I recently went one-on-one with Mike Mears. Mike started and ran the CIA Leadership Academy and retired as the CIA’s Chief of HR. Mike is the author of the book Certainty: How Great Bosses Can Change Minds and Drive Innovation.
Adam: How can leaders hold the people they lead accountable?
Mike: Step one is just to make sure there is clarity in their heads about what they’re accountable for.
It’s hard to believe this, but I’ve done countless quasi-medical calls on organizations, and you start reviewing tasks or responsibilities, and some employees can say, “Hey, I don’t even know what the boss is really looking for here. You know, I do my work, and the boss is always pressing.”
So, step two, after people at least know what the word accountability means, is the boss has got to set up a really good feedback system both ways.
How would you do that? Check-ins. Adobe uses those. A five-minute weekly meeting between the boss and the employee. It’s done very casually, no pressure, always positive. The boss says, “How are you doing? What are you having problems with? What can I help you with?” Those types of questions. When you do that, the employee’s got a chance to not be under threat and answer the question, and you get a two-way conversation going, and that helps sharpen that definition of accountability.
Feedback both ways on accountability is so crucial. When we give negative feedback to somebody, using past tense—I’ve seen this on an MRI scan— the brain of the individual almost melts down. They view it as blame. And you don’t want that.
You want positive accountability.
The way to do that is to ensure these two-way conversations. I saw Jack Welch do this. I worked for GE for the entire 90s, nine years, and GE was really at the peak. And of course, you couldn’t take Jack Welch’s style today on accountability, but he demanded it and generally got it. On the accountability side, after I’d been there two or three years, he scrapped the performance management system that GE had, which is designed for accountability. He scrapped that system.
Now, why did he do that?
Well, GE had invented that. They were an industrial age company and invented that in the early 1900s. It’s the performance management many companies and organizations use today. But what he found, though, was the worst thing you could do is say you’re holding someone accountable, but wait for a whole year to give the employee their performance review. What was happening is you’ve got that employee living in uncertainty for a whole year, and then they get their annual review, they get slammed and they’re crushed, and they go home and complain to their loved ones.
He realized this wasn’t working, so he started having bosses more frequently check in with people in a positive way to ensure that accountability is there. The more frequently you do it, the more positively you do it and doing it in a fear-free environment, the better the accountability is. And the proof is there on what that does to performance.
I was walking down the hall one time with a CIA director, seventh floor, and he turns to me and he says, “Mike, why aren’t they being more innovative?” And I knew he was talking about the employees because that was his main value that he wanted to push in the agency. So why aren’t the employees being more innovative? He paused and said, “I’ve told them in my first five talks, I want them to be more creative.”
Whoa.
In his mind, he’d told employees, “You are accountable for innovation and becoming more creative and changing the culture.” But nothing happened. And nothing happened because everybody’s got the same pressures going the other way. They got the culture pressuring against them. They’ve got their habitual behaviors locked in. If they’re not being creative now, their brain actually restricts them. It keeps them doing what they’re doing, clinging to the status quo. They may have a mediocre boss who they’re worried about: “If I’m a little creative, even though the top guy wants me to set the accountability bar up, I don’t know how my boss is going to react.”
You’ve got all these counter pressures. Just telling people what they’re accountable for and even writing it down on paper is not enough.
One of the best arrows in the quiver of a leader is question asking. You could do it through a check-in or simply ask low-key questions to employees.
Usually, I do it individually and ask, “Do you understand what we’re doing here? What are you doing to improve X?” If my thing is I want a more agile, quick reaction unit then my question would be, “What can you do to improve agility here over the next week?” Get the employee thinking specifically about the problem you want to hold them accountable for.
You really got to crawl into people’s heads and tell them what to do. It’s necessary, but certainly not sufficient to get you to the promised land.
Adam: How often should leaders have check-ins?
Mike: My recommendation with the larger companies and groups in the intelligence community that I work with is to give everybody praise and recognition once a week.
If I had my career to live over, I would up the amount of recognition and praise I gave fivefold. Why? Because I always thought my A players and my B players knew they were doing a good job.
Well, they don’t.
Everybody needs recognition. I’m talking with Gallup now, and it’s really interesting because I noticed that if you give somebody positive feedback once a week, that tends to have a shelf-life for that one week only.
If I’m your employee, I’ve got all these thoughts in my head, these worries and concerns that are unconscious, such as:
- Do my colleagues respect me?
- Is Adam mad at me?
- Is anything afoot here that’s going to be troublesome to me?
That’s all humming all the time, but when you give somebody praise, all that evaporates, and now they’re operating the way they should with a clear head.
That opens the door for accountability, because now you can have those discussions without fear, either through the check-ins or any number of other ways about accountability. You can have updates during those little five-minute, once-a-week check-ins, and each week there would be some positive feedback.
It takes you only four or five seconds to give somebody positive feedback.
If you don’t know what they’ve done that week to be able to give them positive feedback—which can happen because the boss doesn’t see everything and it’s difficult for a boss to know all the good that people do—ask a question, “Hey, what one thing are you proudest of doing this week?”
That’s a pretty cool question. They’re going to come back with something, and then you can praise them for that.
If you keep accountability positive and keep the discussions frequent then you’ll have a rocket going off. You want really fine mid-course corrections on employee accountability—and not those silly once-a-year performance reviews. You’ve lost a lot of employee performance in a year if they’re going off in the wrong direction just because they didn’t quite know which direction to go in.
Adam: What are the best ways for leaders to give feedback to most effectively hold the people they lead accountable?
Mike: That’s a great question. Feedback has a negative and a positive tinge.
I’ve seen executives tell everybody, “OK, I want you guys to give and get more feedback.” And nothing changes down below because there’s not that little push of accountability in there to get people to do it.
And the reason is, people think, “When I hear you say accountability, do you mean positive feedback or are you talking about negative feedback or constructive criticism?”
It’s good to have a little five-minute discussion in a staff meeting. “Hey, what do we mean by feedback?” And let people talk.
Another great question is, “How do you like to get your feedback?” And you turn it around on people, “How would you give me feedback?” Feedback is two-way. The boss has to get some feedback on how aspects are going.
My best boss was a guy named Malcolm Baldrige. The Baldrige Award is named after him. He was Secretary of Commerce. He would walk into the cafeteria and grab people. Employees are trying to get out of his way like minnows in front of a shark, because this guy’s the head of the Commerce Department.
He’d grab them and say, “Hey, come on, sit down. Let’s have lunch together.” And they would. He had warned his management chain, “Look, guys, I am going to periodically meet with employees. And it’s not a violation of the management chain because I’m not going to task them. But that’s the way I do business.” So the whole management chain was fine with him doing that.
He would have discussions over lunch and let it be free-flowing. But he would always ask the same question, “Hey, if you were me, what one thing would you do here to improve the Commerce Department?” And that’s a great way to get feedback.
You could ask people, how would you like to give me feedback and how do you like to get it? Do you want to get it in public? In private? Do you prefer it in writing? And so forth.
Another great way is to always obviously lead in with something. You can’t just blurt out negative feedback to somebody because their brain’s not prepared. So, the simplest thing you can do is have a lead-in sentence. For example, “Hey, would you mind if I give you some advice?” And then you can give them the feedback. And believe it or not, from the way the mind operates, that little preamble is really, really important to prepare that person’s mind to receive that feedback.
I had a deputy one time named Cindy. She was a superwoman. She had great leadership skills, great management skills, and great administrative skills. And one day she came to my office, and I’m trying to work. I’ve got so many tasks to get done. We were heading up this massive compartmented project.
She starts telling me a story about a woman she had worked with and how they gave feedback to each other. And I’m half listening. I’m still trying to do my work. And then she starts getting into it: “If one of us had feedback for the other, we would walk into their office with our hands cupped like this, and we’d say, ‘Hey, Cindy, I’ve got a gift for you.’ Silly little thing to say.” And I’m still listening to this and thinking, is this woman going to get out of my office? And guess what the next thing Cindy said to me? “Mike, I’ve got a little gift for you.” She cupped her hands. We both laughed.
And from then on, that was the mechanism we would use to give what was normally quite negative feedback back and forth to each other. And it just broke the mood and allowed us to do that. But it’s important in accountability because you want those fins to move little by little, keep you on the right trajectory, and so feedback can help you do that.
In my mind, the leader is part coach, part teacher, part guide.
Really what we have to do is unleash the best of human nature. To do that, you’ve got to understand what is human nature.
One of the big issues with accountability is we get most of our information through the visual cortex. The sight part of the brain is bigger than all the other senses together. There’s a study which found that if you see something, but all your other senses tell you the opposite then you’ll go with the sight input. It’s that powerful. So that’s our primary input method to the brain.
