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What’s wrong with the way most leaders speak to their teams? How can a leader encourage their employees to speak up?
Leadership Is Language says that modern corporations have a problem with their employees: they’re not speaking up. This is due to outdated and discouraging language that leaders use to communicate with their teams, and it needs to be updated.
Read below for a brief overview of Leadership Is Language by L. David Marquet.
Leadership Is Language by L. David Marquet
Why do the decisions that leaders make go unquestioned? What causes workers to stay silent when they have concerns? In Leadership Is Language, L. David Marquet argues that the reason workers hesitate to speak up lies in the language that leaders use to communicate to their team—language that’s outdated and that discourages workers from voicing their opinions. Marquet provides a new approach to leadership focused on collaboration and experimentation that empowers workers to play an active role in decision-making. By adopting Marquet’s communication strategies, you can transform your organization into an adaptive, innovative, and high-performing workplace led by engaged and passionate workers.
Marquet is a former United States Navy captain and bestselling author of Turn the Ship Around!. He commanded the USS Santa Fe, one of the lowest-performing nuclear submarines in its fleet, and transformed it into one of the best. He now coaches his leadership model called Intent-Based Leadership.
The Problem: The Language That Leaders Use Is Outdated
According to Marquet, the way many leaders speak and many modern workplaces function is based on the leadership model developed during the early 1900s—one that prioritized maximizing output from workers and maintaining strict control over all decisions and operations. In the fast-evolving digital age, however, organizations achieve success not through efficiency, but through adaptability, learning, and innovation. This means that rather than silence workers, leaders must now use language that encourages them to speak up.
The Solution: Encourage Collaboration and Experimentation
In today’s business environment, the outdated work model prevents organizations from achieving their potential. Marquet advises that companies should instead encourage collaboration during the brainstorming part of a project and experimentation during the execution part of a project. This means that leaders should use language differently to get employees to be more proactive, thoughtful decision-makers. Doing this can foster innovation, prevent disasters, and enhance work performance.
Since workers tend to default to executing, you must purposefully promote collaboration and experimentation. You can do this by breaking down obstacles that prevent people from voicing their diverse ideas and perspectives. Let’s look at four steps for structuring more collaboration and experimentation into your team’s workflow.
1. Build Relationships and Break Down Barriers
Before you can have a collaborative session with your team, you must foster an environment of psychological safety where people feel comfortable sharing their perspectives. While many workplaces encourage workers to take the initiative to participate, Marquet argues that it should be the leader’s responsibility to involve them. This is because workplace hierarchies and the fear of jeopardizing relationships can create barriers to participation. By breaking down these barriers and fostering comfort and strong relationships, your team is more likely to think and perform well.
2. Launch Into Collaboration and Generate a Hypothesis
Once you’ve lowered the barrier to participation, you can have your first collaboration session to weigh your options and decide upon a course of action. Let’s look at how to communicate in ways that encourage open participation during these sessions.
Normalize Pause Points and Manage Time Proactively
As we discussed earlier, people tend to get stuck in execution mode because it takes less effort to plow on with a task mindlessly. To prevent your team from getting stuck in execution mode, introduce the concept of pause points when you meet for collaboration. Make it easier for your team to call a pause point by deciding on a name for them (like a “mindful moment”) or schedule them in advance. This creates more opportunities to adjust your course of action and make new decisions rather than getting stuck with the first decision you and your team made.
To lower the barrier for calling timeouts, Marquet suggests using language that conveys vulnerability instead of certainty, such as, “I’m not sure if this is the best approach given that a couple of team members are absent today. Let’s see what we learn and revisit this decision in four hours.” This allows team members to feel comfortable calling pause points and expressing concerns while they work.
Invite Comfortable and Honest Participation
Once you’ve introduced and encouraged your team to call for pause points if needed, collaborate on brainstorming your options. To do so, ensure that everyone feels comfortable enough to participate. Accomplish this by asking open-ended questions, voting on options before discussing them, and encouraging dissent.
Open-ended questions: Marquet suggests using “how” and “what” questions to avoid implying that one option is better than another. For example, you could ask, “How strongly do you feel about Option A and Option B?”
Vote first: Before anyone shares their thoughts on which option seems best, encourage honesty by having everyone vote on the options first. This prevents biases that commonly affect people’s opinions, such as giving more weight to the first option they hear. Marquet suggests using methods like probability cards or a fist-to-five voting method. Probability cards involve each member voting with a card with numbers like 1 or 80 or 99, where 1 indicates strong disagreement and 99 indicates strong agreement. The fist-to-five method involves showing agreement using their fingers, with a closed fist meaning strong disagreement and five fingers meaning strong agreement.
Encourage dissent: Remind your team that to generate better solutions, they should be curious and open to different ideas and perspectives. Get your team comfortable with dissent, for instance, by having members play devil’s advocate. Marquet also recommends encouraging dissent over consensus when contemplating the best course of action. This is because people tend to try to agree with one another, which can cause you and your team to lose valuable insights and innovative ideas.
Decide on a Hypothesis to Test
Once you’ve brainstormed ideas, your team must decide on a course of action to take. Marquet suggests you treat your decision like a hypothesis—an assumption to test—rather than as something that’s fixed and unable to be changed. This mindset is more flexible and allows you to pivot to new directions if needed.
When selecting a hypothesis, Marquet writes that the final decision should be made by someone other than the person who proposed the idea. People tend to become emotionally invested in their own suggestions and often favor their ideas over others’ ideas. To avoid this, Marquet suggests that team members decide on the hypothesis to test while the leader has the final say to approve or reject it.
3. Run an Experiment to Test the Hypothesis
Once you’ve decided on a hypothesis, it’s time to dive into experimentation so you can test it out. Marquet doesn’t cover specific techniques on how to execute your experiment, as this will look different for every organization, but he does offer advice on how to make your experiment as effective as possible.
Before your team launches into work, you may find that some members of your team disagree with the decided course of action. In spite of this, you can still encourage everyone to put in their best effort by simply asking that they commit to testing the hypothesis as part of a learning process. Don’t try to convince everyone that the hypothesis is right—you’re simply trying out a course of action and seeing what happens. By trying to convince people, you’d be asking them to change their beliefs. This would discourage them from expressing their unique perspectives.
Additionally, before beginning your experimentation, set a time when you and your team will regroup and analyze the results. By planning a time to review the hypothesis and the experiment, your team can focus completely on carrying out your course of action without constantly questioning their work.
4. Regroup and Reflect
After conducting your experiment, regroup with your team at your preappointed time to reflect on the results. Without deliberate time for reflection, you risk getting stuck with a bad decision or missing out on valuable insights for improvement. In your post-execution collaboration session, Marquet advises you to celebrate the completion of the experiment and encourage reflection.
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Here's what you'll find in our full Leadership Is Language summary:
- Why most leadership language discourages workers from speaking up
- A new approach to leadership that empowers workers to participate
- How to create an adaptive, innovative, and high-performing workplace
