Managing: Safe space for disagreement

Paid to disagree?

Here’s a secret insight on how I work.  I work as a contractor, as an external coming in to help.  There’s an old adage for contractors ‘not my circus, not my monkeys’, which is a cynical way of saying, it’s not your family to fix.  It’s their team, their culture, their way of doing things, don’t try to fix what you’re not here to fix, unless that is why you are here.

An extension of this mindset is- you don’t pay me to argue with you.  Contractors tend to take a customer-service mindset, and give the client what they want, unless it can’t be done.  Like a builder renovating your house, they are here to do what they are asked to do, and only push back at if it can’t be done, not should be done.

But is this ‘hands up and backing off’ mindset a good thing?  Do we lose something important with this approach of professional indifference?

We want employees* to be different

You want employees to care more, don’t you?  The ‘I only work here’ approach means we are missing out a lot of potential insight, problem solving, early warnings, issue spotting, and knowledge.  We want people to speak their mind freely to us if they think they need to, to engage, to CARE.

I bring up the contract mindset, because that can be the refuge.  That can be the way people ‘back out’ and take a hands-off approach to engaging with their team.  It’s especially easy if they are only part time with another gig (e.g. public work).

The importance of being disagreed with

I’m pretty sure you’re on the same page as me that it’s important, but let’s just walk through the benefits of being disagreed with.  Someone disagreeing with us can:

• Help us brainstorm,

• Point out things we’ve overlooked,

• Identify information we didn’t know (and didn’t know we didn’t know),

• Stop us making mistakes,

• Stop us from being obstinate.

Maintaining trust

Really it’s a question of trust.  Someone disagreeing with someone who has power over them, has to be certain that that person will not use their power to punish them.  This all sounds a little medieval, and but it does happen, albeit subconsciously.  Bosses have power, not just to hire, fire, pay more and so forth, but also subtle power.  The boss has huge sway over opportunities, inclusion, and feeling part of the team.

To keep it simple, we can measure power (or lack of) by someone’s capacity to speak openly.  Those without power don’t speak openly because they don’t trust there won’t be consequences.

So what to do?

There are a lot of ways, but here’s good tips for creating a ‘disagreeable’ environment:

Listen.  Think you’re a good listener?  Most likely you’re not. Or not as good as you think.  I talk about this elsewhere, but in short; good listening is like meditation- stop doing everything else, and pay attention until they get it all out.

Soliciting input.  The most obvious is to ask for input.  This can be big questions (“Sarah, do you have anything to add?”), or little openings (“thoughts anyone?”).

Keeping it tentative.  The more definitive it sounds, the harder it is to disagree and the easier it is to keep quiet.  Strong decisive language (of how things are, and what needs to happen next) is much harder to disagree with than when things feel less certain, and more like we are all brainstorming, that minds are open to different ideas.

Minimise your emotions.  Nothing stops people speaking openly to you than an apprehension about how you might emotionally react.  This is the hardest to do well, the easiest to get wrong and not know it. Everyone tiptoes around the emotive boss, and the boss who reacts emotionally (any emotion, not just the angry ones) makes that a factor that people will factor in.  Calm bosses are more open to hearing different points of view.

Leaving space.  This is easy to do, and easy to not do.  We naturally think things through, and then turn our mind to solutions, to actions, to the ‘now what’.  We speed up from thinking to doing, often internally and without external warning.  But this shift from 2nd to 3rd gear tends to close our mind, tends to make us close minded- because we are moving on from thinking to doing.  This means we can miss the bit where people can speak up.  So leaving a gap, opening the floor- good to do, but can be harder than you think.

* I’ve used the term employee as short hand for someone who is an integral part of the team, and contractor as a someone who is not. Because these are terms regarding their legal status of engagement, they are not perfect matches, so bear in mind a contractor could be part of the team, even if they invoice.