Is There a Grizzly Bear Behind Your Open Door

You can't change what you can't see and your team probably won't voluntarily share with you what they know you don't want to hear. Now, if that struck a little close to home for you, then stick with me. Because in this episode of the Leader's Kit Bag, I'm going to share with you some tips that might just change and how your team communicates with you and what you can achieve together. Hey, I'm Ben Morton. I'm a leadership trainer, executive coach and keynote speaker. And everything I do is designed to help create a world where people can go to work feeling inspired to give their absolute best whilst going home to their loved ones at the end of each day feeling recognized for what they do and appreciated. So for who they are. I can't tell you how many senior leaders I've spoken to who tell me that they've gone open door policy. But here's the thing. An open door doesn't count for much if there's an angry bear sitting in the room beyond it. An open door doesn't count for much if people don't feel safe walking through it. And there are a myriad of reasons why people might not walk through that physical or metaphorical door while they might not share feedback or insights with you. Perhaps three of the most significant are number one, a fear of being labeled as the difficult or negative team member. Number two might be they've seen feedback being ignored or punished in the past. Or number three, it might be that they've simply heard the line, we'll take that away and look at it, only to see nothing change whatsoever in the past. So if we aren't actively taking steps as leaders to earn that upward feedback and to make it safe for people to share their thoughts and ideas and challenges, we're never going to get to the truth. And without the whole truth, our leadership decisions are going to be based on assumptions and inferences instead of true insights. So how do we do it? How do we make it safe for our team to walk through that door? Well, here are two quick tips for you. Number one is. Or number one involves. Sorry, just pausing to think about your leadership brand. Now, don't worry, we're not going to get too abstract here. Let's just think about brand as being how people experience you as a leader and what people say about you when you are not there. There's a simple formula for your brand and it's this leadership brand equals people's most extreme experience of you plus their most recent experience of you. So just pause and reflect on that. Do people have an extreme negative experience of you? What are some of the recent negative or at least less than positive experiences people might have of you? Once you've done that, you need to think about, well, what is the experience extreme and recent you want and need people to have in order to make it safe for them to share to feedback and ideas with you. And you then need to go away and work at creating some extreme positive examples to rewrite the negative ones and some positive recent experiences to rewrite their recent experiences. So that's tip number one. Tip number two involves asking a simple yet powerful question in your next team meeting, which is this. What is the one thing we could be doing more effectively as a team that no one has said out loud yet? And then sit in the silence. Allow the discomfort to do its work because the gold, the insights lie just beyond the silence. That's it for this episode of the Leaders Kit Bag. As always, I hope it's been useful. Look after yourself and those you got the privilege and responsibility to lead. And until next time, lead on.