The Elephant In the Room
Introduction - your team's path to true openness and honesty
So what is the ‘elephant in the room’? It’s a phrase which may not be known in different cultures, so let us share our definition. The ‘elephant in the room’ is something so large and obvious to all, that everyone can see, but no-one says anything. This can be because no-one is brave enough to articulate it in front of colleagues – real honesty is required. Sometimes this is because people think the subject so obvious that in asking about it they may expose themselves to ridicule. Through talking about the elephant, you can encourage a spirit of openness and honesty within your team, this is vital to achieving high-performance. A transparent and honest culture at work is an essential component to allow open and honest communication. Glassdoor suggest that there a multiple benefits of such transparency allowing the largest of elephants to be revealed.
Why is finding elephants important?
In our experience, there are always many ‘elephants’ in any organisation. If you want openness, honesty and a creative culture, it is better to start getting the elephants ‘out in the open’. This way you can really drive team momentum and cohesion. Once you have started allowing ‘elephants’ to be released don’t be surprised once the gates have opened you may have a herd of elephants trampling through your virtual environment. But be brave, the processes and outcomes will be truly liberating, once the spirit of openness is unleashed you can truly start to drive performance!
One pre-condition of this exercise is that non-judgemental safe spaces have been created so that no-one is afraid of speaking out or of asking an unpopular question. In creating these safe spaces you will engender openness and honesty within your team.
In our experience, this takes patience and understanding but allowing space in each meeting, where anyone can say anything, should eventually lead to people volunteering to ask questions.
Sometimes teams can end up falling into the trap of creating atmospheres or behaviours that encourage groupthink and therefore discourage creativity. No-one wants to ask ‘that’ stupid question, but perhaps it’s the one question that would liberate the team and enable them to be truly high performing.
How to set up correctly
To help in this journey, you could elicit those challenging conversations or topics in your one-to-one sessions with your team members and actively encourage them to share these at a team meeting. Whilst this might initially seem false, it will help others come forward with their questions. If you are taking this approach, make sure you publicly reward people who are brave enough to ask the first few challenging questions, or reveal their inner-most concerns. Remember, it takes a lot of courage to speak out first, but your drive to openness and honesty within your team means you need some brave ‘early-adopters’!
In a physical environment, The School of Babel uses real (toy) elephants, so that asking people to talk about ‘elephants in the room’ becomes a bit more fun. We have even had an ‘elephant’ on the walls in some of our meeting rooms to encourage a spirit of openness.
With a virtual environment, you clearly can’t have a physical toy present (although we have in the past sent mini toy elephants to our teams so they can wave them at the camera when they want to say something which needs some courage), but we are sure you can think of your own creative ways of making your virtual elephants come to life. The path to true openness and honesty (or shameless honesty) can be difficult to navigate, but when your team achieves this, they will be unstoppable.