And the second thing about human nature is we tell narratives or we make up stories. Many psychologists say the brain is a story machine. So, if I see Maria going to the copying machine and you and I see her doing the same act, she rushes off, and we get there and it’s jammed. What I think is, “Well, Maria jammed the copy and ran off and left it for me.” You see that, and your brain is making up a story. Why did she do that? Because your brain is very curious.
But you, Adam, might say, “Oh, isn’t that nice? Maria ran off to get help, to get the copier fixed.” We got two polar opposite views of this woman.
We all make narratives in the office of all kinds of different aspects and different behaviors. People are always making up narratives, and when you see the boss do something, you tend to make up a story that is more negative than positive. It’s called a negativity bias. It’s a survival mechanism.
Here’s an example: I was walking through CIA headquarters on the first floor, and I saw Mark, a guy who had worked for me ten years before. Here’s how our conversation went.
Me: “Mark, how are you doing?”
Mark: “Oh, great. I just got my coaching certificate at Georgetown, and now I can coach.”
Me: “Mark, that’s super. I’m so happy to hear it.”
He didn’t say anything, but had this perplexed look on his face.
Me: “Mark, what’s wrong?”
Mark: “Oh, I thought you hated coaching.”
Me: “Why?”
Mark: “Oh, I came to your office ten years ago and I brought up that I wanted to take some training in coaching, and you grimaced.”
Now, I don’t remember doing that, but I remember we had the conversation, and I remember that I was probably thinking, Mark’s group is behind schedule, and I’ve got a micromanager boss. And so if Mark goes to coaching training, maybe he’ll fall farther behind. You know, that’s my story. That’s my narrative.
And his narrative was that he saw me grimace and made up a story of how I don’t like coaching.
So, ten years later, at a completely random event, I find out somebody’s been carrying around this narrative that’s not correct. I did the wrong thing, certainly, by grimacing, and I inflicted what psychologists call social pain on this guy, and it stuck.
That’s what we’ve got to be careful of. We all have different narratives. So the discussions about accountability are so important because I’m not quite sure where you’re coming from if you’re just telling me to be more accountable. And especially if you’re a tough but fair boss. I’m on alert. So boss, does that mean you want four widgets a month, not two and a half? And that type of boss puts a little more psychological fear into the system.
Adam: Do you have any other tips for anyone in a leadership position on how they can hold the people who they lead accountable?
Mike: Here’s something I did in December with a group. There’s an age-old dilemma, and it often happens in groups. What we found in the leadership training business is you school people up, you tell them everything, and then they go back to the workplace and they only apply maybe one of those new behaviors.
And this is a real problem.
Barbara Kellerman at Harvard has written a book on failure of the leadership industry to get accountability at the end, to actually have people do it. Jeffrey Pfeffer out of Stanford wrote a book called Leadership BS because people aren’t applying it.
So how do you get accountability for a group? And again, I say do it softly and smartly. What we did in December, was we taught them how to do check-ins. But we want them to actually do them, and we want them to be accountable to do them. We talked the management of this group into allowing us to have a weekly report required by each graduate for 90 days. It’s only a 90-day report because you don’t want to create bureaucracy.
But the report was this: give us five bullets a week to your boss that says, what I learned about my people doing those brief check-ins or what I learned about myself. Pretty cool report, very brief.
The reason for 90 days is because we’re making them do those check-ins which have dragged out a lot of good behaviors: question asking, one-on-one conversations, feedback. We have them doing those weekly and they’re building up habitual behavior for all those little habits. So that was a way we put accountability in.
You can do it through something like a report. You could do it with pulse surveys, especially if it’s a soft issue such as trying to increase collaboration or cooperation or innovation in a group. And then lastly, those one-on-one casual check-ins are really the single best way to know what’s going on in your unit or your organization.
Adam: What are your best tips for leaders on how to have difficult conversations?
Mike: I tell executives this, and I tell front-line managers this: Reflect before you go in and have a difficult conversation.
Twenty minutes a week is all you need to do. You could do it on Saturday morning with a cup of coffee. Think through the following:
- Who are you going to give praise to that week?
- Who are you going to check in with?
- Who are you going to have a difficult conversation with?
- And map it out – how are you going to have it?
