False Harmony in Teams

Welcome to Connecting to Admired Leadership, where twice a month we explore the behaviors and routines that make great leaders extraordinary. I'm Wes Bender, and I have the distinct pleasure of hosting some of our firm's partners, coaches, and clients to discuss leadership in ways you won't hear anywhere else. Let's dive into this episode and make people and situations better together. Good morning. Good Good afternoon, good evening. Maybe some of you are, like I said in previous series, on a run. Perhaps you're on a commute listening to this recording. We sure are glad that you're here, especially those of you who are joining us live today. Thanks to Sophie, who is our quote-unquote producer behind the scenes for these webinars. She's already dropped in the chat box, if you can see that. We do have Alex participating in the chat box, so our Admired Leadership Excellence AI coach. Getting better and better every week. Alex will be with us in the chat box. Alex will also be compiling a summary to send along with the recording to all registrants as well. As we welcome all of our live participants to our session today, Sophie will open up that chat box. We'd love to know who you are and where you're from joining us live today. So we'd love for you to drop that in the chat box. Make sure to click that dropdown and choose everyone. We love the opportunity for real-life people to network behind the scenes during our, during our times. We got Texas and Arkansas and Iowa and Canada and Philly. Great. Lots of folks coming in today. It is graduation season. You will notice I don't have my normal backdrop. I am en route to my nephew's graduation in Chattanooga, Tennessee. So taking a little detour here. My oldest son is with me, who also just graduated, and I have 3 other nephews and 1 niece who are also graduating this month. It has been very busy— 3 high school graduates, 3 college undergrads, and 1 master's degree. One thing that I enjoy at every graduation is finding the families who are quote-unquote playing nice. You might say there are some indicators where you can look in different families that maybe some false harmony is going on in order to celebrate The Graduate. That's how I'll tee up our conversation today. Things that I look for: stiff hugs, maybe carefully choreographed seating arrangements for certain individuals too. But it's fun to see a bit of, you know, big smiles, but a bit of false harmony at times as we get into that. As we jump into that, I want to bring in our guest, Diana Hong, no stranger to our series as our guest. Diana, I'd love for you to kick us off. Who are you and how are you using Alex or any other AI to make yourself better or the people around you better? Yeah, thank you so much for that, Wes. As you mentioned, it's not my first time on, on our seminar, on our sessions here, but I do find that every time we have a new novel, interesting conversation. So I'm very excited to, to be guesting here today and hopefully will be useful as well. I'm using AI and particularly Alex to try to make make myself a better coach. Um, so, you know, even after doing this for 15+ years, um, you know, if you include my frontline leadership, um, experiences, then probably 20+ years or so, um, I still find that it's helpful to ask Alex, here's the situation, here's the way I'm thinking about doing it. Now play a persona. Pretend you are my worst critic. What would you come at me with? Or pretend you're my toughest team member, you know, what would you push back on? Or pretend you are someone who doesn't know a lot about the situation, but you're observing this from the sidelines, what assumptions are you walking away with? And then trying to get out of my own head, right? And asking Alex to play that almost a different lens with me is very helpful because there's absolutely no way that no matter how experienced, no matter how comfortable, no matter how confident you feel, you'll never be able to completely see a 360 around you. And so having Alex play that, whether it's at 2:00 AM or 2:00 PM, you know, is very, very helpful. Yeah, that's fantastic. I agree. And it is nice because there's no qualms in doing that. There's no reservation in doing that because there's no human on the other side. You know you're going to get that pushback. You know you're going to get it from certain people. But going ahead and walking all the way through it and role-playing that through that is a great way to do that. Diana, many of you know she's a partner. She's a coach. She's a strategic communications advisor for our firm. She is equal parts fun, smart, and focused. She can turn on a dime and get a room focused, as well as pivot and make the room just absolutely erupt in laughter at the same time. Just an absolute joy to work with, and many of you know, one of my favorite people to have on our time. So this particular topic, I think we all see. We may see it personally, like I said, at graduation or holidays in our own families. But I think it shows up quite a bit and can be very detrimental to really reaching results, really reaching full potential for teams and the results we're trying to see. So if you could maybe just frame this up, I know, I know one thing we say a lot within our firm is, are we harmony over truth, or are we truth over harmony? So just frame this up and the importance of this topic for us, Diana. Yeah, absolutely. And I'll start there. When we think about those two ways to— it's almost a spectrum of thinking about how a culture, a team, an organization, a group, a family tends to act. Families or groups that are high truth over harmony, you'll see behaviors like people actually saying things so directly it might almost hurt, but it's in honor of the truth. And there's a sense of, but I have to tell you this because if you don't know this, then you're not going to get better or it's not going to be good for you. Right. Cultures that are more harmony over truth, you'll see it's a lot about we want to make sure that we are smiling and happy out of this conversation, that how you feel is also an important outcome. And so it's actually right to say you probably want both. You don't want to be so extreme on truth that you're going around willy-nilly, aggressively hurting people's feelings just so that you can feel, ah, I got the truth off my chest, right? I mean, that's kind of selfish, right? You also don't want to be so harmonious that none of the truth ever gets out, and then people are leading either delusions, right? Or as is more common, especially with false harmony on this end of the spectrum, people are actually talking about it, whatever it is, and it could be you, but they're talking about it behind your back, right? They're never actually bringing it to your attention. So you're kind of going in either this ignorant cloud of, Oh, I think everything's great, right? But then all sorts of backtalk and behind-the-scenes commentary is happening. And that's really where we see on that side of the extreme, if it's so harmonious that people aren't being honest at all, then all that does is it shoves the actual negative truths outside of the conversation, outside of your ability to do anything about it. So it still exists. These people still talk about it. People still, you know, complain or get angry or etc. You just have no visibility into it, which means you can't do anything about it. And so that's sort of the danger of, I think, false harmony when we look at it from that lens. Yeah, that's good. Sophie's dropped the Field Note that we're working from. If you're not a subscriber to Field Note, you can click that and see that there. So this whole concept of false harmony, how do you know it's happening? Because— and in the chat box, I'd love to know And you can, maybe you can take this question personally or professionally. So let us know, in your family, are you typically Harmony over Truth or Truth over Harmony? Or maybe perhaps in your work team, are you Harmony over Truth or Truth over Harmony? Which one are you? I'd love to see that in the chat box. But how do you, how does a leader pick up that this is happening? How do you see it in action to recognize that it's happening? Yeah, so a couple of, of, uh, cases I'll actually bring up. So in one situation, we were working on a massive change. It was, um, a few thousand people in an organization, probably around 7,000 to 8,000 people in organization. They were all going to have kind of some different organizational reporting lines, new business lines, things like that. Um, and quite frankly, I don't think more than half, or maybe even less than half, were on board, right? But all the leadership meetings were like, yes, this is a great idea. Here's the 100-page slide deck. You know, we're all gonna go and we're gonna do, we're gonna do this this year, right? And then of course, push comes to shove, you find out, you fast forward 2 months, 3 months, and nothing actually has happened. And the reason is because as soon as every leader, every manager, every supervisor left that room, they're like rolling their eyes and going, ugh, this is the worst idea in the world. Let's just, wait this out, right? So that's kind of another example of false harmony on the scale of thousands. Sometimes you see it happen because of what doesn't happen, and so then you unwind and you're like, "Oh, it must have been false harmony because what I heard was agreement, but I didn't see any action whatsoever," and so that's clearly false harmony there. Unfortunately, that specific tell is obviously a month or two down the line. You can't tell when it's happening or be plugged into it, One of the ways that you could be a little bit more plugged in is if you have a good information network inside your team, your, your family, et cetera, people that you can just pick up the phone and talk to who are really plugged in. There was another client that we worked with where actually we, we brought the executive assistants together and said, you actually are the pulse, the heartbeat of this organization. You know, if people are rolling their eyes, you know, if people are venting to you, you know, if people say like, ignore that, do this instead, et cetera. So what we really want is not for you to be spies, like, that's not— let's not be negative about it, but we want you to represent the honest heartbeat of the organization. If we're going awry, if we're missing something, if, if we think this is the best idea, you know, in the world and everyone else does not, you know, don't hesitate to give us a heads up and say, look, you might want to