March 8th, 2010
In one of my past lives I managed a team of thirteen very talented people. It was a really cool group of people and I tried to make opportunity available to them and get out of their way for the most part. At that particular organization we had an annual performance review process and part of that process involved getting feedback from them about how I was doing as their supervisor. I generally asked for a few specific examples of things that I was doing well and a few specific examples of things that I could improve on.
I almost never got anything that I needed to improve on.
The first couple of times this happened, it was a nice little boost to my ego. I wanted to do well and I wanted to help this team of people do well, so being told that there was nothing I could improve on was a pleasant fantasy to say the least. And a dangerous one.
I have been thinking a lot about what courage and bravery look like at work. It seems that we all know what is wrong, but we always think that the solution lies with someone else; ”if only the boss..”, “if only the leadership team…”, “if only HR…”, etc.
I think that the way we change the culture of our organizations and our communities has much more to do with our own individual courage than it does with the actions of the CEO or the policy of human resources.
Is there evidence of your courage?
Dissent can be very valuable in organizations and every organization sends a lot of explicit and implicit messages about whether dissent is valued or not. Conformity is a powerful, powerful thing without throwing organizational politics into the mix. Do you value dissent? If so, you should see some from time to time. If you do not truly value it, you probably will not see it…even if you say you value it. My story was not even about dissent, but simply getting some basic feedback from people that reported to me. We all have room for improvement, but I had clearly not created an environment where employees felt comfortable providing honest and candid feedback.
Seeking out honest feedback, supporting dissent both require courage. They can often feel like personal attacks, and if we do not have courage and if we lose sight of how valuable these things are we will likely not benefit from them and we will make them less likely to happen in the future.
Is there evidence of your courage?
Be good to each other.
Joe – I personally value dissent because it helps me see my blind spots. I also work for a place that values, and encourages, dissent if it is respectful of others.
We recently had our annual Strategic Planning session and our 1st ground rule was "safety" to express your views because it was our intention to develop something tangible for the Company to truly move forward. So, dissent occurred and it was freeing !!! We now have something we are really going after and not just something that people rallied around to sit on a shelf.
Too many companies, and HR people, choose not to value dissent and it shows because most of the issues that would have been upfront now become buried and devisive.
Great post my friend !! Thanks for stretching our boundaries !!!