World-class teams embrace candor, do not tolerate backchannel conversations, and never throw their peers under the bus. They have shifted to an agreement to care enough about each other’s success that nothing will be withheld from the team that might stand in the way finding the best solutions. When it comes to problems, world-class teams know that sunlight is the best disinfectant. But most teams don’t behave in this way. Data gathered by the Ferrazzi Greenlight Research Institute from thousands of teams over the last two decades shows that 72% of team members avoid conflict. When people hold back the truth and stay silent—even in executive teams—the opportunity for bold innovation is missed and organizations are exposed to unnecessary risk. Too many teams still operate to the old social contract of only speaking critically to peers or senior leaders in discrete private conversations, typically behind each others’ backs. We need to awaken to candor and realize how erosive conflict avoidance is to a team. Allowing back-channel conversations may be the most draining behavior of high-performing teams and corrosive to shareholder value. Just like world-class teams, we need to shift to an agreement as a team to care enough about each other’s success not to let each other fail and to embrace candor with rich curiosity to break through to better solutions.
Engineering candor through high return practices
We cannot wait for this behavior change to happen by chance. The volatility and performance pressure in the world around us call for extreme and collective purposefulness and leave no time for the traditional chance exploration of individual leaders on a team. Awakening to candor is an essential element of a new working culture and it needs to be forged into being. Ongoing evidence about the interventions toward team performance from more than 3,000 diagnostic assessments gathered over 20 years of team coaching have been used by the Ferrazzi Greenlight Research Institute to used to design behavioral shifts and engineer a set of High Return Practices that quickly turn each shift into new team habits. Three practices, Candor Breaks, Yoda in the Room, and Stress Testing, can ignite behavior change.
Candor Breaks
Candor breaks are the best way to discover what is being held back. Pause the meeting to ask the team, “What’s not being said in this room that should be said?” Ask for a candor break. This is easy to do in remote meetings but equally important when teams are back in the office. The best candor break is to go to a breakout room, one of the most powerful, yet overlooked practices of team collaboration. By breaking the whole team into smaller groups of three people, for example—even just for five minutes—you unleash massive psychological safety. In these small groups, people have more courage. Candor in small breakout rooms is 85% higher than when teams meet as a single cohort in a main room. They will self-critique and weed out weak ideas. The temporary tribes that form in the breakout rooms establish a bond that would make people lose face if they watered down their discussion too much. Open a shared Google Document in each breakout room, then share them with the whole group when you return to the main room.
Yoda in the Room
Another practice is inspired by Yoda, the wise Jedi Master from the Star Wars films, who represents wisdom, truth and insight—the qualities that exist in every team rather than one individual, but are often sequestered. People don’t have the courage to speak up. So you’re going to make Yoda the safe word for business. Anyone can use it in a meeting. It’s that moment when Sally, Suki or Steve raises their hand and says Yoda. The leader says, “Okay, go for it.”
Suki says, “Well, it seems we have circled this topic so many times and never landed the plane.”
Or Sally says, “It seems the conversation has gone off topic and perhaps we should get back to the real issue?”
Or Steve says: “I’m sorry but I just don’t understand how this is going to get us there. I don’t see the linkage to the real core problem. I see this solution as topical at best”.
You get the idea.
A Yoda moment is an invite to say what needs to be said. It’s an open invitation to say what bold thing you are thinking but typically would keep to yourself, or would DM in a chat, or talk in the walk down the hall after the meeting had finished.
Stress Testing
Traditional teams sit through that 20-page deck that someone reads through and a couple of people chirp in. They sit in silence and think they can lobby afterwards, or think their point of view won’t be appreciated. World-class teams don’t do that. The high return practice of Stress Testing is a superfood of a high-performing team. It is a core process that can be used to elevate different modes of collaboration and agile working, as we will see in later chapters. At some of the most successful companies Ferrazzi Greenlight has studied and worked with, executive team members keep a partial but constant focus on the enterprise as a whole, independent of their specific positions and responsibilities.
Stress Testing turns building dream team challenge culture into an assignment. Here’s how it works: A team member presents a high-priority project in a team meeting, outlining:
- What’s perceived to have been achieved,
- Where the project is struggling (the use of the word here is important as it mandates candor)
- What’s planned for the next phase of work.
The team is then sent into breakout rooms (if in a virtual meeting) or turn your chairs towards each other in groups of three. The small groups are asked for no-holds-barred feedback and constructive criticism in three ways:
- Challenges the breakout group sees,
- Suggested innovations,
- Offers of support or help.
The three-person groups work collectively to critique their colleague’s project. They challenge anything that might involve unacceptable or unnecessarily high levels of risk, and brainstorm ways to mitigate that risk but maintain a respectful, collegial tone. It’s essential to capture feedback from the breakout room/small groups in a shared document divided into columns for challenges, innovations, and offers of help. This ensures that the person responsible for the project has clear, well-documented input encompassing a variety of perspectives along with concrete offers of support and that by the time the project comes to fruition, it has been subject to rigorous examination and benefits from the entire wisdom of the team. It is essential for the recipient of the feedback to give those who have contributed a clear response to their input. Either a Yes, I will do this. No, and here’s why not. Or Maybe, but I need to do further research before making a decision.
Ray Dalio’s verdict
Investor, entrepreneur and Principles author Ray Dalio is renowned for his belief in radical honesty and radical transparency. Dalio says they are “fundamental to having a real meritocracy. The more people can see what is happening— the good, the bad, and the ugly—the more effective they are at deciding the appropriate ways of handling things.” He’s practiced radical honesty and radical transparency at his asset management business Bridgewater Associates for almost 50 years, growing the company from the two-bedroom apartment where he lived in 1975 to the $120 billion firm today. Talking to Dalio once at Davos about putting his principles into practice, he believes it is easier when hiring people comfortable with such candor, as most companies struggle mightily to make this shift with the average existing population. But reviewing the High Return Practices, he remarked how elegant they were to execute what he hires for at scale.
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