In business we see leaders who are NOT accepting of being challenged. Leaders must first show they are open and humble in accepting this.
I recently met with a Swede with extensive experience living and working in Asia who noted how a Swedish company had run into cultural differences working with colleagues in China. A meeting was held on video, with that person working in the team based in China at that time, whilst the Swedish leader from head office was talking to the team in China from Stockholm. At the end of the meeting, as apparently is common in Sweden, the person leading the meeting simply asked “does everyone agree?” and took their silence, their “no response” as being a unanimous “yes” at the end of the meeting. After the meeting though, everyone turned to the Swede in the team in China and said “what do we do now? we don’t agree with what he was proposing at all!”.
The story is about how different business cultures interact, particularly around challenging authority figures.
Now, to this idea:
When someone challenges you in a meeting, they are not insulting you. They are testing your hypothesis.
We should reframe meetings as a place for mutual hypothesis testing – a place where we are collectively in search of the best idea. It’s important to remove the stigma of challenge, descent and failure.
Cultures where employees understand the value of diversity of thought are the ones where innovation thrives.
#RebelIdeas
Matthew Syed on LinkedIn
Linked to this, one real misunderstanding around the science of Covid vaccines has been around the scientific method in general. When pressed for definitive answers, scientists would rarely give one, and for good reason. Very, very few things in science are fixed and universal, most are “the best answer we have so far” and with the scientific community always seeking to learn and improve. A key part of this is that, in science, it is absolutely core to scientific progress and advancement for people to both seek to be challenged and to embrace it, for example through such things as publishing papers and requesting reviews from peers.
In business, however, all too often we see leaders who are NOT accepting of being challenged, so whilst Matthew’s idea to declare meetings as a place for “mutual hypothesis testing” is a great one, leaders must first show they are open and humble in accepting this.
When I lead businesses in the past one of my favourite phrases to use when asked for my advice was “I don’t know, what do you think?”. I would deliver this in a way that made clear that I did have an idea, but that first I really and truly was curious to learn the ideas of the person posing the question. I found that such an open and humble approach paid huge dividends in people always feeling they could speak freely. When you create such an environment, and only then, I believe that Matthew’s reframe is a powerful one to apply.
Oh, and my core article around this shift in leadership to being not only Open and Humble but also Brave and Hungry: “Are you ready for #OpenLeadership?“