This is how we help.
Leaders are responsible for creating the interpersonal context that influences the behavior of their team. We offer one-on-one coaching and leadership mastermind groups—both help foster deep social and emotional intelligence that enable you to create an interpersonal context of psychological safety.
These workshops are held over Zoom with the intent to develop communication skills and deepen the team’s access to candor via experience. Focuses may include empathetic listening, candid feedback, or social connectivity.
We partner with your leaders to design and install a peer support program that meets your team needs. This may look like a pair of team members meeting once per week on Zoom to practice active listening to each other’s challenges at work and home.
WITHHOLDING CULTURE
CANDOR CULTURE
Mission.
Our mission is to help leaders of remote teams foster a culture of candor - shift from “A” to “D”.
WITHHOLDING CULTURE:
Team members withhold their true thoughts and feelings because they believe that their colleagues or leaders will ridicule, ignore, or reject them — withholding is a common behavioral strategy among teams when interpersonal fear is unmanaged.
CANDOR CULTURE:
Team members reveal their true thoughts and feelings because their colleagues and leaders invite, appreciate, and protect candid contribution — candor is essential to increasing innovation, productivity, and social connectivity.
Unsure of what culture you have?
Does your team ‘withhold’ or ‘reveal’…
ideas or concerns that challenge the status quo?
critical feedback for colleagues and leadership?
questions when they are uncertain and need help?
failures, mistakes, or errors in a timely manner?
authentic expression of their personality?
Candor levels are responsive to psychological safety.
When psychological safety increases, candor increases, and all the good things go up:
—
+ Innovation/Creativity
Innovation becomes easier when team members are comfortable challenging the status quo, sharing mistakes, and giving candid feedback. Withholding cultures impede innovation with fear.
+ Learning/Growth
When people feel safe to share their mistakes and ask for help, individuals and teams learn faster.
+ Knowledge circulation
Candor speeds up the circulation of accurate information, giving the full team a clearer sense of awareness aligned with what is true. Withholding clogs and dilutes the circulation of knowledge on teams, leading to isolation of leadership and an overall distorted sense of reality.
+ Social connectivity
When individuals express themselves more authentically in a relational context, they give others the potential to accept and include them more fully. This is human connection 101.
+ Energy
Withholding is severely energy depleting for individuals and relationships. Having a culture in which people are celebrated for speaking candidly and expressing their true selves is energizing.
+ Zone of genius
In cultures of candor, individual’s strengths and weaknesses become surfaced more easily for the team to notice. Naturally, team members become more responsible for roles that are aligned with their zone of genius and less responsibility for roles in their zone of incompetence.
The best know the power of candor.
Google’s research study discovered that the most powerful indicator of “team effectiveness” is psychological safety.
Edwin Catmull believes that “candor is the key to collaborating effectively”. Check out the creative process behind Pixar - the “braintrust.”
Professor Amy Edmondson attests that psychological safety is really about candor. It’s rarity can make it a competitive advantage.
Bridgewater manages the largest hedge fund in the world ($160B). Their first work principle is “trust in radical truth and radical transparency.”