Three things to avoid and three things to do to foster open communication in teams

Perhaps the most important thing you can learn to be both a more effective team member and leader is to learn the art of asking questions…

Three things to avoid and three things to do to foster open communication in teams

Dragon by Joshua McDonald

Perhaps the most important thing you can learn to be both a more effective team member and leader is to learn the art of asking questions. Sounds easy; however, like most things that seem straightforward, many things often go wrong, leading to miscommunication and even team or mission failure. David Marquet wrote an excellent book titled Leadership is Language which discusses the power of language from leaders. He states that “the problem is that the language we use is only about doing, not thinking,” which is especially problematic when most work today requires thought.

Do

Encourage dissent!

Do you find yourself in meetings where the norm is to agree and move on or team meetings where the goal seems is to end them as quickly as possible? If you read that and nodded your head, you are in an environment where problems only appear at the point of no return. To encourage diversity of thought, make sure your questions invite debate. Start by asking open questions where no right or wrong answer without leading the team.

“We’re about to release tomorrow. Is there any reason we should delay the release?”

versus

“We have to release tomorrow, or we’ll miss our deadline. Is everything ready?”

Of course, in the development process, it’s better to pay upfront with pre-mortems where you go over all possible problems by framing the project as a failure and asking the team to come up with reasons why the project failed before you start writing the first line of code. There is a link at the bottom of the article that details the pre-mortem — the only advice I have for anyone planning to do those is to only focus on what is in the teams’ control which sounds a lot like chaos testing.

Despite your best efforts, if you still find yourself surrounded by agreement and silence, you can take Alfred Sloan’s approach when facing unanimous approval, “I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting, to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain some understanding of what the decision is all about.”

Ask open-ended questions

Open-ended questions invite discussion, where closed questions like binary questions tend to lead people to true or false type answers. You can spot open-ended questions by the inclusion of phrases like, tell me about, or tell me what you mean by, or can you explain.

Open-ended questions are really important in a team setting to get everyone on common ground as far as vocabulary is concerned because it’s not what you say; it’s what the other person heard that matters, and across industries, experiences, and cultures, there are various words or phrases that have differing meanings. Probing questions where you are trying to dig into a topic are better when they are open. Consider this.

“Can you go into more detail on the caching strategy and really explain the decision points?”

Be vulnerable

If the team does not feel safe, then regardless of the type of questions you ask, you will still not be able to create the kind of environment that invites creative thought, dissent, and collaboration. Don’t worry about what everyone else thinks about you or be afraid to admit mistakes — here’s a secret — everyone else is also trying to figure it out, so be willing and able to accept your mistakes and change your mind in the face of new information.

Don’t

Knowing what not to do is just as important as knowing what to do. If you spot the following patterns, it might be good to reassess your communication style or address the team’s communication patterns before the culture turns into one of fear and mistrust.

Stack questions

In an attempt to lead the team to what you view is the correct answer, you start stacking questions, which has the opposite effect as instead of focusing on the path you want to take, the team has suddenly lost trust in you and feel like they are being judged or unfairly called out or confused. Let’s take a look at confused versus judgmental as we dig deeper into this topic. First, confusion ensues as you face a firehose of thoughts framed as questions without pause in the example below from David Marquet’s book, which you can find the link to below.

“We really need to understand why clients don’t buy this service, and what our team is doing to address this, whether it’s to do with our communications, or is it because they don’t have the skills which are needed, or do they think it’s not important and if we asked them what would they say, and what are our measures of success for this anyway, and who is leading on this?” Source: Marquet, L. David. Leadership Is Language (p. 119). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Wow! That’s a lot to unpack. Even the best note takes on the team will have a hard time reconstructing all of the various questions. If you this, you are likely going to be met with silence. Ask one question at a time, and make sure you think about what you want from the conversation beforehand. Remember, if you lead a team discussion, it should be an 80/20 split on word count, 80 percent team responses to 20 percent questions. Let’s take a look at a more aggressive approach.

“I see that the code failed the build tests. Is it because we are just not good at it, or is there something else? Are we not able to think through all of the edge cases in advance? Do I have to test this for you since no one seems to be able to do it? Really?”

Aggressive questioning is belittling, and you will not get the desired effect by demeaning the team. However, there is a time when you need to highlight problems, and if you want to make a point about the lack of quality in the test cases, it would be far better to state the facts, be data-driven, and let the team see the bigger picture.

Ask self-affirming questions

Self-affirming questions frame the question to gain acceptance or agreement by making it unlikely that anyone would challenge the question. Let’s take a look at the example above again.

“We’re about to release tomorrow. Is there any reason we should delay the release? I don’t think so, right?”

See what happens when you add a subtle, “I don’t think so, right?”, to the end of the series of questions. This one is hard because we all want assurance that our decisions are sound. I admit I need to work on it because I find myself saying, “Does that make sense?” a lot after explaining something. If you break it down, I’m just trying to elicit approval for a directive or explanation.

The actual harm in these questions is that it sends the message that you do not want to hear what the team has to say because you have already made up your mind.

Leading questions

Leading questions are questions framed to elicit the answer that you want, and they can come in many forms, some subtle and some not so subtle. If you are asking leading questions, then you are just wasting everyone’s time. You might as well make the decision you want to make and move on. Especially egregious is the use of these questions in surveys and questionnaires. Just take a look.