slow your roll a bit, you might want to slow down a bit and just gut check that, maybe do a little bit more, a few more conversations, etc., without putting the EAs in a difficult situation. You don't have to call out who said what or anything like that. Just give us an indication that we need to slow down. So that's another way, is that when you start hearing the rumor mill, people who are plugged into the rumor mill approach you, say something, etc. I also think, too, there's a way to try to get ahead of it. And the situations that are most ripe for false harmony are when— so passive-aggressiveness and false harmony, they exist for a reason. People don't just sit there and go, "You know what? Today I'm going to be falsely harmonious for no reason." I'm just going to make life difficult for every— no, right? So you think about what I do feel like my daughter does do that sometimes. She's sitting there plotting, right? My 13-year-old redheaded daughter wakes up and says, you know what, I'm gonna create some serious, uh, right, passive-aggressive nature today. That's beside the point, but in our teams, I think you're right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you know, maybe, uh, again, obviously, uh, 13-year-olds are their own special breed of personality, but I do think I think there's a grain of truth in terms of, you know, that exists because somebody feels like for whatever reason, real or imagined, that if they're honest, they're gonna get a huge backlash, right? Either personally they're gonna lose something, or emotionally it's gonna feel terrible, or publicly they're going to be humiliated over something like that. And so, uh, passive aggressiveness happens when people say the cost of a direct challenge, an honest challenge, is too high. So I have to keep it passive and it just leaks in these very unproductive ways, right? And so I do think there's an element as leaders where you have to look back and go, am I making it too high cost for people to challenge? Like, is there a way that, you know, someone brings up something, I'm like, well, I can't believe you didn't bring this up before. And, ah, we're so far down the line and I'm berating them. I'm actually creating an emotional cost for someone to raise a flag, right? Now, that doesn't excuse someone from being the perennial— you'll always have this, what is the word, squeaky wheel that says, yeah, but this or but this or but this or but this, right? So you do need to ask yourself, have I given enough chances for people to object, to confront, to push back a little bit healthfully earlier on? And if you can say yes, great. But sometimes the answer is, I'm part of the problem, right? Because I'm moving so fast that I don't want to hear it. Or I'm reacting in a way and I'm pushing back hard on someone who pushed back a little bit. So now everyone just says, OK, I can never talk back to Diana. She's going to bite my head off. So I think those are some of the things to look for ahead of time as well is what are the conditions of confronting each other? Are there avenues where people can do so healthfully? And if not, is there anything I can do to fix that? That's good. So we've talked about— This is dangerous. There is no question about that. The danger is sometimes, dare I say, subliminal or behind the scenes. And the absolute danger of it is that we— false harmony means everything's harmonious, so we keep going. But there's a potential that we're not realizing. So we need to recognize false harmony. We've talked about that. I remember in a former career, I was advised I would go into these groups and settings and facilitate, you know, sessions and workshops and trainings and things. And I was always advised afterwards to try to cut out first and go sit in my car and watch how many different parking lot conversations happened after the meeting. And that was a barometer of whether or not things were soaking in or there were lots of different conversations starting. Alex actually put something in the chat box there. So we've talked about How do we recognize false harmony? How do we know this is happening? And so now we're starting to get into, okay, what do we do about it? What can a leader do when they recognize that we've got some false harmony on our team? Could you speak about, to the individual who is thinking right now about somebody else and what they need to do about it? So they're thinking about their leader,— or perhaps, you know, I would hate to say it, but maybe they're thinking about their spouse or whatever, and they're like, I'm the one who's not speaking up. I'm the one having the parking lot conversations because I don't want to get my head bit off, right? The leader recognizing this is one thing, but what do you do if you're the individual? How do you lead up in that way? Yeah. And then if there have been some incidences in the past where you feel like your hand has been slapped because you voiced something and you thought, OK, I've learned my lesson. Maybe I don't feel as that I can trust that I can say this, right? That is something that is on the other side of the scales, right? It is absolutely deterring you from speaking up. I usually, though, challenge people to say there's almost always a slightly more indirect, maybe a creative way to try to think about