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Brain Circuits
Don’t mention it! Tackling your team’s taboos, Part 1
Nothing stunts team progress like “undiscussables.” Left unmanaged, they choke the team’s problem-solving abilities and its capacity to learn and change. In this four-part series, we provide a guide for team leaders to tackle thorny issues, beginning with things people think but dare not say.
What are “undiscussables”?
Undiscussables help people avoid short-term conflicts, threats, and embarrassment. But they also short-circuit the inquiries and challenges essential to productive feedback. This not only impedes performance and team learning but can have a disastrous effect on the organization at large.
Problem diagnosis: Do my team members think things they dare not say?
Most teams suffer from undiscussables in four broad categories. They overlap, with two being more or less conscious behaviors and two less so. Instead of trying to fix all of them at once, take a sequential approach. Start with the first of the two more conscious undiscussables, knowing but not daring to say, because you can impact this immediately and get comparatively easy wins. (We will tackle the other “conscious undiscussable,” saying but not meaning, in Part 2 of this series.)
Go through this checklist to see if your team is struggling to be productively honest with each other:
- Do team members agree publicly during meetings but disagree (and vent) privately?
- Do they often use sarcasm, silence, or nonverbal gestures to signal disagreement?
- Do they focus on “managing up” in meetings?
- Is this a problem you have helped create?
Why it happens
Undiscussables are most commonly associated with risky or difficult questions, suggestions, and criticisms that are self-censored: people may joke about them or discuss them confidentially, but never openly. Views are left unspoken when people fear the consequences of speaking up, whether the risk is real or imagined. Often, the main driver of this fear is team leaders with an emotional, erratic management style and a reputation for responding harshly when people disagree with them. This makes team members feel unsafe.
Beginning the fix: team detox
- Explicitly acknowledge that you (and other leaders) may unwittingly have created a climate of fear or uncertainty – with a tendency to “shoot the messenger.”
- Invite discussion about sensitive issues to draw out concerns.
- Promise immunity to those who voice dissenting views…
- … and lighten the weight of your authority in the room.
Key takeaway
Acknowledging your own responsibility for team members “knowing but not daring to say” is a powerful way to unblock the discussion and set an expectation of candor. This will help them realize that what they gain will outweigh the pain, generating momentum to move from above-the-surface undiscussables to deeper ones that usually require facilitation or external intervention (see Part 4 of this series). This will enable you, as team leader, to identify the dominant undiscussables in your team and kick-start the conversations necessary to bring them to light.
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