opinion

Why does voice matter?

As I write this, at the end of February 2022, the world is watching a Russian invasion of Ukraine which is both oppressing and suppressing: besides the raw brutality, the suppression of voices is deeply disturbing.

Voice matters because it is a channel for the freedom of self-expression that people need in order to feel acknowledged and seen, and – more broadly – because it can have a significant impact for a team or organisation when judgment, uncertainty, ideas and innovation, collaboration, communication and coordination are in the mix. An absence of voice may mean compliance or obedience, but it isn’t territory for sustainable engagement – and sustainable engagement is essential for the flexibility and adaptability that characterises resilient, robust, flourishing teams and organisations. Conversely, a lack of voice can be the cause of brittleness and fragility in a team.

Voice is especially important on risky, uncertain, unclear topics that people often experience as unsafe to talk about – for example, articulating that they don’t know the answer, expressing disagreement, calling attention to errors that might be mission-critical, suggesting a new idea, being different in some way…. This includes acknowledging without judgment individuals or actions that may have been perceived as a cause of problems in the past (often a characteristic of a bad leaving, for example), but which an organisational culture has agreed (often silently or implicitly) to ignore.

The individual who’s withholding what they really think may be depriving the team or organisation of key information, game-changing ideas, potential innovation, or highlighting of errors (such as a doctor mis-prescribing) which entrain greater or lesser risk.

To whom does voice matter?

Voice matters to everyone and everything that is part of an organisational system – leader, report, team, organisation, culture, strategy and the tactics that fulfil it – and actually beyond, to customers, suppliers and the business environment in all its manifestations. Messages about voice not being welcome, as much as messages about it being welcome, are often experienced and felt rather than spoken or written: people just know, in their guts, when it’s not safe to speak up. Equally, they know when they can speak up because the culture has conveyed that confidence, which can often bring a sense of space and freedom in which creativity and a sense of involvement can flourish.

What enables voice

What, then, enables voice? At heart, it’s a question of psychological safety being present (and note: psychological safety isn’t the total solution, but it is absolutely necessary as a starting point for any other success factors to fulfil their potential). According to the research of Amy Edmondson, Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, and her Fearless Organization psychological safety means believing that you won’t be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes. That belief means the leader, in the first instance, consistently modelling behaviours that authentically welcome inclusiveness and diversity (including diversity of thought), that mean that help is offered and requested freely, that engage without judgment in taking risks and failing, and that make open conversations the norm – all this without fear of judgment, penalty or exclusion.

How to ensure psychological safety

Amy Edmondson advises some key practices that enable the presence of psychological safety (they link to her Leader’s Toolkit, set out in her book ‘The Fearless Organization’) :

Demonstrate situational humility: There’s no ego here. No leader, and no individual, believes they know all the answers: rather the leader’s role is to enable the collective intelligence of the team. Heroic leadership or autocratic leadership are a long way from releasing or capitalising on the potential of the team
Practice inquiry: Inquiry is the practice of asking rich, probing questions, and listening with fascination (as Nancy Kline says) to the responses, enabling learning without judgment. Inquiry often leads to the experience of creating and undertaking low-risk experiments, which are such a fertile source of learning and change
Set up structures and processes that enable voices to be heard, particularly forums for input (Edmondson highlights Google’s Googler-to-Googler networks of employees who volunteer time to help their peers learn, for example). Such structures benefit from guidelines for discussion so that the ‘working contract’ is clear.

Ask us too about the Psychological Safety Index Scan for your organisation: this unique approach enables the quantified measurement of psychological safety in a team, and the exploration of the reasons for the score.

Back to Ukraine

At this point no-one knows how the Russian invasion of Ukraine will play out. What is very striking, however, is the contrast between one leader whose tactics depend heavily on ramping up the fear that inhibits voice, and commands obedience, but doesn’t enable the true engagement and commitment that make for a thriving system, and the other leader who is clear, authentic, honest, humble, connected with his people and making admirable and courageous use of his voice. As long as the freedom of voice is stripped from some members of our world community, let those of us who have that freedom act as their voices.

^{Photo by: Bermix Studio}

Are you being heard?

Voice matters because it is a channel for the self-expression that people need in order to feel acknowledged and seen, and – more broadly – because it can have a significant impact for a team or organisation when judgment, uncertainty, ideas and innovation, collaboration, communication and coordination are in the mix. An absence of voice may mean compliance or obedience, but it isn’t territory for sustainable engagement - and sustainable engagement is essential for the flexibility and adaptability that characterises resilient, robust, flourishing teams and organisations. What enables voice is psychological safety: believing that you won’t be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes. That belief means the leader, in the first instance, consistently modelling behaviours that authentically welcome inclusiveness and diversity (including diversity of thought), that mean that help is offered and requested freely, that engage without judgment in taking risks and failing, and that make open conversations the norm – all this without fear of judgment, penalty or exclusion.