how can I voice this, right? It doesn't have to be a head-on collision when I challenge something all the time. Is there a way that I can just slow the tempo down a little bit? So for instance, a great technique is to say— is to just ask a really good question in the moment and say, oh, I just want to ask a quick question. What about this thing? Are we paying enough attention to this issue? Because I just want to make sure we get ahead of that, right? So you see how the way I phrased it, it clearly shows that I am worried about something, but I'm putting it in a way that's solvable, right? That's not just, I think this is a terrible situation and you're making the wrong call and you're ignoring this very big issue over here. I could have approached it that way. It's still very much, you know, me pushing back, right? But the first way means that I figured out a way to do so that actually takes the temperature down on my side as well. Not just the leader, but I can also help take the temperature down, make it a little bit less about, you know, you're wrong, I'm right, and more about, okay, well, maybe this is an issue. Let's solve it. Let's get ahead of it, right? Who doesn't want to be smart and get ahead of something, right? And so I think when we tap into that, The idea of a neutral question, the idea sometimes of, you know, maybe it's helpful to think about who has conversations outside of that room even ahead of time, you know. So it might be something where, you know, if you corner someone, they've staked their career on it and then you start nitpicking away at it and saying like this issue and that issue and I'm concerned about this or whatever. And they're in front of 25 other people, including their boss, your boss's boss, etc., all of those things. Then rationally you're going to expect a little defensiveness, right? Like, there's nobody who's there— like, just watch sports events, right? If people start booing the player, do they ever sit there and be like, oh yes, what a rational piece of feedback, or, you know what I mean? No, they say, oh, you know, and they get defensive and angry, you know, because they're in front of people and they're trying to play their game. And so, um, so I do think we have to be human too and just realize maybe what's the right avenue, what's the right way to approach this. Do I have an offline conversation? Is there someone that that person trusts, you know, maybe even more than they trust me? And I can see if that person can bring up something there. So it's indirect and not perfect, but there are ways I think we can be just a little bit more creative about how we, how we mention some kind of resistance or concern. That's good. And there's a couple things you said in there that I wanted to pull out, maybe spend a little bit more time with, because I think it's something that this firm has really taught me. And so I recall my wife grew up with two sisters in the house, and their idea of working out tension was way more dramatic and in your face than the way I grew up in my household for the most part. And I remember in our first year of marriage, I remember a tube of toothpaste being thrown across the room at me, and I thought, well, this is it. I guess we're getting divorced. This is the final nut. And she's like, no, no, no, this is just the way we work out. Our tension. And so over time, it's taken me a long time, but there's some real, there's some real universal behaviors of admired leaders where tension is not the enemy of harmony. Meaning what we're talking about here is false harmony. That does not mean harmony is bad. Tension is good. In fact, that learned how to navigate and intentionally put some tension in a room in order to get everyone to a new place. But you can do that in a very harmonious way. Would you agree with that? And then how does that play out? Because it is a standard within our firm. I mean, it is a standard that we need a little bit of tension if we're going to get somewhere in our room. Speak to that just a little bit. Yeah, I mean, there's a, there's a reason why a lot of the best ideas, they come from debating. Right? They come from, well, I don't think that'll work. And how about we fix it this way? Well, I don't think that'll work either. How about this way? Right? And I think there's an idea of human beings, if you just agree, like, oh, yeah, that's great. And then the conversation ends. You know what I mean? So we kind of need that, well, what about this? And sort of challenging each other. The mental model I have is, is it a clean fight? You know what I mean? And by a clean fight, I mean, are there rules? Is it not personal? It's not— targeted about you have bad judgment or you have a history of making bad decisions or those kinds of things that turn it a certain way. And you see how when, when a, when a conflict turns, it's usually because I want to say something because it makes me feel better to say it in the moment, but it doesn't actually help the situation or us to agree on anything. What would be the point of me making someone feel bad in the moment, right? Just so that I could feel better. I mean, that's really irrelevant. I really have to think about what are we trying to solve here, right? And what's the piece of information or the question or maybe the encouragement