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Open Communication – Where Courage Meets Kindness
Embracing courage, curiosity, and kindness towards ourselves and others can help us overcome the discomfort of facing difficult conversations and assist us in building a culture of transparency and feedback within our organisation.
During communication workshops, I ask participants which statements evoke the most significant discomfort. At the top of this list, participants mention much dreaded: “I want to have an honest conversation with you about what I think.” However, before someone gets to the heart of the matter, it’s worth considering the emotions and reactions this statement triggers at the outset.
Research indicates that our brains tend to focus on negative aspects and create worst-case scenarios quickly and automatically before the brain’s rational part can speak. That’s why we often fear these kinds of conversation starters. On the other hand, training participants emphasise how important transparent and open communication is to them and their awareness of what sets us apart and where we see things differently.
Kim Scott, an advocate for feedback culture in organisations and the author of the book “Radical Candor,” emphasises the importance of transparency, honesty, and open communication in professional relationships. Her approach is based on a balance between kindness and candid feedback.
At Synergist, we believe that modern leadership should be characterised by the courage to face the discomfort of such conversations, which are rarely easy, as the nature of corrective feedback or exchanging conflicting views challenges our need to be accepted as we are.
Why is this often so difficult? Our nervous system, as many specialists, including Professor Arthur Brooks, writes, is tuned to this like a smoke detector and immediately triggers an alarm. This is related to old defence mechanisms of our brain encoded in its more senior survival-responsible areas, which remember ancestors’ experiences where anyone who was not accepted by the group or was outside of it was expelled and had little chance of survival. We have no control over this automatic fight, flight or freeze mechanism; we have no control over immediate discomfort, yet we have control over how we interpret a situation after a moment and how we manage it consciously despite the uncomfortable feelings it brings.
Modern leadership requires us to have the courage to proactively seek feedback, especially as we climb the hierarchy, often receiving less candid opinions. During workshops, I noticed that employees struggle with giving feedback to their leaders. It is no secret that this is particularly difficult for most people unless the leader can ask for it, and even then, it is a challenge.
Creating corporate rituals or providing opportunities for this in meetings or team retros is good, but what happens daily is also essential. Kim Scott encourages asking everyday, ordinary questions such as “How is it working with me? Is there anything I could do to make our collaboration easier?” etc.
As we mentioned, this requires the courage to face discomfort from both sides. However, greater responsibility lies with the leader as someone higher in the hierarchy, who should normalise such situations and make them more manageable. Why doesn’t it always happen? One reason may be that leaders bear many responsibilities and are often burdened with so many challenges that they no longer have the strength for this demanding openness.
Additionally, what often comes up in my conversations with them is the fear of “Okay, but if I ask the other side, I’ll have to do something about it, and I don’t always have the influence.” It is worth noting that this process does not obligate us to immediate changes. What is important is simply to listen, understand, and sometimes admit that not everything always goes perfectly or we see things differently.
Without this awareness, something important may escape us, not to mention that an employee who cannot openly share their frustrations and concerns will be less open to hearing difficult things from managers and less inclined to appreciate the things that work well nonetheless.
It is essential just to listen and sometimes say, “You’re right, I’m working on it, and it won’t always come out perfectly,” or “I’m glad you told me; I’ll think about what you said” or “I agree with some parts of what you’re saying, but some I see differently, but it is essential to me that you shared.”
A special kind of feedback, an opportunity to expand our awareness and is challenging to extract, is the situation where we end cooperation with someone who leaves the organisation. What I hear from employees in such situations is: “Why should I share what’s difficult at the end, what will I get out of it?” People don’t want to burn bridges and make such a significant emotional effort in a situation that is already difficult for them. However, if we show our sincere intention in such a situation, curiosity and kindness can overcome fear and resistance. One of the training participants recently told me how impressed he was that a colleague who was leaving the organisation came to him and said, “Listen, Adam, tell me how it was with me. I’m leaving now, so tell me honestly, where was it easy to get on with me, and where was it difficult? I want to know.” This is an extraordinary kind of courage.
A completely different situation is if the HR department conducts a conversation with such a person. It is another thing if the boss also dares to approach the employee and simply say, “I know that at this stage you may no longer feel like sharing with me what was okay and what wasn’t from your perspective, but if you did, it would be a huge gift for me.” I remind clients endlessly of this simple truth that there are people who speak openly and share what’s inside, but there are also many people who can contribute a lot both in terms of ideas and information, who, if not asked, will never voice certain things.
However, for an employee to want to share with us, they must be assured and feel that it will not be used against them, which requires constant work on building “psychological safety” and trust in teams, which, according to one definition, means “building an environment that allows taking risks in interpersonal relationships, without fear of negative consequences.”
It somewhat simplifies reality: “You come to the company, but you leave because of the boss.” It is not always like that, but our relationship with the leader significantly impacts the level of engagement and initiative in the team. According to a Gallup survey, it’s up to 70 per cent.
We encourage you to do a little soul-searching; when was the last time there was such a situation that we simply asked someone for feedback or their perspective on a particular challenge or problem? While coaching leaders towards a specific goal, I often encourage them to do homework consisting of asking a few people they come into contact with in the company how they see this challenge from their perspective. What are we doing well to meet it, and what could we do better? It’s not an easy task for our coachees, yet it’s easier for them to dare to do it in the coaching process, and gathering this information always brings some inspiration. It is essential here that the people we dare to ask come from those we feel more comfortable with and those we feel less comfortable with.
There is one more magical, albeit somewhat strange, question that we often encourage in such situations: “What am I not seeing, but you or others see, that affects …”
Identifying areas for improvement and regularly asking for cooperation are vital to monitoring the company’s mood. It’s never too late to work on it, even if we haven’t had the habit before and don’t know how to start.
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