Creating more openness on your team starts with you opening up to your team.

Once you begin to serve those you lead thoughtfully, regularly, and compassionately, being able to get people to believe and follow you becomes a lot easier. The formula is now ready to start mixing; you just need the next ingredient—the willingness of you to be open and then creating a climate where people feel like they can safely open up and take risks.

Safety First

Charles Duhigg, a Pulitzer‐award‐winning journalist and author, wrote an extensive article in the New York Times Magazine about a massive investment and effort that Google undertook in 2012 titled “Project Aristotle.”¹ The tech giant wanted to find out what was behind teams that were effective and others that were not. Google statisticians, researchers, sociologists, psychologists, engineers, and others gathered and deciphered data from hundreds of the company's teams trying to find out why some fell below expectations and others exceeded them.

What the Project Aristotle team discovered were five specific things that made the biggest difference on effective teams, with psychological safety being by far the most important of all of them. Amy Edmondson, a Harvard business professor, explained psychological safety as “a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes.”² Psychological safety creates less focus on self‐protection and a bigger focus from team members on the team's direction. Feeling safe to open up creates greater efficiencies and overall stronger teamwork.

As a grad student at Harvard years before, Edmundson was studying medical teams at hospitals in order to find out what distinguished the best‐performing groups from others, much like what Google did later. She assumed she'd find that the top teams made the fewest medication errors. To her surprise, however, she found exactly the opposite. Better‐performing teams seemed to be making more errors than worse‐performing teams.

Later she learned though that the best teams weren't actually making more errors than the worse‐performing teams, they were simply more open to admitting errors and discussing them more often. What actually distinguished the best‐performing teams from the poor‐performing teams was psychological safety.

It has been my experience with the many teams I have worked with over the years that those teams where members felt safe were at a very different level of performance than teams that didn't feel such safety. Because team members felt safe, they could be open, completely honest, passionately disagree with ideas and each other, and they were more likely to be accountable and hold each other accountable. Their interactions and meetings looked very different. Those types of teams to me felt like a functional family because of their ability to be so open with each other. They were safe but also very productive. They also learned by their mistakes quicker and prevented their teams and companies from losing face and losing money because they weren't afraid to speak up, raise issues, address concerns, suggest better ideas, and so on. Creating a climate where people feel safe starts with your willingness as a Care to Lead Leader to open up and to be vulnerable at times.

Opening Up

Matt Sakaguchi was a mid‐level manager at Google at the time that Project Aristotle began. He was interested in the project because the last team he led didn't work very well together and he wanted to make sure things went better this time with his new team. He asked Project Aristotle researchers if they could help and they provided him with a survey for his team that he then administered. Sakaguchi thought he had a pretty strong team, but to his surprise when the results came back there were some glaring weaknesses.

Sakaguchi decided to bring his team together for an offsite meeting to talk about the survey results. But he started the meeting first by asking each team member to draw his or her life journey and how he or she got there that day. Sakaguchi went first and showed the team his journey and shared something he was fairly certain no one knew about: he had stage four cancer. His team was stunned; they didn't know what to say.

In the short 10 months that they had been working together, they came to like Sakaguchi. No one on the team had any idea that he had been dealing with this. Journalist Charles Duhigg explains what happened next. “After Sakaguchi spoke, another teammate stood and described some health issues of her own. Then another discussed a difficult breakup. Eventually, the team shifted its focus to the survey. They found it easier to speak honestly about the things that had been bothering them, their small frictions and everyday annoyances.”³

Sakaguchi later said of the team activity in an interview with Massey Morris, manager of digital and marketing at Tory Burch:

My goal with that exercise was to see that once you hear what people have gone through, you can never look at them the same. You start seeing them as people first, not a co‐worker who is making your job harder. At this new level of sharing, we were actually able to get some discussions going about how we can work better as a team. After about a month, the dynamics of the team had changed and it became one of the best teams I've ever worked with at Google.⁴

Having an open team feels safer and makes everything better. Care to Lead Leaders recognize that power and do everything they can to create such a team or teams.

You Go First

Creating a place where people felt safe started with Matt Sakaguchi and his willingness to be open, which gave the green light for others to open up as well. And it starts with you, too.

Years ago, I was doing some consulting and development with a senior leadership team. At the time, they were having what seemed to be unrepairable issues. They didn't like each other and there had been a lot of unhealthy conflict, huge communication issues, and trust was at an all‐time low. People were closed off and very little collaboration was happening. And as is usually the case, these problems cascaded down the entire organization affecting the morale of everyone.

I brought the team together to do a two‐day intensive workshop on trust. Kicking the meeting off with an exercise, members of the team were asked to share a personal challenge that they had dealt with as a child. They were encouraged to be as vulnerable as they were comfortable being. I knew that the sharing had to start with the CEO, whom I will refer to as Scott (not his real name, of course).

Scott was perceived to be very closed. He was mostly about business and rarely took the time to get to know others on a more personal level. To be honest, most of the struggles with this company were due to his lack of leadership and trust in him as a leader. I had a direct and honest conversation with him before the meeting. Fortunately, at that point he was open to anything because his company was tanking fast.

I asked Scott if he would be willing in the kickoff exercise to share first. His openness was going to set the tone. Based on my experience with teams and much like the experience that Sakaguchi's had at Google, I knew that if this leader could be open, others would be willing to be open as well, and openness was what this team needed to start getting back on track.

What happened next surprised me and completely shocked this entire leadership team. Scott went first as planned. He shared his experience of growing up with an alcoholic father. Here's the thing though: every member of that team knew who Scott's father was, which made it even more personal. His father had stopped drinking years ago, but the affect it had on Scott growing up was still very real. I assumed he had permission from his father to share his story.

