The Year-End Gift: Embracing the Messenger
The end of the year is nearing, and some leaders might be wondering: what do I gift the people in my organization? That’s exactly what Daniela Landherr explored at a leading international toy company on their journey towards simplification. The focus: building a culture of trust by amplifying psychological safety. And as Amy Edmondson identified, one of the most crucial ways to amplify psychological safety is by embracing the messenger.
It’s Q4, the stress is high in many organizations towards the end of the year with the pressure rising, and as if that wasn’t enough, many are experiencing one VUCA-wave after the other. This is a time when we can be more thin-skinned than usual and less receptive to feedback, as well as less thoughtful about how we communicate. And while we can’t control how people communicate with us, we do have a choice about how we respond to the messenger, particularly in those moments when they build up the courage to share something with us that might be difficult for us to hear, that can trigger us emotionally. This is a crucial moment we often can’t prepare for, a key moment that has the power to define the culture on our team. And the magic lies in how we respond to the messenger.
Embracing the messenger
Let’s face it: it can be hard to receive information that we are not going to like to hear. If we dismiss it, minimize it, deflect, justify it or push back (among other options of rejection of the feedback), the messenger learns that:
- “I am not safe to share the truth, therefore I will need to sugarcoat it, avoid it or deflect next time. Or lie.” (Because it makes me really uncomfortable, psychologically unsafe and I fear the consequences.)
Building awareness of how we respond to being emotionally triggered can help us regain the conscious power of choice in that key moment, and help us lead with empathy and kindness by embracing the messenger. Let’s think about this for a moment: The messenger probably knew that sharing this difficult information with you would be challenging. Most likely, they prepared for it for quite a while, thinking about how to tell you, and about options of not having to tell you at all, as not to hurt you. That means, they care. They probably discussed this with a trusted ally, they likely had a sleepless night or two, and needed to build up a lot of courage to approach you with this information. By choosing to embrace the messenger, you can change the course of this conversation, and plant the seed for a psychologically safe culture. Here are three examples of how you might respond in that key moment, in order to give the messenger the gift of psychological safety.
- When you need to collect your thoughts and want to buy some time to respond: “Thank you for sharing this with me. I really value your perspective, can you tell me more?”
- When you are feeling emotionally charged and need to buy some time: “I appreciate you sharing this information with me, I can feel that you care deeply. You are giving me food for thought and I would like to take some time to think about how I can best learn from this moment. Would you be willing to reconnect with me on this in a few days when I’m ready?” (you might be very tempted to fire back at the messenger here, so learning to contain that urge and regaining control of yourself will be key here :-)
- When you are ready to engage at a deeper level: “I truly appreciate and champion your courage to come forward with this. How does this / did my behavior make you feel? What can we learn from this?”
These are just a few examples on how you might be able to respond when being emotionally triggered by a messenger, and this will likely the conversation to a less hostile place, opening the door to amplifying psychological safety. By being fully present as you listen to the messenger, you can tune into the emotions, which will give you the opportunity to better understand where the messenger is actually coming from. How you choose to take the conversation from there, is just as important. Because psychological safety isn’t something you build and then you’re done, it’s something you will always need to care for. And when you lose it, don’t fret: by being open to address what happened, by leading with vulnerability and calling out what you could have done better, will set yourself up to change the course of your actions and behaviors, and can make your team stronger than if you got it right the first time round. And you will encourage others to feel safe to fail, and talk about it, too.
Let’s give each other the year-end gift of embracing the messenger. And lead with care.
If you would like to learn more about how to give feedback (it’s a gift, practice it!), I can recommend the Situation-Behavior-Impact (SBI) Model, you can read more about it here: https://medium.com/pm101/the-situation-behavior-impact-feedback-framework-e20ce52c9357