259. Quick Thinks: Task-Focused to People-Focused—A Smarter Way to Communicate

[00:00:00] Matt Abrahams: One of the best ways to be purposeful, respectful, and successful at work is to optimize for spaciousness. My name is Matt Abrahams and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to this Quick Thinks episode of Think Fast Talk smart, the podcast. I had a really insightful and inspiring conversation with Megan Reitz. Megan is an associate fellow at University of Oxford Saïd Business School and an adjunct professor of leadership and dialogue at Hult International Business School. She shared so many valuable skills and approaches that we couldn't fit them all into one episode. So here comes more practical, tactical tips on how to be more spacious and mindful in your communication.

[00:00:44] You discuss doing mode and spacious mode. Can you help us understand what these are and why they're important? And how can we help people take the more specious thinking approach to interaction? 

[00:00:57] Megan Reitz: So this is my very recent research on a topic that I call spaciousness. And the reason why we started looking into it is if, you know, after a decade probably of working, at least a decade of working, with organizations trying to develop psychological safety and trying to change their habits, if there is one, might I say, excuse that I hear the most often for cultures not changing it's when people say to me, we're just so busy at the moment. We've just got so much on, I haven't quite had time to do what I said I would. So we decided to explore exactly what was going on with this. And the way we describe it in our research, we have two modes of attention, two ways of, if you like, of encountering the world and other people around us. We have what we call the doing mode. And in the doing mode we are focused on the achievement of a goal or a target.

[00:01:54] So it's instrumental, tends to be quite short term. It's quite a narrow attention. We are interested in control and also in predictability. And we often see others and the world around us as separate to us and things that can be manipulated in order to achieve a goal. That mode, the doing mode, is utterly vital for survival. Okay? So we couldn't live without it. We do have another mode, and we call that the spacious mode. And when we're in a spacious mode, our attention is expansive. It's unhurried. We are not trying to seize the, what should I do? What must I do? What sense does this make? What will happen? What's the action steps? We are encountering in the present moment, others in the environment around us, expansively.

[00:02:50] So it tends to be the area where we gain insight. We tend to see relationships and interdependence and flow and change and emergence when we're in the spacious mode. So obviously depending on the mode of attention we have, we make very different choices. And the issue that we are seeing particularly in the last few years is that the doing mode has muscled in and taken over pretty much most of our organizational and indeed our personal worlds. So if you think about types of organizations, that type of conversations that organizations can have, we need to talk about task, but we also need to talk about purpose and meaning. We need to talk about learning and reflection. We need to talk about ideas and creativity, and we also need to talk in a way that develops and builds our relationship.

[00:03:50] But the task bit of that seems to have slightly suffocated some of the other aspects. That's what we are interested in. We are interested in how do you create the space inside, frankly, pathologically busy work systems to have the conversations that matter. And that's the link with psychological safety is that there is, that sometimes we just get so busy we can't pause and turn our attention to the other to ensure that we create an environment where we can really speak up and be heard in the first place. So there's no point in talking to people about habits and techniques around psychological safety if they're just caught up in the doing mode and they can't even see it. So that's our latest research. And I have to say, it's probably the, oh, most interesting and challenging research I think I've ever done in my life. 

[00:04:47] Matt Abrahams: It is very interesting. Several things I wanna dive into. The first thing that struck me is it sounds like we need to develop an ability to be agile and fluid to move into the different modes, the doing mode versus the spacious mode. Being in any one without being able to move into the other, I think probably leads to problems. Clearly, we overindex on the doing mode. My life is full of doing, and yet the most rich, meaningful and important conversations happen when I'm in a more spacious mode. And it strikes me also that when we talk about our own communication, the way we are in the world, that we have to be able to be fluid in response to who it is we're speaking to. So if I'm talking to my boss, I have to agilely adapt, and then if somebody is talking to me and I'm in a position of power status, I have to adjust and adapt as well. How do you help people build this agility and ability to flow into one place versus the other? 

