Have the Hard Conversations!
Stefan Lindegaard
I help sharpen your leadership approach, build high-performance teams and enhance corporate innovation through new, original tools like Team Dynamics Cards and the Gap Map Overview.
We need hard conversations to grow! Leaders not only fail themselves but also their colleagues, customers and partners if they don’t address hard conversations and undiscussables.
Too often, I see the lack of hard conversations among leadership teams create barriers towards needed transformation and change.
In my work on this, I am glad to share a similar take on what Ginka Toegel and Jean-Louis Barsoux call undiscussables in a MIT Sloan article: It’s Time to Tackle Your Team’s Undiscussables
They argue that...“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.”
They have identified four key undiscussables.
1. You THINK but dare not say. Undiscussables are most commonly associated with risky questions, suggestions, and criticisms that are self-censored
2. You SAY but don’t mean. Alongside unspoken truths, there are spoken untruths
3. You FEEL but can’t name. Emotions felt but remain unexpressed or misunderstood.
4. You DO but don’t realize. The deepest undiscussables are collectively held unconscious behaviors
Just some reflection for you and your teams!
It is high time that these suggestions were heeded, and unfortunately, until the example is set at the top, the courage will not spread throughout the organisation - is my observation and maybe it concerns only me. Do you have the same or do you see it differently?