even that I can give that'll help us get there and get to a better idea or a better outcome. And if I can keep my head on in the moment and then try to strive for that, then that keeps it a clean fight. And it is very hard. I mean, especially, you mentioned spouses in our personal lives. We care so much. The reaction time is very quick, right? So that's— what did you call it? The tube of toothpaste that goes flying across the room. I mean, that probably happened in 0.1 seconds. Like, there was not a lot of time. Oh, it escalated quickly. I can't even remember what it was, but it was like, oh, I was— I thought we were having a nice conversation. And then, you know, here come a full tube of toothpaste headed in my direction. Yes. Absolutely. So I think, you know, that there's a value in the workplace at least, or whoever you're working side by side with. It could be a volunteer organization. It could be your community organization. But just taking a breath, right? Taking a breath. And whatever that— I saw a comedian once who said, and obviously this is for laughs, but there's an element of truth to it, who said, the reason I and my significant other have a 50-year marriage is because I think about the first thing I want to say and I don't say it. I think about the second thing I want to say, and I don't say it. I think about the third thing I want to say, and then maybe I say that. And I was like, ah, wise. You know what I mean? So again, that's humorous. But I think there's an element of hopefully if you're working on being an admired leader, you're really thinking about not just me, what feels good for me to relieve my angst or anger or whatever it is, but just what's the purpose? What can I say or do that would be helpful, right? That would get us somewhere. And sometimes it is just saying, look, we're actually a little too heated right now. And maybe the best rules right now for us is just to take some time. But let's commit to coming back. Because if we just let it sit in the silence, that actually, again, is embracing false harmony. We know already we disagree, but we're never confronting it. We're actually lying to both of ourselves then. Fascinating. OK, so Alex and Brian are having a good chat in the chat box there. Brian, great. Thoughts in regards to how important trust is with all of this. I want to take a quick pause, and Sophie, I don't know if you have readily available— there are some immediate behaviors that live behind our kind of our paywall in our playbook in regards to behaviors. And so I'd love for you to drop, if you can, just kind of point people to that playbook that we call where we've kind of incorporated some— thank you very much, We've gathered and researched some of the most, the best practices of some of the most admired leaders in the world. And there's some that come readily to mind in regards to all this, specifically around building trust, specifically around how to navigate tension and those kind of things. What I want you to speak to, Diana, when we have some time left, is what is a good— how do you implement a good cadence of harmonious tension? That's how I want to ask the question based on our conversation so far, because I think it's so important. In fact, before this webinar, uh, I've mentioned to you guys before, every time I talk to Diana, I immediately— she immediately starts coaching me on different things, and I was getting some pretty solid marriage advice, uh, prior to this. There was a— I don't know how many of y'all watch The Office, but there's a great Office episode, uh, with Jim and Pam, who are kind of the, uh, the, the love relationship, you know, the primary love relationship in The Office. They eventually, over the seasons, get married, and there's a moment where they have a moment of tension between the two of them, and one of them has to make a conscious choice that they're going to fight. And actually fighting shows that they care, whereas being more passive would show that they didn't care about the relationship anymore. This is worth fighting for, basically. So, and so it's real strange that sometimes when there's passivity, passivity or there's false harmony, it is such an indicator that people don't care enough. They don't care enough about what's going on. Yes, it could be trust, but it could also be an essence of they just don't care enough. So what I'd love for you to speak to, Diana, how does a leader implement or how does a team implement a healthy cadence of very intentional harmonious tension within their team? How would one go about that? Yeah. And I think you're spot on, Wes, is that there's a saying that sometimes at CRA Admired Leadership we say, which is relationships die in the silence, right? So false harmony to its extreme, it's a lot of polite, mm, yes, of course, and then silence, right? And so that's where the actual trust and relationship dies off because there's nothing that you actually work on together. There's nothing that you commit to each other for. There's nothing that you promise to each other and then follow through for. So I think wherever a leader takes a glance and says, you know what, there's too much silence. I propose something and it's always just dead silent. People are just politely nodding. Right? I mean, that's an issue. And so one way to