Want to Foster a Speak-up Environment? Here’s What Not to Say
I admit it, I’m guilty. I’ve not only done the thing I’m about to disparage as a poor leadership practice, I have in fact done it many times in my 20 years as a project manager and people leader. Even worse, I’ve done it despite having experienced it from my own leaders and seeing the damaging consequences first hand. If you’ve been a leader for any length of time, you’ve probably done it, too.
So, what is this leadership anti-practice that’s running rampant through our organizations? It’s using the following phrase, or some variation of it, when a leader assigns a task to an employee:
“This shouldn’t take that long.”
Now, before you write me off as some crank conjuring up faux microaggressions, let me share a personal example to illustrate. A few years ago, my boss’s boss called me on a Friday evening to ask me to make some changes to a presentation she needed for Monday morning. She explained the changes, told me that she expected me to be able to reuse some existing materials for most of it, and that the rest “really shouldn’t take that long”. Doesn’t sound so bad, right?
Unfortunately, she was severely underestimating the effort involved. The presentation was for a senior audience, and the changes she wanted made to the diagrams and presentation flow were easy enough to describe, but took quite a bit of work to do with high quality. In addition, once I dug up the existing materials she referred to, it was clear that they were not exactly what she remembered, and they were almost no help for the updates needed.
The result was that I spent about 12 hours that weekend on a task that I was assured “really shouldn’t take long”. Reader, I can’t tell you what I had for lunch yesterday, but I can still remember every detail of that long-ago conversation and how I felt as I burned the weekend oil on those slides.
Don’t get me wrong, I know weekend work is unavoidable sometimes (much of this blog was written over a weekend), and obviously no one enjoys getting an urgent Friday night assignment. But this example also illustrates how saying something like “this shouldn’t take long” can compound the damage to an employee’s morale while undermining their willingness to speak openly with you as a leader. Let’s break down the reasons why…
Unpacking The Phrase
First, it implicitly tells the employee that it’s a competence problem on their part if the task ends up taking a long time. And since no employee wants to give their boss a reason to doubt their competence, it’s much less likely that they will disagree and tell you how long they think it will really take. Or, if they do, they will quickly shut down when you push back.
Furthermore, people are notoriously bad at estimating how long it will take to complete their own tasks, you included. So, we’re in no position to tell anyone else how long their tasks will take. Yet we continually do just that. And when jobs do take longer than we expect, our people often end up working overtime to complete them, knowing they won’t get credit for the extra hours they’re putting in, because they don’t want their competence called into question by admitting how long things really took. Honestly, it’s hard to imagine a less motivating situation. Don’t worry, it gets worse.
In my experience, leaders are most likely to use a phrase like this when asking a team member to complete something on short notice, usually when evening or weekend work is required. It’s as though we are subconsciously trying to assuage our own guilt by downplaying the time the job will take. While we might make ourselves feel a modicum less guilty in the short-term, we end up making an already bad situation even worse for the employee by trivializing the time and effort they’re about to invest in our deliverable.
Tackling the phrase “This shouldn’t take that long” is all about dialogue over dictation
Finally, the dynamic created by using a phrase like “this shouldn’t take that long” can deprive leaders of important feedback from employees. For example, if an employee walks you through their understanding of what is required and how they plan to go about doing it, you may realize that they misunderstood the deliverable or the level of polish that’s needed, which you can then correct. Or, you might have some valuable coaching to offer on how the task could be completed more efficiently. Or, you may even realize that your estimate was simply too low, allowing you to then decide if you want to change the scope of the task, pull in someone more experienced to do it, assign others to help, and so on. If the employee doesn’t feel comfortable speaking up about the assignment and why they don’t think your “shouldn’t take long” estimate is accurate, these options are lost in the ether.
Do This Instead
If we can’t tell an employee how long we think a task will take, what can we do? Don’t leaders still need to be able to have input on how their team member’s time is spent and prioritized? Absolutely. But we are leading knowledge workers, not 1960s assembly line laborers, meaning task assignments should be more dialogue than dictation. So instead of jumping to the deliverable and timeline, start by sharing with your employee the purpose of the task — what problem are you trying to solve? This will give them helpful context, and in some cases they may have a better idea on how to address the problem than what you have planned. Once they understand the purpose, then you can explain the deliverable you envision, giving them a chance to ask clarifying questions and talk about their planned approach.
Finally, when it comes to timeframes, you can take a page from the world of agile software delivery and do one of these two things:
- Ask how long it will take. Ask your team member how long they think it will take and (this is the important part) assume they know what they’re talking about. Do not attempt to convince them that their estimate is wrong, regardless of how well you think you understand what’s required to complete the work. Again, your job here is to 1) make sure they correctly understand the deliverable, and 2) provide suggestions on how they can complete it as efficiently as possible. Once you’re confident you’ve done this, you should accept their estimate and proceed accordingly.
- Set a time budget. Your second option is to determine how much of your employee’s time you are willing to invest in the deliverable, and set that as the maximum amount of time they should spend on it. Then be prepared to accept whatever they can produce in that timeframe. Of course, if it does not meet your needs once they deliver, you can decide at that point if it makes sense to extend the timeframe, secure additional assistance, or call the task off entirely.
By doing these things instead of pre-judging how long a task “should” take, managers can focus on helping team members prioritize their time, coaching them on more efficient ways to complete their work, and can better understand how their team’s bandwidth is being spent. It will also foster an environment where people know they can speak up and be listened to without judgment.
How Ericsson is Fostering a Speak-up Environment
As part of a company-wide cultural transformation program launched last year called Ericsson on the Move, Ericsson has challenged its leaders to “listen up” more and create an environment where employees feel more comfortable speaking up. This is being driven by hands-on workshops attended by over 6,000 leaders so far, and supported by an online community forum where leaders are encouraged to experiment with different practices to create an environment of open communication on their teams.
For example, one experiment resulted in the standard “Q&A” portion of all meetings to be renamed to “Speak Up”. This trivial-seeming change has markedly increased the number of people that come forward to ask questions and share thoughts in meetings and presentations, especially in sessions led by very senior leaders. To date, several hundred “speak up” experiments have been run by leaders in North America alone, resulting in dozens of new practices being adopted across the organization.
Why such an emphasis on speak-up as one of the pillars of our cultural transformation? Tomas Ageskog, Head of Digital Services for Ericsson North America, explains: “A speak-up culture in a company releases the full and true diversity of competence and experience across the company. I find that many times the introverts or shy team members who typically wouldn’t make themselves heard have the best ideas.”
But you don’t need a company-wide cultural transformation program to encourage employees to communicate more openly. As their leader, you have the most influence over your teams’ work environment and employee experience. So, ask yourself: What things do you do to foster a speak-up environment for your teams? What things should you do? And what things have you seen that can shut down employee dialogue?
Originally published in Ericsson.com/blog.
About the Author
Dan Kerber is Vice President of Operations for Ericsson Digital Services in North America. He writes about strategy, careers, and leadership with an emphasis on empathy and authenticity. To see the content he’s reading (and sometimes writing), follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Read Dan’s earlier blogs on best practices for managing teams remotely, and the importance of empathy and mental health.