And then you’re like a great athlete when you’re going into a difficult conversation. You do a mental rehearsal of that conversation, and that is absolutely vital. Because what will happen invariably, it happens to me all the time, if you get caught in there, emotions rise, and lo and behold, somebody says something they probably shouldn’t have said, and then you’ve got some permanent damage.
The reason this is so important, at UCLA, at the Amundsen Brain Center, they’ve done a lot of studies on something they call social pain. For example, if you’re my boss and said something in a meeting that inadvertently humiliated me, the strong negative emotions that I experience is social pain.
Social pain follows the same pattern as physical pain through the brain. It’s really remarkable. It is held in memory longer than physical pain. And it’s held more intently.
If you think back to high school, and someone betrayed you, that often still hurts. But think back to you spraining your ankle playing soccer, and you know it hurt, but it’s kind of hard to conjure that up.
When you’re getting into a difficult conversation, if you haven’t thought it through and rehearsed and figured out, okay, what do I do if they say this or that or the other, you can easily run through the guardrail and you’ve created more damage than not.
I’ll be honest. I still have trouble with this. I find this to be one of the single most difficult leadership acts that you can do. And the reason is, again, it is so easy to get angry very quickly. The interesting thing is you’ve heard of fight or flight, and that all is based on our unconscious survival instinct. We’ve all gotten in our heads, even though we’re not aware of it. There’s a third one, which is freeze. Fight, flight, or freeze.
If you have one of these really important conversations and do it the wrong way, you may not be able to read that person just because they’re still sitting there. They’re in freeze mode. Angry as hell, but they’re in freeze mode. Or you might be unlucky enough to trigger ‘fight’ and that’s when the temperatures rise and go off the chart. Or perhaps you spark the flight response in someone and they up and leave the room.
And here’s a tidbit for you. I was talking to a CIA psychologist this week, who says there’s a fourth F. Fight, flight, freeze, and flock. Think about zebras spotting a lion. What do they do? They’re fearful, so they flock together. They’ve seen that with some people. If you’ve got a very bad boss, for example, heading up a unit, people will either freeze and not perform. Or take flight and transfer out. You’ll burn off some really good people. Others might be a little combative with that boss. But it also could have a cohesive effect of flocking and pushing people together.
When crucial conversations go awry they can trigger some very, very different behaviors in different people. Which is why rehearsal ahead of a difficult conversation is so crucial.
Adam: Do you have any tips on how to rehearse effectively?
Mike: I don’t usually plug books, but two of the best books I’ve ever read on leadership are older ones. One is called Crucial Conversations. That’s sold something like 100 million books. It gives you a technique for handling these types of conversations. And it’s very simple.
The other book was one called Leadership and Self-Deception. Funny title, but this one is one of the biggest bestsellers ever in books as well. It gives you information on the fact that we all have different narratives in our head. How do you straighten that out? How do you have the conversations to have a meeting of the minds?
Those are two that I would recommend to learn techniques to help rehearse for difficult conversations.
Adam: There are different types of tough conversations that leaders have. There are huge topics like you’re going to be fired or you’re going to be laid off or you’re not getting promoted, and then there are other conversations that may not necessarily rise to that level, but are still very difficult for leaders to have: Your work product isn’t what it needs to be. You need to elevate your performance. You’re not showing up with the level of effort that you need to show up with. You’re not a good team player. You’re not following the rules here. How would you guide leaders to approach those different types of conversations depending on what kind of conversation it is?
Mike: That’s interesting. I’m going to just call them big and little. The big one is you’re fired, I suppose, or you’re redundant in our department. I don’t have a lot of advice for that because it is what it is, except for this one thing.
We had an interesting dinner, and we were talking about somebody who brought up the fact that they had to fire an employee a few years back.
They talked about the steps they had taken over a year to let this employee know that they were on the bad list and that they weren’t performing appropriately. They walked through the whole thing, and they were astonished that when the day finally came to have that big conversation, the employee didn’t have a clue that they were going to be let go.
We all carry around a model in our head. When you have one of these big conversations, understand that because of our sense of self-worth and our model of ourselves, we generally don’t realize that the big conversation is about to erupt. Treat the other person with respect. Respect is the most important thing in big conversations.
For the little conversations, which are the ones you probably have once a week or might be slightly negative conversations that you’re forced to have, here’s a little brain trick.