[00:05:45] Megan Reitz: So the first thing I would say is just being able to give a language to the spacious mode. And that's actually one of the key objectives, I suppose, of our research is in a doing mode and in a doing world, we don't have much time for spaciousness. The first thing is to sort of see the irony of that and be able to lift ourselves and just value and see and have a credible language around the spacious mode. So that's what we're trying to do. Now, once we actually talk about how do we create that capacity to choose, one of the things, key things, is safety. And again, this links to the psychological safety in our research on speaking truth to power. When we are fearful and anxious, our perspective and our attention narrows. Yeah, we, it, we become very focused on ourself as opposed to other as well.

[00:06:41] We are in survival mode, so the more that we can do in our systems and our teams to recognize psychological safety and to develop and build that, the more likelihood is that we'll be able to move into a spacious mode when we need to, as in when we need to innovate and relate with one another. And dare I say it, have fun at work, that safety is a really important part. But the other thing that I would probably mention is people. So the people we hang around with have such an influence on the attention that we then pay to one another and to the world. And one of the much talked about problems of social media is that we tend to go into these silos of very narrow thinking, same thinking groups that increases the way that we polarize issues and that we can discuss around issues. So I also do quite a bit of work asking people to notice who they spend time with.

[00:07:46] And of course I think there's a saying that says you can't choose your family. Well you often can't choose members of your work colleagues as well, but you do have some influence. So if you are managing a team, for example, and you are thinking, gosh, we are rushed off our feet and we're all, we've got our head in the sand, who can I bring in, probably from outside, that can just be that sort of person that enables us to take our breath, pause a second, and look around, and then make wise choices rather than just busy, sometimes foolish, choices. So lots of stuff around safety, lots of stuff around who we spend time with. And I guess the other one I'd probably pick out is, funnily enough, conflict.

[00:08:39] So how can we bring in dissonance? How can we surprise ourselves and others so that we are woken up from the doing mode? And that we are forced to go, oh wait a second. Good point. Why are we doing this? Or, hang on, let me just see things from the customer side. Again, it's a kind of a dig in the ribs to say, wake up. Stop being a busy fool. Look up and look around, reconnect with what you're actually trying to do, your bigger and wider intention. And then when we've got that set on the compass, so to speak, let's go again. So those are just some of the things that are coming out at the moment, but this research is very much, um, work in action right now.

[00:09:23] Matt Abrahams: Well, and I appreciate the explication you gave and the actionable things we can do. We have to develop a language around it, and that language can be something that's co-created within the organization or relationship that we have that gives us the opportunity to have these conversations. We have to build psychological safety, which I'd like to address next, and then we have to think about the people who are around us and how they can help snap us out of our habits and our way of acting. One way that I have seen that works really well, given that we don't have a lot of control sometimes over who we are working with. Is to assign different roles. So for this task, for this meeting, for this project, you are in the role of devil's advocate where your job is to question, even though the person might be somebody I work with a lot and have similar attitudes and approaches with, by virtue of giving them that role, it can give you that little dig in the ribs, as you've talked about.

[00:10:17] So we've had the pleasure of speaking with Amy Edmondson. She's well known for having defined the notion of psychological safety. I am curious if you can provide for us some specific guidance on how, not only someone in a position of power, a leader, the head of the family, whatever, can establish psychological safety, but how can those who are not in power also encourage and support it? What are some things we can do to really build that psychological safety? 

[00:10:43] Megan Reitz: I think I'll answer that by saying, what do I see go wrong a lot of the time over the last few years? And therefore what is really important here? And the very first thing I would say, and I think Amy would probably agree on this being a problem, is people's misunderstanding of what psychological safety really means. And sometimes it's, I encounter it being thought of as being nice, as being lovely, as being in agreement, as comfortable. Whereas to me, psychological safety is our capacity to have the really difficult conversations that we have to have if we are to flourish. So it can be far from comfortable. So if you go into an organization and you see it all very polite and comfortable, I would say it's unlikely to be psychologically safe.

