Jim - article draft

2023/03/18 First Rough Draft

The Cascading Costly Impacts of Individual & Team “Withholds” and Silence

On a Business Unit of 16 leaders and 87 people.

The Vital Statistics Survey measures behavioral data based on team members’ perceptions of the behaviors observed in the team. They are used to evaluate a team's effectiveness, the Cost of Lost Productivity, and the leader’s effectiveness with their team.

Vivo Team has identified six key indicators that contribute to team effectiveness: communication, accountability, interactive feedback, structures, emotional intelligence, and cohesion. A Team Effectiveness score is derived from the results of the leader’s and team members' responses to the statements in these key indicators.

For the purposes of this topic I have selected three of the nine statements in ONE key indicator - Communication - to illustrate impacts of “withholds” or team members not speaking up.

The graph below gives an indication of the behavioral dynamics in action in these 16 teams of 87 people in total. That’s a total of 261 different perceptions by people of their teams in three statements.

Communication Indicator

Diagnosis

Statement 1. People on my team speak up when they have a disagreement about a decision.

48% of the team members think their team needs to improve this behavior(soft skill?)
52% think their team is doing well
73% of the 16 leaders think the team needs to improve

Statement 5. My team members ask people who are being silent in a discussion to contribute and share their views.

71% of the 71 team members think their team needs to improve this behavior
29% think their team is doing well
100% of the 16 leaders think the team needs to improve

Statement 9 - My team members invite and respect dissenting opinions.

48.5% of the team members think they need to improve this behavior
51.9% think the team is doing well
90% of the 16 leaders think the team needs to improve this behavior

Overall there are significant differences how how well people think their team is performing, which indicates, in my experience, a confusing of roles and responsibilities. Analyzing this data, I predict that in this group of 87 people their tendency to “withhold” and/or be silent has a negative effect on their teams’ effectiveness.

The above Vivo Team’s data is inline with what Harvard Business Review reported in an article “. . . that 60% of employees have had a difficult time getting their colleagues to share information, expertise, opinions that is vital to their work.”FN

“Open communication and transparency are the two very valuable characteristics of a positive, healthy work environment - whether virtual or in office. According to Great Place to Work, companies with a high-trust environment, in which people can collaboratively and transparently share knowledge, gain stock returns two to three times higher than the industry average and have 50% lower turnover rates than competitors.”FN

It - open communication - might be considered to be one of a company’s most powerful competitive intelligence (all of the knowledge, skills - both technical and soft skills - and experience of all people) and competitive advantage (the ability and willingness to apply the combined knowledge, skills and experience.) These two elements combined help the company to compete more successfully in the marketplace.

Lets explore what happens when team members are silent and/or withholding and do not possess the ability and/or willingness to break the silence.

Vivo Team reviews the results of the Vital Statistics Report with each leader.

The leader is then encouraged to share the VSR with team members with their team members. People often report ‘...that they were withholding their concerns, because they didn’t get a chance to air them or did not know how to speak up for fear of being ‘put down’ in meetings.” The leaders were perplexed because they did not know how to break the silence.

If the withholding and silence persists . . .

After larger meetings people go into smaller, informal “shadow networks” in which people talk about the stuff that is not being talked about within the meetings.

Over time, smaller “Factions” start forming which can have a positive or negative effect on performance. Those factions start bonding together in common beefs, “agendas or perceptions about what is . . . and what isn’t.”

These dynamics, in turn, tend to make decision-making messy because the various “shadow networks” and “factions,” have different informal decision frameworks based on the “beef”, “agenda” or perceptions about what is . . . .and what isn’t.

As a result, one can come away from a meeting thinking: “I think we made a decision, but i’m not sure we actually did.” Which is indicative of low scores in the:

Communication Statement 2 in the graph above:

People on my team often act on facts, rather than assumptions, about what others are saying or doing.

65% of the team members think their team needs to improve this behavior
35% think their team is doing well
91% of the 16 leaders think the team needs to improve

Obviously if people are withholding and/or silence the facts and assumptions are neither articulated nor understood and therefore, in essence, people are flying blind.

The impacts of withholding and silence?
People tend to focus on the symptoms rather than the root causes of issues. Why? Beause identified symptoms, in the absence of facts and clarified assumptions, are small, easily focused on, and seemingly more easily resolved. Unfortunately the unaddressed root causes can come back to bite you.

Perhaps that’s part of what was going on in the failed banks these days or in the Boeing 737Max malfunctions? We know that happened in NASA’s Challenger blowup.

The BIG PARADOX …

Now to the Business Impacts of Silence and Withholding on Your Company

Panoptu recently surveyed 1001 US employees across a variety of industries to learn as much as they could about their experiences using (and having to cope without) their coworkers’ institutional knowledge. What they found is that companies suffer from unshared knowledge in two ways: first, by making employee onboarding less efficient, and second, in making day-to-day work less productive.FN

The results are staggering: