It’s happened to all leaders at one time or another.
You’re sitting in a conference room with the team, perhaps even with some remote members on the speakerphone, and you’ve just finished giving a presentation on why and how the company is going in this direction or that.
You sense general agreement, with some folks enthusiastically expressing their support. But what you failed to notice in your desire to keep the ball moving are the key folks on your team who aren’t saying much at all.
“Well, if they weren’t on board, they should have said something — that’s on them,” you think.
Wrong — not if you want to be successful. And let’s be honest, who wants to debate the boss in front of everyone, especially when almost the entire team seems keen on the plan?
Only later, of course, after you’re trying to figure out why Joe and Bill and Suzy aren’t really moving things along, and you’ve gotten each of them into your office for a one-on-one, do you find they were never really gung-ho about the direction you’d outlined, or perhaps just their part in it. You’ve fallen victim to the age-old leadership trap of taking silence for agreement.
In a great series on organizational health, Dave Miller, CIO for Optimum Healthcare IT, writes about such dynamics, and notes they can be killers.
In “Organizational Health, Part 4: Disagree And Commit,” Miller writes: “It should be noted that passive agreement is your worst enemy. People who smile and nod agreeably without offering their opinions have not necessarily bought into the plan, and often do little to actively support the plan after the meeting is over. Instead, they tend to stand aside and watch the process, hoping it will not be successful so that they can then put for their own ideas and solutions.”
I got to thinking about passive agreement and selective expressions while listening to the Cold War classic work of fiction, “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold,” written by John le Carré. In it, a British agent named Alec Leamas pretends to defect to the Soviets (double agent stuff). Upon going over to the other side, his interrogator, an East German agent named Fiedler, explains an interesting angle of such interviews.
“Let me be frank,” Fiedler replied, “There are, as you know, two stages in the interrogation of a defector. The first stage, in your case, is nearly complete. You have told us all we can reasonably record. You have not told us whether your service favors pins or paperclips because we haven’t asked you, and because you didn’t consider the answer worth volunteering. There is a process on both sides of unconscious selection. Now, it is always possible, and this is the worrying thing, Lemus, it is always entirely possible that in a month or two we should unexpectedly and quite desperately need to know about the pins and paperclips … ”
As a leader, it is incumbent upon you to ask your team what they think about what you’re doing. You simply must get them on the record, not so you can say, “I told you so,” if you turn out right, but so you can be assured you’ve had their best recommendations. None other than Abraham Lincoln did this when considering how to tackle the Fort Sumter crisis which wound up igniting the Civil War.
“ … Lincoln followed up on March 15 by asking each cabinet member to provide a written answer to the question, ‘Assuming it to be possible to now provision Fort-Sumpter [sic], under all circumstances, is it wise to attempt it?’” (Wikipedia)
So ask the tough questions and be sure you do everything possible to solicit honest answers. Sometimes, if you don’t ask about the pins or paperclips, they’ll never think it was important enough to divulge, but it might make all the difference.
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