[00:11:32] So the very first thing is, you know, understanding that psychological safety is about our ability to challenge one another and give feedback to one another openly and honestly. One of the first things I find in organizations that are trying to develop, you know, speaking up and speak up cultures, they make the mistake of looking at the people that aren't speaking up and then mainly trying to fix them. So we try and fix the people that are silent rather than noticing the impact that we have within the system. So I spend a lot of time with wherever you are on the hierarchy, it really doesn't matter, but how you show up affects the voices of the people around you.

[00:12:15] And I just wanna sort of pause there and just underline that because it's actually quite profound when you think about it and think about it from a family, community, and workplace orientation. How you show up affects the voices of the people around you, and I think that's tremendously important for people to really notice and then have the capacity to view and reflect on how they are showing up in the impact that they have on others. I'll just mention two other things. One, I would say we have surveyed about 24,000, I think, employees globally now. And one of the clearest patterns that we have is something called superiority illusion. Superiority illusion is when we all think that we listen quite well. It's just everybody else that needs to get better. All of us tend to be quite generous when we assess our own listening skills.

[00:13:17] And the reason for that, of course, is that we assess ourselves on our intent to listen and we assess other people that are on their behavior and there is a gap, to say the least. And so the other thing when we're developing psychological safety for others, for ourselves, is just to be able to deeply reflect on whether we really are as good a listener as we think we are. And to deeply reflect on what does it mean to give somebody a really good listening to, and how often do we actually do that? And when we've been listened to deeply, it's often really quite profound. And the final thing I would say, and I've mentioned it briefly, is the response. Changing culture and changing conversational habits, one of the key most important areas for doing that is in our response to when people speak up. And as I said, when we speak up, and particularly if it's challenging or it goes against the grain, we might do it a bit clumsily.

[00:14:24] We might not speak up very well. And so the thing that happens all the time, and Amy and I actually wrote an article specifically on this in Harvard Business Review, when that happens, rather than the listener understanding the courage that has gone into what's happened and appreciating the attempt to speak up. They often respond in a way that just completely closes that person down, and they don't then speak up again. Similarly, the person that speaks up and gets that response doesn't really reflect fully and widely on what they've learned and try again. So I really would love us to be able to learn and reflect from these mistakes, as Amy would call them, intelligent failures, actually. When we are trying to improve our ability to speak up and listen up, of course we're gonna make mistakes. So we've gotta expect them and then we've gotta learn from them. Those are intelligent failures. 

[00:15:20] Matt Abrahams: So the components of psychological safety first start with the willingness to have the hard conversations, the willingness to engage in that way. It's thinking about how we show up in terms of really being present and giving ourselves space to have those conversations and creating space for others. Then this notion of the superiority illusion, that we're not as good as we think we are at these things and we need to work at them. And really taking the time to listen deeply and actively, and that's not just nodding your head and going uh-huh, uh-huh. We've had lots of conversations with experts on listening. It's about paraphrasing. It's about acknowledging the emotion that's in the moment, and then making sure that when somebody does speak up or does contribute something that's vulnerable and exposed, that we really respond in a way that's respectful and encourages it moving forward. Again, a lot of this requires self-awareness.

[00:16:16] Well, there you have it. As promised, lots of useful insights from Megan Reitz, including practical, tactical ideas to help you and your team be more present and productive. I hope each of you explores ways to help you be more mindful to maximize your mutuality.

[00:16:35] Thank you for joining us for another episode of Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast. To learn more about psychological safety, listen to our episode 132 with Amy Edmondson and to learn more about leadership, listen to episode 148 with Irv Grouse. This episode was produced by Katherine Reed, Ryan Campos, and me, Matt Abraham. Our music is from Floyd Wonder. With special thanks to Podium Podcast Company. Please find us on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe and rate us. Also follow us on LinkedIn, TikTok, and Instagram. And check out fastersmarter.io for deep dive videos, English language learning content, and our newsletter. Please consider our premium offering for extended Deep Thinks episodes, AMAs, Ask Matt Anything, and much more at fastersmarter.io/premium.