Mastering the Art of Elephant Taming

This is the second of two articles on the hidden dynamics of organisations and organisational change.

Hidden dynamics are those things left unsaid or denied because the topic is viewed as inappropriate, unacceptable or unsafe to raise.

These topics become ‘elephants under the table’, or what Bob Marshak calls Covert Processes.

In my first article, ‘Have you got an elephant under the table?’, I shared the two reasons why things get hidden, and what topics are typically discussed - or not - in organisations.

I also shared two strategies for bringing things out from under the table, and keeping them on the table top:

1. Create safety (with a ‘safe enough’ environment)

2. Establish legitimacy

In this article I’m going to discuss how to put these strategies into action.

So let me ask you:

What one covert topic, theme or issue would have the greatest impact on your team or organisation’s performance if it was brought into the open and successfully addressed?

And on a scale of 1-10 (10 being high):

How well are you doing in creating safety?

How well are you doing in establishing legitimacy?

Creating Safety

Creating safety is where most teams typically focus, but in doing so they give insufficient attention to (or ignore) the equally important role of establishing legitimacy.

We need to remember that it’s not just about what makes it to the table, but what stays there and is openly engaged with, as well as what never gets on the table in the first place.

In the teams I work with to optimise team effectiveness, typically they know that they need to create psychological safety. Leaders say that creating the conditions where people believe they won’t be punished or humiliated for speaking up is the environment that they want to build.

This view is supported by leading academics such as Amy Edmondson , and companies such as Google, Gartner and Microsoft who identify psychological safety as the key to unlocking team potential.

Research from Accenture also shows the influential role of psychological safety in reducing stress and turnover and increasing engagement, productivity and collaboration.

But just because something is common knowledge we can’t assume it's common practice.  So the first thing you need to do is create safety.

Just 26% of leaders create psychological safety for their teams.*

*McKinsey 2021

Now when I say safety, people often think I mean perfect safety. I don’t. The emphasis is on creating a ‘safe enough’ environment.

Think about when you cross the street. You look both ways, you know how to do it, you check beyond parked cars to see if anything is coming, and you make sure it is safe enough to step out.

Is it perfect safety? No. You could still get hit by a car, but you’ve done all you could to ensure you are safe enough.

What you want is sufficient safety so that people are willing to engage.

So what’s involved in creating a ‘safe enough’ environment?

1.    Minimise fear and threat

Often people hide things because there is a threat. If there’s too much fear and threat, your people won’t put things put on the table and they simply won’t be dealt with.

Looking at how organisational/team culture and leadership style influences peoples’ perceptions of threat and fear can be helpful here.

2.    Establish psychological safety

This is creating the environment (and the relationships) where people believe that they won’t face recrimination for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes. 

Establishing a set of team behaviours to guide interactions and accountability is one of the foundation blocks for establishing the environment you want to create.

It’s worth noting that when senior leaders role model the behaviour changes they’re asking employees to make, transformations (team interactions) are 5.3 x more likely to be successful (McKinsey).

3.    Establish trust and boundaries

This is an element of psychological safety that needs specific attention. It’s about developing relationships in the team so that there is a sense of trust and connection between people, and so that the relationships are strong enough to endure inevitable differences of opinion.

It’s also about making sure there are boundaries to govern how you talk about things; for example, you are going to listen to what people have to say, you’re not going to rebut them, you will listen and take it in, and so on.

These boundaries create limits and provide guide ropes for people to hold onto, which give them a sense that it’s not a ‘free for all’.

4.    Establish that individuals have some control over how much to reveal, when, in what way, and to what depth.

One of the ways you create boundaries is by helping people understand that they have some control over their situation, that they can control how much they say, how they say it and how much they reveal.

For example, having the ability to say, ‘I’ve said enough for now, I’d like to pause and think a little bit more about what is going on’ reassures people that they have some control over how they interact, and in what kind of way.

They feel they have some say over what they’ve talked about and how, and that they can protect themselves and set limits.

