If your organizational culture is missing this element, your company is not reaching its full potential

When I work with teams as a consultant or facilitate a customized program for the Center for Creative Leadership, I usually like to start my workshops with this easy and quick exercise. It helps set the tone for the duration of the program as well as reveals a fair amount of information about the organizational culture. The exercise is simple enough that can be accomplished in a few minutes but the conversation and conclusions that rise from the results could take hours to debrief. It could reveal an underlying theme throughout the workshop. Based on those results, adjustments may be needed to the activities and topics to be covered in the program. The results are powerful, telling much about an organization’s effectiveness and communication styles.

As a consultant, I usually introduce that element as “transparency in communication”, “directness”, “openness” or “frankness”. Those are just words that are part of the definition of candor. The question that I usually ask the participants is “How candid in your communications are you willing to be during this workshop?”. I ask them to anonymously rate their willingness to be frank with me and with each other, to be transparent and open about the motivation behind their actions or comments, and to determine how honest and truthful are they willing to be over the course of the program. The anonymous results help me complete a quick and non-scientific diagnose on the level of psychological safety correlated to the leadership and organizational cultures.

In her book “The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth”, Amy Edmondson defined psychological safety as “a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.” She talked about the willingness of employees to speak their mind, with courage and candor, asking the questions that need to be asked, challenging decisions when they have doubts or providing feedback on a timely manner without fear of negative repercussion to their jobs. Psychological safety is the main pillar for the foundation for the leadership culture and therefore, the underlying organizational culture that governs the behaviors, ethics, decisions and actions of individual employees.

Candor goes beyond affecting the perception of psychological safety within an organization. It can determine the level of engagement of an employee with the organization. It could affect the productivity and effectiveness of organizations in complex and unpredictable environment (and what companies are not operating in a VUCA environment?), and could determine the level of resilience and optimism of an individual contributors. Candor involves a level of trust in the leadership and foments courage within individual employees to speak up when they see something wrong or disagree with a decision.

Candor provides leaders with more relevant information for effective decision making.

The main challenge to candor resides in the organizational culture and the environment in which the organization operates. In particular, when candid conversations are most needed, it usually went they are least likely to happen. When organizations operate in a state of constant change as it reacts to the complexity of the environment and the unpredictability of market conditions, pressure mounts on employees and these conversations are forgone in favor of speedy decisions based on incomplete information and hierarchical leadership, using a top-down approach to decision making. It is important to recognize that candid conversations do not delay decisions or take more time — those conversations feed the decision making process with different perspectives, relevant information and feedback.

I recently heard about the conditions surrounding the 2001 collision between the Japanese fishing school trawler Ehime Maru and the US nuclear submarine, the USS Greeneville, that resulted in the death of 9, including four high school students and two teachers. The submarine crew, and in particular, Commander Scott Waddle, were entertaining 16 VIP civilians. Commander Waddle was under pressure since they were running behind schedule due to a longer-than-planned lunch with the civilians. Several emotional outbursts were noted by the crew members, denoting the short temper of the commander on that day. The sonar room was left without a supervisor, leaving a trainee to man the sonar display. Technical issues were also noted with a malfunctioning sonar display meant to provide relevant information to the commander and the crew. During the practice of a rapid resurfacing drill, the commander was operating without the necessary level of information since the crew did not want to disturb the commander with feedback or missing by critical information. Despite their training and knowledge of the proper process to follow during an emergency ballast-blow surfacing maneuver, the crew refrained from providing the relevant information to avoid further irritating the commander. Therefore, the individuals with the information chose to remain quiet and several necessary operations such as periscope check and sonar check were bypassed without objections or questions. The submarine resurfaced below the Japanese fishing trawler, breaking the ship in half. It sunk in less than 10 minutes with 9 people inside of it.

Do you have enough information covering all quadrants of the environmental picture?

In our daily life, we do not face situations as critical as the manning of nuclear submarines. Still, we are operating in a world that is volatile, unpredictable, complex and ambiguous. As leaders, we need to have access to as much information and perspectives as possible to make the best decisions, since there are no right decisions any more (but plenty of bad decisions).

In order to improve our team’s productivity and effectiveness, we need to cultivate a culture that truly motivates employees to provide us, the leaders and teams, with the necessary information, feedback, the different perspectives and questions that would promote our best decisions. Leaders that have a truly open-door policy will function at a higher level of effectiveness if they operate with the most relevant and up-to-date information residing within the overall team, and not just the information in the leader’s hands. Leaders should invite feedback and questions, to model the behaviors expected by team members. We should also be watching for organizational cynicism or incivility, underlying conditions of professional burnout, and major depleting element of productivity, engagement and employee satisfaction. Promoting candid conversations will ensure that organizations meet their full potential, engage employees effectively, improves overall motivation and promote optimism and resilience among the workforce.