make this a little bit more palatable is to actually put it in a neutral context. Right? So whether it is like your Pam and Jim from The Office example where you schedule a fight. Right? But the work equivalent could be We're gonna schedule a risk assessment meeting. You know, I don't care if you call it risk assessment. I don't care if you call it, you know, what could go wrong, worst case scenarios, whatever it is, right? We're gonna schedule a 15-minute or 20-minute or 30-minute conversation where all we do is we pick holes at this, right? Nobody takes it personally. It's solely so that we figure out how do we get ahead of that? Are there plans that we need to make? Is there good feedback we're not getting ahead of? And the magic about that is that you depersonalize it. So instead of someone feeling like, wow, I need to speak up and tell Wes, he's wrong, and he's going to look at me and say, you're taking this, you know, to a personal level. Now Wes is the one saying, all right, everybody, bring your questions, bring your criticisms. We're actually going to go around and say, everyone has a criticism. What's your biggest critique? What's your biggest critique? What's your biggest critique? And it doesn't feel as personal anymore. So that can help lessen the cost, right, of being honest, of being challenging in the moment. Another way also to do it is sometimes actually in the same meeting. So you might notice again, sort of that silence, maybe you read between the lines and you think based on someone's expression they're holding back on something. A good question to pose to everybody is, OK, let's do what we call the crystal ball exercise. So fast forward 1 year from now, we failed. We failed at whatever it is we're here to talk about doing. Why? Why did we fail? Let's work backwards. Imagine we're 1 year from now, we failed. Why did that happen? Is that something we can solve now? Can we get ahead of that? Is it just something that we keep an eye out on? And then the crystal ball exercise, again, it's all in the framing. People are like, oh, you're just asking me to take a crystal ball. It just feels like a guess. You know, I feel a lot more comfortable, you know, saying, well, what about this? It's not something that I feel like I'm staking my credibility and your credibility and our relationship against. So that's another way to do it as well. So I think there's a few ways to destigmatize this idea of conflict or challenge, right? And really try to get people to see it's okay, you know, any question, any challenge is a good challenge, and let's get ahead of that, right? Because it's all about making us better. And that might, might be helpful there. Yeah, I'm reminded back up the chat a little bit in case anybody missed it. Alex dropped a field note of one of my favorites that's titled Weak leaders prefer the silence. Weak leaders prefer the silence. And that could be a bit of a rally call to kind of get after some of this stuff with your teams or your families along the way. So Diana, certainly want to give you just the final words here, any encouragement you might have for everyone who attended live and those who might be listening to the recording as well. I would— we are going to be— I'm headed to Miami tomorrow, so So Nashville to Chattanooga to Miami and back to Nashville this week for our on-location event. On Thursday, we'll be in Scottsdale, Arizona coming up in June, and sometime probably mid-June, we'll be announcing all the different places that we're going to be traveling this fall as well. So Sophie can drop that, some of those in the chat box, and then all of the rest of our webinars like these topics for the rest of the year and guests are located there too. We'd love to see you there. Diana, final words for our folks today around this topic of false harmony. Any encouragement, any final recommendations or things we should be thinking about? Yeah, I mean, I think the big thing I always walk away with is that false harmony is short-term easy but long-term headache, right? So right now someone nods, agrees, fine, there's no pushback, you can move forward. But inevitably that always bites us, you know, afterwards when we think about, oh, someone actually doesn't do something or they claim to misunderstand or there's also sorts of things piling up and then there's a bigger explosion later. And so you don't have to solve everything in that moment, but just make sure you do put a Post-it note on it and come back to it and say, you know what, we should solve. I just wanna call it out and make sure we come back to it. So that might be something. I love that concept of putting something, making sure you, making sure you circle back to it because false harmony fosters more false harmony. If we don't— if you don't get after it, for sure. That's fantastic. So we'll leave the chat box open here just for a bit if anybody wants to grab at any of those links that we had today. And happy graduation season to everyone if you have any graduates out there. Look forward to seeing everybody in our next session, which again you can find in the link that Sophie dropped in there too. Diana, thank you so much again. For all you do for us and our clients. Appreciate the time you've taken today, and we'll see everybody in the next one. Thanks, everybody.