Scott emotionally (and I am talking about weeping at times) shared how his father was rarely present, how as a young boy he never felt like he mattered much, and how he could never live up to his father's expectations. By the time he was done, he had every person in that room in tears, including myself. For the rest of the exercise each member of that team openly shared, and many times very emotionally shared, their greatest challenges growing up. After the exercise was over the team was in a very different place than they had ever been. The feeling in that conference room dramatically changed from what it was before we started. And the next two days were amazing as openness increased and trust, communication, and accountability improved, which all allowed for more open discussions on what was happening to the organization and how to fix it. That team forever changed from that point on.

Is this an extreme example of a leader being open? Yes, but it worked! Although I don't think it is always necessary for leaders to open up to the level that this leader did, opening up at some level begins to create higher levels of trust and safety and makes team members feel that they can be open as well. Creating more openness on your team starts with you opening up to your team. People want to follow a leader who is open, real, and human, not closed, fake, or perfect.

However, I feel at this point I should give a warning before going any further. Opening up doesn't mean sharing every day every single personal challenge you are having. It doesn't mean shouting every single little mistake you make, and in general letting people know you can't do your job—that is a lack of competence, not vulnerability. It also doesn't mean opening up about personal gripes you have with team members, your boss, other leaders, or even clients. It shouldn't feel to your team like complaining, being negative, or even critical. It also doesn't mean you share things you have no right sharing. Opening up in the wrong ways about the wrong things puts you at risk of undermining your own leadership. People may see you as weaker, not humble and open. There is a balance and that balance requires careful thought and good timing.

However, you have probably had a past leader who never opened up and showed any type of vulnerability, was always right and never wrong, “never made a mistake,” never said he or she was sorry, and never asked for help or feedback. How did you feel about that leader? How safe did you feel opening up and expressing honest opinions, feedback, or concerns?

No One Is Perfect

Your ability as a Care to Lead Leader to humbly open up at appropriate times and be seen as human is critical to creating safety and trust on your team and in your organization.

Norms to Perform

Team norms are a powerful Care to Lead Leader tool. In fact, you can't create a highly safe climate of openness without them. They are a set of guidelines that a team establishes together that safely support the interaction of team members. Norms give members of your team permission and a feeling of safety to be open and to embrace others' openness.

“He consistently interrupts, talks over people, can't shut up, and I get very little participation in my meetings from others as a result.” Those were the frustrations described to me by Stephanie, a leader who was at her wit's end and had no idea how to fix the rude and monopolizing behavior of one of her team members, Jeff. I asked her if she had talked to him, she said she had several times but to no avail. I asked if she had any types of team norms in place. At that time, she didn't.

I suggested that Stephanie quickly set some norms with her team. Naturally, with the team very aware of Jeff's monopolizing behavior and with her leadership guidance, they could easily create a norm that included not interrupting and talking over another person. Once the team's five to seven (I highly recommend not setting more than seven because if everything is important, then nothing is important) norms were in place, Stephanie would then challenge the team to abide by the norms and commit them to heart by the next meeting. I also asked Stephanie to bring a bell for each team member to the next meeting. She looked at me a little funny, but as I explained to her, the bells were a fun way to bring attention to any violation of a norm. In fact, I suggested that Stephanie purposely violate a norm at the start of the meeting and have several on the team who were asked ahead of time to ring bells when she did.

As the meeting began, Stephanie indeed purposefully violated a norm. The two people she asked previous to the meeting to ring their bells rang them quickly and loudly and thereafter the rest of the team rang theirs as well. They all laughed and Stephanie apologized and said she would work on it. After that, any violation of a norm, including interrupting and talking over others, was immediately followed by bells, lots of laughter, and apologies. Jeff's tendency to interrupt and talk over others lessened substantially and participation in meetings increased and eventually included everyone.

What I did was help this team set a group of norms to improve good team behavior and create a safe climate of openness. You can effectively use these tools with your team(s) as well.

Norms can be set for many things such as being on time to meetings, being prepared for meetings, agreeing how quickly people answer their phones or return an email, creating a no cell phone or technology policy during meetings, doing what you say you will do, and so on. But some of the most important and powerful norms set on teams are those concerning openness:

• Treating each other with kindness and respect
• Giving others the benefit of the doubt
• Listening to understand first
• Openly admitting mistakes
• Not throwing people under the bus
• Avoiding politics
• Having permission to be genuine and open about ideas
• Respectfully challenging someone if you don't agree
• Supporting each other as needed
• Establishing that it's okay to not have all the answers

There are many other team norms that could be listed here, but the important thing is that you create these as a team. The goal of setting up such norms is to create a safe place where people can feel open in; take risks; express how they feel; respectfully but passionately (if necessary) disagree; provide bold, direct, and honest feedback; courageously contribute ideas; admit when a mistake is made; or ask for help.

Would you agree that if your people felt safe with even just a few of these actions that it would make a difference? Team norms are an important tool that you can't afford not to use in your leadership in order to create openness.

Support, Encourage, and Mine

If a gardener fails to give a plant water, fertilizer, weed around it, and protect it early on from wind and frost, it won't ever reach its full potential and may not even grow at all and instead die. Similar to a plant, if you set up norms, for example, but fail to regularly support, encourage, and mine them early on, those norms will fail to be adopted and embraced. In turn you are not going to be successful in creating a team where others feel as safe. Creating a climate of safety is an active and proactive activity.