The illusion of solutions

Family therapist Barry Mason characterises solutions as ‘only dilemmas that are less of a dilemma than the dilemma one had’. There’s no such thing as right or wrong in the coaching encounter: no predetermined answers, no pre-set course, but rather flow and emergence, and the noticing of these. And here’s where certainty and uncertainty arise, mirroring the working environment - and particularly the leader’s environment. Thinking in terms of certainty may mean that the leader doesn’t see all the tripwires, since not everything is either certain or predictable. In my experience of coaching leaders, the capacity to allow, and allow for, uncertainty – frustrating as that may be – also allows for versatility, responsiveness to the situation as it is, rather than as one wants it or assumes it to be, and creativity. Which in turn allows for a more agile response.

Award for Coaching through COVID and Beyond

Pro bono coaching programme Coaching through COVID and Beyond (of which I'm a co-founder and a member of the core team) has won the Coaching at Work magazine award of External Coaching Champion (Organisation). The depth of our psychological safety in the core team has meant that we’ve been able to have difficult conversations in a spirit of openness and honesty, we’ve been ready to take risks in a context of uncertainty, we’ve been agile and responsive and happy to experiment in a spirit of ‘test and learn’, and we’ve welcomed diversity of all kinds. Living diversity means that we’ve constantly called on our collective intelligence - and so we've been able to achieve innovative success in several important ways.

Trauma

Trauma is a living expression of a life-changing experience that often can’t be expressed in words but is a fundamental – and literally visceral – part of an individual’s identity. The range of manifestations is endless, including addictions, anxieties, physical pain, illness, problems with sleep, problems with relationships, and repeating patterns of behaviour which are counter-productive but which the individual doesn’t seem able to change. Despite appearances, the most apparently well-balanced, cheerful and obliging colleague may be hiding pain and distress which can get triggered and thus result in unexpectedly negative behaviour. The need for compassion and self-compassion, patience and acceptance, curiosity and tolerance is significant. What do you notice at work – about yourself and others?

Belonging, identity and confidence in uncertainty

You might recognise a situation where an organisation’s strategy is unclear, poorly-defined, poorly communicated or in constant flux. In this context, the role and place of any individual in the organisation (and especially a new recruit) can be unclear. The criteria by which his or her performance is evaluated are also likely to be unclear or in flux, or even more unsettling, implicitly in flux. As a result his or her confidence, their sense of identity, and sometimes even confidence in their survival, take a knock. None of this is good news for performance or growth or development. Leaders can therefore begin to turn things round by being curious about what they could be more aware of, by enquiring into their reports’ experience, and by listening.

Fear and courage

Fear and courage are intertwined when it comes to leadership of self and others. Fear is inevitable and - if unchecked - inhibits and erodes performance, versatility and the creativity that can be crucial to address the challenge, complexity and uncertainty that are constants in the life of leaders. Courage isn’t inevitable, but it’s an invaluable resource when fear is present. Learn, experiment again with a small change in courage, keep learning, and keep experimenting.

The impact of kindness and compassion

The news emerged that Dame Clare Marx, Chair of the General Medical Council, was stepping down from her post, having been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She reflects on her career that ‘in my happiest moments, I felt respected, valued and listened to. I felt I belonged’. Her wish is that ‘every doctor and every patient experiences the compassion that defines first-class care’. It’s the humanity between colleagues and by leaders that can evoke either distress or joy, isolation or feeling part of something bigger. How would it be if all of us, as leaders, spent just a couple of minutes each day being aware and conscious of compassion, kindness and listening? Awareness is the crucial starting point for change.

Power and the leader

One of the most striking features of power is, it seems to me, how multi-faceted the topic is – and how richly the facets interrelate and intersect and interdepend. There are many and varied implications for the exercise of leadership, and leaders can benefit from reflecting on these. For instance, a variety of perspectives are afforded by looking at ‘my’ power, ‘your’ power, ‘our’ power, and the power in and of the system. Further, within each of these comes the contrast between personal power, the power afforded by title or status, and the nuances of the perception of power that arise in the presence or absence of fear or shame. power can be ‘power over’ or ‘power with’ – and the latter implies more sustainability through relationship and connection. Power, courage and compassion can go hand in hand.

Integrity and power

The client’s terms of engagement transgressed my own deepest values, including integrity. This kind of behaviour on the part of consultancies seems widespread. Further, the attendant disservice to the ultimate end user stems from the enforced compromise of professional integrity, and the imbalance of power is experienced by many of their associates to be abusive. As professionals, are we prepared to tolerate this kind of attitude, behaviour and lack of integrity inherent in the contracting from so many perspectives? Are we really powerless or can we find ways to bring our power respectfully to a rebalancing that will be in all our interests?

Peace, ease and fulfilment

I accept that it may make no sense to juxtapose a street sweeper's relatively simple situation with my clients’ complex roles and environments. On the other hand, I’m very curious about how leaders conceive of their responsibility (and opportunity) to design and embed working lives for themselves, their peers and their reports which release greater peace, trust, ease and fulfilment - and thus greater effectiveness. More than that, I worry about their health, their wellbeing and their longevity if leaders don't take that responsibility.

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