We often call them the elephant in the room – important issues that everyone senses are a taboo topic, not to be raised or discussed. “Undiscussables exist because they help people avoid short-term conflicts, threats and embarrassment. But they also short-circuit the inquiries and challenges essential to both improving performance and promoting team learning,” Ginka Toegel, a professor of organizational behaviour and leadership at IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland and Jean-Louis Barsoux, a term research professor at IMD, write in MITSloan Management Review.
They have studied group dynamics in a variety of organizations and found the more undiscussables there are, the more difficult it is for the team to function. If those issues aren’t discussed collectively they can’t be managed intelligently.
They also found team leaders tend to overestimate the risks of raising undiscussables. “They assume incorrectly that talking about negative subjects will sap team energy, reveal issues they cannot resolve and expose them to blame for the part they played in creating the problems the group faces. In reality, we’ve found that discussing undiscussables brings relief, boosts energy and bolsters team goodwill,” the professors note.
They also feel that team leaders underestimate the consequences of doing nothing to address undiscussables. Disregarding them leads to strained working relationships, ineffective meetings with little debate that produce bad decisions and a failure to correct course and learn from mistakes.
So what elephants are in your meetings and workplace? They come in four species: Things you and others think but dare not say; things you say but don’t mean; things you feel but can’t name; and things you do but do not realize.
Undiscussables are most commonly associated with risky questions, suggestions and criticisms that are self-censored. These are the things you think but dare not say. They are joked about or discussed confidentially, but not openly grappled with. The professors point to a mock ad Theranos engineer Aaron Moore created in 2008 for colleagues that referred to a prototype of the company’s blood testing device as “mostly functional.”
Usually the views aren’t being expressed openly because people fear speaking out. The professors say the fix is for leaders to acknowledge they may have created a climate of fear or uncertainty and to invite discussion about sensitive issues. Assurances must be given – and accepted – that the invitation is genuine and nobody will be hurt for speaking up. The leaders must watch their behaviour, not expressing their own views too quickly, and refraining from judging the contribution of others.
As well as unspoken truths, there can be spoken untruths: Things the team says but doesn’t mean. “Teams often proclaim but fail to follow certain values, objectives or practices that are supposed to guide and inspire them and create a sense of togetherness. The disconnect between what’s said and what’s done is visible to all, but no one points it out for fear of endangering the team’s cohesion, even if that cohesion is based on a shared illusion,” professors Toegel and Barsoux say.
Silence is not based on fear but out of loyalty to the team, the leader or the organization. Fixing this requires the leader to expose the hypocrisy of saying but not meaning and acknowledge their part in the charade. The professors offer this helpful question to throw out to the group to complete: “We say we want to … but in fact we….”
The third category of undiscussables – you feel but can’t name – stem from negative feelings such as annoyance, mistrust and frustration that are difficult for team members to label or express constructively. The example the professors provide is when the top team of a German-based high-tech company was thrown into turmoil by unspoken tensions between two colleagues.
Help begins by providing coaches and other support to the feuding parties to investigate their differences and find better footing. The team leader must be sure everyone feels welcome, particularly if issues of diversity intermingle with the friction. In the German case, a breakthrough came when both parties – a chief operating officer and a chief technology officer – took part in a role-playing exercise in which they put themselves in the other person’s shoes.
The deepest undiscussables are collectively held unconscious behaviours. “Members of the team may be aware of isolated problems in their dynamic, but they cannot connect the dots and infer root causes, so they jump to the wrong conclusions about what is behind team inefficiencies and poor performance,” professors Toegel and Barsoux explain.
They recommend in such situations the team leader invite a trusted adviser from another part of the organization or an external facilitator to observe the team and provide feedback on communication habits, such as who talks and how often, whom people look at when they talk, who interrupts whom, who or what is blamed when things go wrong, what is not spoken about, who stays silent and whose comments are ignored.
Most of our focus, of course, is normally on the first category: The unspoken truths. This broadens our perspective. Which elephants should your organization address, and how can you help?
Cannonballs
- I’d add to the four undiscussables ideological issues, which pop up in various guises and need to be directly faced for an organization to move ahead. Examples might be feelings on bottom up versus top down, hiring from outside versus promoting from within, or which set of customers to focus on. It can be helpful to consider how to get the best of both options, rather than continually sparring.
- Wharton School professor Ethan Mollick says given the substantial increases in productivity AI promises and the fact the usual ways in which organizations try to respond to new technologies are too centralized and slow, they should offer substantial rewards to people uncovering significant opportunities for AI to help.
- Paola Cecchi-Dimeglio, chair of the Executive Leadership Research Initiative for Women and Minority Attorneys at Harvard Law School, warns that three common biases are surfacing in performance reviews to hurt women choosing to work from home during this hybrid era. They are penalized for often not working on tasks that are easy to define and assess, not being close to the centre of action and not being close to the group the assessor identifies with.
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.