5.    Remember, threats are in the eye of the beholder

As a senior leader or team facilitator, what is not threatening to me could be very threatening to somebody else depending on their childhood, ethnicity, cultural background, or other experiences.

6.    Avoid becoming the threat

If you are the team leader or facilitator it is important you don’t become the threat.

If you don’t follow boundaries, if you force a discussion, if you expose someone, or if you press something so much that it’s fearful, then you are a threat and you are getting in the way.

You need to know your own dynamics about how you’re dealing with things and how others are experiencing your leadership.

Establishing Legitimacy

One of the ways people can move something off the table is by making it illegitimate because, by definition, things that are legitimate and appropriate go (and stay) on the table.

So if legitimacy is challenged, the item for discussion gets vetoed. This happens in organisations all the time.

To deal with this there’s the who, what, why, when, where and how of legitimacy - and you should try and make each one of these legitimate.

Here’s how each of the legitimacy factors shows up:

Who can raise the issue?

“You’re not the right person. That should be dealt with by another team. What do you know about that? Who made you the expert?”.

These questions remove a person’s authority to raise an issue. The question then becomes: “If not me, who is legitimate? Who can I involve to legitimately raise this?”. Bringing in an external consultant or using customer voice (internal or external) to raise issues is an example of this.

What can be addressed?

“This is an inappropriate topic for this discussion. Monday morning meetings are for dealing with X, but not that topic. That’s a topic for a leadership retreat. Why are you bringing that up here? That has nothing to do with what we are discussing today.”

Asking questions like this de-legitimises the topic at hand. It gets taken off the table and you go back to what you were doing.

You have to make the topic legitimate; you can do this by aligning it against the values, purpose and ambitions of the organisation, or what the group said it wanted to do - in other words, you are looking for a hook to legitimise it.

Why does it need to be addressed?

“There’s no good reason to address that, it has nothing to do with what we’re doing. Somebody else should deal with that. Why do we need to deal with it?”

In this situation, your ability to make the topic legitimate - given the group, their mission, their values and their performance expectations - rests on your ability to say ‘why’ it’s important.

When to address the issue?

“Oh no, not now. Not this month. We’re dealing with quarterly items; this is not the appropriate time.”

You need to have the confidence to ask “If not now, when?” so that you get an agreement on when and where.

Where is the right place to address the issue?

“That’s not a topic for an operational meeting/in-office meeting.”

So we need to establish where it can be addressed! At an offsite retreat? Informally over coffee?

The question of ‘Where?’ might also raise legitimacy about whether you are the right group to address the topic.

In this case think about which group within the organisation is the right group to address it, and how you get it there. For example if it is for the Board, or for another team, create a plan to get the issue in front of them.

How can the issue be successfully addressed?

“That’s an important topic but we don’t have a safe way to talk about it. I know people who have tried to talk about that and it has turned into a terrible discussion.”

Your ability to demonstrate that there are ways to deal with the topic, to suggest a suitable approach, or even to give an example of how you’ve seen it done previously, will provide a way forward here.

In summary

If you take nothing else from this article, take this:

Your ability to make a topic legitimate (who, what, why, when, where and how) and to make it ‘safe enough’ for people to be willing to engage, are the two things that will make you vastly more likely to get ‘elephants’ on the table, make them stay there, and ultimately be able to deal with them.

To close, let me revisit why we need to address covert processes. We do it because we want to empower the organisation, to empower the person or empower the team so that they have more choice and more ability to perform.

If you are unsure whether you should attempt to ‘tame an elephant’, J. Richard Hackman’s tests for evaluating team performance are a useful guide.

Hackman’s tests for team performance:

Will addressing this topic or dynamic help you to:

• Ensure stakeholder requirements are met or exceeded?
• Improve the degree to which the team becomes a performing unit over time?
• Increase the extent to which members become more knowledgeable and skilled as a result of their team experiences?

To discuss how we can help you optimise team performance, please book a call, email reception@triumpha.com or send me a DM.