People must feel safe to speak up

I remember when I first began in training and development – almost 15 years ago now. I was working for a large confectionery company and in a training room there was a hand written poster with this on it…

“We cannot teach anyone anything. Only allow them to discover it for themselves.”

At first it didn’t really make sense to me but over the years it has become a whole lot clearer.

I’ve realised that people have brilliance in them, we only need to let it out.  The problem is that sometimes people are too scared of the consequences of speaking up in work settings. They feel that by ‘putting their head above the parapet’ they are making a target of themselves and this is stifling creativity, team effectiveness and overall performance.

This recent article about team effectiveness by Google has some interesting findings on that theme. https://www.inc.com/michael-schneider/google-thought-they-knew-how-to-create-the-perfect.html

If you would like to improve team effectiveness, get in touch and see what we can do to help.

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