Mind the Gap
Our client prides itself on having a culture where the best ideas win. Through training, feedback, and reinforcement, the organization pushes its people to challenge one another directly and to address tough issues head-on to get to a rigorous understanding of business problems. When people engage with each other, they are encouraged to do so honestly (saying what they think), with humility (owing their missteps) and in a way that brings the best and most out of others.
The expectation is that if individuals act in a way that’s inconsistent with the company’s values, colleagues witnessing such behaviors will speak up and challenge each other, regardless of seniority. However, this is not consistently the case. Why, in such a forthright culture, do some individuals stay quiet in the face of their colleagues’ transgressions? Our client wanted to develop its leaders and managers to create an environment where all employees are more likely to share their perspectives, voice their concerns, and speak up.
We first wanted to understand when and why people do and don’t speak up in the organization, so we ran a series of focus groups and had conversations with individuals from employee resource groups to learn more about the nuances of the culture, what encourages people to challenge, and what holds them back. People shared their lived experiences with us of what it’s like to speak up in the company, exemplary leadership habits they’ve observed that promote speaking up, and behaviors they witnessed that close people down.
In partnership with the HR department, we developed a Speak Up leadership workshop, with a heavy focus on self-exploration, deepening self-awareness, peer coaching, and learning through scenarios. After piloting the workshop, we rolled out 24 workshops to 300+ leaders and managers over a 12-month period, culminating with two sessions for the executive team. The workshops gave individuals the opportunity to reflect on their behaviors and their responsibilities as leaders, underpinned by some of the latest thinking from neuropsychology. Using a combination of science, psychology, and personal experience helped to land the concept of the bystander effect, the reasons it occurs, and how to overcome it.
We know from participants’ feedback that, on aggregate, they found the workshops to be valuable. The workshops were rated above the high standard of excellence set by the organization. In particular, leaders really benefitted from the opportunity to discuss their experiences of speaking up or staying silent with their peers and to talk through a range of what would you do scenarios. Furthermore, the workshops:
- Challenged leaders’ assumptions. A notable proportion of leaders came into the workshops holding a firm belief that speaking up was something they already did well and that was a defining organizational strength. We were able to demonstrate that there is often a gap between what people say they would do in a hypothetical speak-up moment and how they actually behave and that such a gap exists in this company, despite their well-honed culture.
- Heightened the awareness around speaking up and pushed individuals to focus on their responsibilities as organizational leaders in such situations. We believe that these types of interventions, when nearly all leaders participate in the same learning and development activity, is a vehicle for organizational change. This is providing the learning is reinforced by executive-level advocacy, manager support, and ongoing activities to cement the new behaviors.
- Equipped leaders with tools and language for speaking up, including challenging more senior leaders. Typically, it is perceived or real power differentials and social threat (e.g., the fear of humiliation, embarrassment, interpersonal tension, ostracization, and rejection) that prevents people from speaking up.
From the HR sponsor:
The workshops heightened our leaders’ and managers’ awareness around how to foster an environment where people speak up when others say or do things that fall below our collective standards. Our leaders and managers now utilize the strategies they learned to create an environment that enables others to find their voice. The lessons from the workshop have become ongoing tools that we utilize over and over again, with some of the terms and concepts that MindsOpen taught us having become part of our vocabulary, especially when we work through challenging personnel issues.
From participants:
The workshop was great. There is a self-awareness I was lacking. I went in thinking, “Of course I’ll speak up in most circumstances” but I left the workshops with a lot of questions on humility: How humble am I really? Why did I think I was so good when I really am not? How did that come to be? I also left with the notion that the gap I have in inclusion is greater than I realized. So the moral of the story, I feel the burden of this. It’s hard. It’s harder than I realized, and it’s going to take a lot of struggle to get better.
I really enjoyed the case studies and putting ourselves in those situations and thinking through how we would have wanted to respond versus how we actually would have responded in the moment, and what was holding us back.
Our facilitator was wonderful, immediately made you feel welcome and comfortable. He listened intently and openly.
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