If you use past tense in one of those conversations, my brain and everybody else’s brain takes that in as criticism. “Mike, you didn’t turn the report in on time.” I have reasons I didn’t, justifications in my mind why I didn’t turn the report in on time. Instead, use future tense when you’re having the little conversations.
Change it around and say, “Mike, in the future, when you’re doing these reports, what I would love you to do is the day before it’s due, just poke your head in the door and let me know how it’s going and see if I can help you in any way.” It’s the same ask, but you’re using future tense.
Brains take that in as advice, not criticism. I would do that in the little conversations.
Adam: Do you have any tips on the kind of body language to either use or avoid when having difficult conversations?
Mike: This is such a simple one. We had a woman in my first frontline managers class on leadership at CIA. She was talking to the rest of the class in an open discussion. She said, “I’m so lucky because I can multitask. When I’m talking to an employee, I can still type and work on my computer.”
And the whole room groaned because they knew immediately that if you want to show respect, show the person your full attention.
That’s probably the simplest body language to use: turn, face the person, lean in, and show them that you respect them by paying attention to what they’re saying.
Pair this with the techniques mentioned in the two books above, and it sends signals along with the visual signals of how you sit and so forth that you’re paying attention to them. That’s crucial.
Adam: Do you have any other strategies or tactics, or pitfalls to avoid?
Mike: Humor is so important in the workplace, but not in terms of one of these difficult conversations. Never try to inject humor in it.
Some psychologists have found, for example, in training, if you get a group to laugh every 20 minutes to 30 minutes, they learn more. Isn’t that interesting? Laughter is a sign of psychological safety. Good laughter, not the phony laughter you do with a bad boss.
But in difficult conversations, don’t try to make light or inject humor because you’re dealing with emotions and that could really backfire on you.
Adam: Many leaders today understand the importance of psychological safety, but for those who don’t, what is it, and why is it so important?
Mike: This is a really fascinating topic, and I’m an old spy. I’m kind of a curmudgeon, and I was always in lone wolf roles, so I’m not a guy with huge amounts of empathy. If you say, oh, poor people, they need psychological safety, it might not ring true in my ears.
However, I’m a compulsive data collector. I worked for Jack Welch in the 90s, and he sent me through Black Belt School, which is a process improvement program, and you gather all kinds of data on a given process to measure it and define the measure, analyze it, and so forth. And so I found out you could actually pretty much measure anything.
So, when George Tenet asked me to start up the Leadership Academy for the CIA, our first question was pretty basic: okay, what does good leadership look like? I did an 8,000-boss study in which I got random groups of employees to list out every boss they’d had at CIA and then rate them great, good, neutral, poor, awful. I’m not interested in the names of those bosses, just the raw data. So we could see, in a pie chart or diagram, what’s the leadership acumen of the whole organization. We got a large number of good and great bosses. But what makes a good and great boss?
That was phase two. We narrowed in on the people who had had a great boss. We asked 200 of them to give us what are the attributes of great bosses. This sounds odd, I know, but the attributes were not helpful because they were platitudinal. Great bosses have integrity, great bosses are trustworthy, great bosses delegate, great bosses are trusting. These platitudes were true, but they’re not actionable. How do I take platitudes and teach them and then actually have people behave in different ways?
We went to round three. We asked all the people who had a great boss to tell us a story about them. We collected hundreds of stories from 200 people. When people described their best boss, they often talked about several behaviors. A long-winded way to get to psychological safety.
We took all those behaviors and we clumped them into various steps that leaders go through repeatedly. The first step, this was so interesting, was establishing safety. We didn’t call it psychological safety. This was 1999-2000 at the CIA. We called it ‘establish safety’.
The behaviors that established psychological safety were really simple:
- Come in in the morning and say hello to people
- Smile at people when you see them in the hallway
- Acknowledge people
When bosses don’t do these, they inadvertently amp up hidden unconscious fears that we’ve got running around in our head about the workplace:
- Is my boss angry at me?
- Am I doing a good job?
- How do I fit in?
- What’s the purpose here?
Once you establish psychological safety, those aspects calm down. I’ve talked with countless psychologists and all agree that establishing psychological safety is a crucial first step if you really want to inspire people.
Adam: And psychological safety, very simply, is the belief that you’re not going to be punished or reprimanded or hurt in any way for speaking up and speaking out and speaking your mind and being yourself in the workplace.
