Pressure creates diamonds, but you work with people, not rocks
Q: Last week you addressed a question from “Don’t Know”. Her colleague was asking her to “speak up” (when she already was!) and you redirected the conversation — how he needed to change the room, not her.
But honestly, you’re being too soft on folks. I need my people to have thicker skin. That colleague is just trying to give constructive feedback, help out, improve. After all, if someone can’t speak up for themselves and do combat at the conference table, how in the blazes are they going to help to win the larger game we’re all playing?
Ah, the ol’ Gladiator strategy.
You believe in putting people and their ideas under extreme pressure, as if it will yield diamonds. But, undue pressure just produces gawd-awful cultures and pedestrian ideas.
First, we’re talking about humans, not rocks. While some folks might respond well to ripping apart their colleague’s ideas in a meeting, the vast majority of people don’t. They actually feel psychologically unsafe. So, most hold back new ideas and key questions. And the business suffers for it.
Combative cultures are sometimes seen as driving “star” performance, but the research shows it’s teams, not individuals who outperform the market. Ideas are like legos. Someone offers up their distinct piece, and others build upon it. And every big impactful idea starts off as a nascent, fledgling idea. Which then gets shaped by social context, and scaled by shared commitment.
Friction is crucial, but that’s not the same as bludgeoning or battling each other.
Despite all of this, you’re certainly not alone in loving this approach. Ballmer of Microsoft fame comes to mind. Or Ray Dalio, of Bridgewater.
And, can I tell you what no one else has said aloud, but you need to know? You’re being fooled. Your people, those combatants? They know how to “win” in your conference room. They “win” by telling you — the director — what you’re known to value, what you already believe to be true, what you want affirmed. But that’s not the same as winning in the marketplace, is it?
So, “competing” is not so much a battle of ideas; it’s a performance for the Emperor’s pleasure. Your pleasure. It’s why you like it.
YOU HIRE TALENTED PEOPLE, DON’T YOU?
And that explains why you want to blame your people, i.e., “if someone can’t speak up for themselves…,” rather than fix the situation.
It was a UPenn academic, Oscar Gandy, who said that we don’t need to have hatred in our hearts to hurt others. We don’t have to have “unconscious bias” to perpetuate harm towards the underseen. It only requires, he wrote, ignoring the bias that already exists.
And the bias about who gets heard? It’s irrefutable.
Ideas are ignored, or credited to others simply because of who brought them forward. Ideas brought by the less powerful are typically co-opted or stolen. While it is widely believed that women talk equally or even more than men, evidence shows the opposite, regardless of the listener’s gender.
And when women do manage to take up equal time on the floor? Research says they face negative consequences in the workplace. Such as AOC, who was recently described in the dang New York Times as “brand building,” when she was doing her job.
WHAT TO DO?
You may not be convinced, Gladiator-lover, but let me talk to the fully alive @work readers to let them know how we shift things.
- Instead of chartering a team by role or title, invite anyone who is interested in solving for x to join in, to “come and play.”
- As you generate ideas, ensure they all get included. Use tools and techniques like stickies or a shared doc to obfuscate who makes contributions, to keep the focus on the contributions themselves.
- As a project lead, when discussing ideas, focus on creating an equal share of voice/air time. I.e., We want to hear from everyone.
- Instead of assigning teams, allow self-organization around key ideas. Ask squads to shape ideas so they are strong, viable, and complete.
- In making decisions about what to pursue, have it be a (blind) vote for ideas that can go to the next phase.
- Reward and recognize the early spark of the idea (you can trace it if you design for it) AND the collective who shaped it into reality.
This is how you create the space to get impactful ideas. Use the different levers available to you — job scope, meeting management, team assignments, agenda-setting, rewards & recognition systems — to hear those voices historically squashed.
To … “change here, not her” as a new friend just said to me.
It’s About Power, (Stupid)
Many folks talk of culture or listening to people as if it’s “soft” stuff.
It’s not soft, but it is less visible than other, more measurable things. Because power is invisible.
Culture is the invisible glue in an organization. It signals who and what is valued. And shapes what kind of ideas you create.
Like the dark matter that holds the stars in the sky, culture is invisible and yet determinative. Inside our organizations, power is what determines which ideas are heard. As we’ve written before, this power is not so much a personal or psychological state, but a sociological or social dynamic.
It’s when we work together that we build impactful ideas.
Right now, we’re over-indexed on ideas from a relatively small group. Just based on demographics, about 30% to 40% of ideas are heard, the vast majority being untapped.
This is beyond sad. It’s pathetic. It reduces our collective capacity to build what is needed, to invent that next breakthrough, to co-create a better future.
When we ask people to speak up, we’re putting pressure on the wrong people. And we’re not creating what we need.