Mike: That’s it. You nailed it. I couldn’t agree more. That’s a beautiful definition because it opens up the doors to everything: great communications and innovation.
When we did that study, it was 1999, and there was a researcher at Harvard who nobody had heard of, Amy Edmondson, and she did her first study that year on psychological safety. And now in the last 26 years, she is the name in psychological safety. She’s done more studies on psychological safety than anybody else. If CIA had named it psychological safety instead of safety and published it, we would have been famous today!
I had a client, and this guy was a world-class engineer running a mega project. He would stand outside his little office every morning with his cup of tea saying hello to people as they came in. The project was a huge success. So this guy got promoted, and he moved into a bigger office with windows on two sides and further away from his team. He started staying in his office more and stopped greeting everyone as they came in. After about a month and a half, his Chief of HR came in and said, “The employees think you’re mad at them.” And he couldn’t believe it. He replied, “That couldn’t be farther from the truth. Why do they think that?” And she said, “Because you don’t say hello to them in the morning anymore.”
What do you think the engineer did? He didn’t just get out in the hallway in the morning again, he did one better. He moved his office back to the little one and stood out in front of it with his tea every morning to say hello.
These little ideas are so simple we tend to forget them, but it’s just the way the human mind works. It’s human nature. It’s a basic survival instinct that’s unconscious. We’ve got all these hidden concerns and worries when we hit the workplace. So the little signals you pick up that you’re psychologically safe are really, really important. A smile and a good morning from the boss on the way to your desk is a small gesture but immediately makes the employee feel safer.
The bad boss doesn’t do a lot of that. And what happens is their employees’ brains are abuzz all day in ways they shouldn’t be.
Adam: What are some other tactics anyone can utilize to create an environment of psychological safety?
Mike: I’ll give you a big one. I mentioned that we clumped behaviors that we analyzed into groups. The first was psychological safety. The second was trust.
How do you build trust? It’s the law of reciprocity. You can’t have trust without psychological safety.
Once you’ve got trust and psychological safety, then you can get clarity on accountability and all those good aspects mentioned earlier.
Back to psychological safety. Here’s a big one. It fits all three of those categories I just mentioned: active listening.
If an employee starts talking about something, don’t rush off to go do something else, but lock into them and pay attention. That’s a gift that you’re giving, and that creates an incredible amount of psychological safety. The employee is unconsciously thinking, well, this boss is not a threat, at least they pay attention to me.
To establish solid psychological safety:
- Active listening
- Chitchat and regular how are yous?
- Smiles in the morning
- Positive feedback and giving praise
Do that and they’ll be okay for the next week.
There are anti-behaviors too. Employees are always watching the boss and will create a narrative. Any behavior that’s a little out of the ordinary, they’ll generally assign some negativity to—that’s the negativity bias. Always watch out for your behaviors. Don’t explode in meetings. Don’t humiliate one person publicly because it will tremendously affect everybody in the meeting. If you do accidentally have an outburst, a good leader will apologize immediately. Say, “Sorry, I wasn’t mad at you. It was the situation.”
People want to be treated like human beings. We’re all a bit irrational, and everybody’s got a different narrative of why the boss behaved that way. It doesn’t mean you walk on eggshells all the time, but just treat people like you want to be treated.
Adam: Do you have any other tips for leaders on how to create an environment that promotes psychological safety?
Mike: Know what the culture is of the organization you lead. When it comes to psychological safety, you could take a trick out of Jack Welch’s book and do what he used to call a workout, but I call them quick wins.
Get your group together and say, “Hey. I just want to make sure that we’ve established a sense of psychological safety here, that we can be open and talk candidly about issues and whatnot. I’ll leave the room, and why don’t you guys spend the last 20 minutes of today’s staff meeting talking about psychological safety? What can we do? Is there anything we can do as a group to improve psychological safety here? I’ll come back in and we can discuss.”
You’ve taken the issue that is in your head, which you know is important, and you’ve given it to them. You’ve delegated and let them come up with the answers. I’ve done hundreds of these. I’ve never seen anybody embarrass the boss when the boss comes back in. They’ll have a list up on the whiteboard and have a good, robust discussion because they’ve got anonymity as the group. They could bring up some negatives. And isn’t that nice to know? What a gift it is to know the negative aspects that are disrupting psychological safety in the group. Once you know, you can address those areas.
That’s my final tip: when in doubt, ask your workforce.
