读书笔记 ： How to Talk with Your Team About the Elephant in the Room

 https://hbr.org/2023/01/how-to-talk-with-your-team-about-the-elephant-in-the-room

What Is Framing — and Why Don’t More Leaders Use It?

Framing means defining the issue and setting the container for the conversation. A frame helps people organize their thoughts, feelings, and experiences, and ultimately, allows them to take action on the issue.

Step 1: Identify to yourself what’s impeding progress.

As a leader, your first step is to define what is causing resistance or blocking forward motion. This could be a submerged tension, an inconsistency in action, a difference of opinion, a negative emotion, passive agreement, or an unconscious pattern. In this step, it’s your job to try to identify what’s happening. Ask yourself, what’s at the heart of the matter? What’s not working?

Step 2: Look at the situation with curiosity.

The next step is to open up your understanding of the issue. It helps to imagine that you are an extraterrestrial observing the situation for the first time. You may ask yourself, what do I notice? What possibilities exist besides my ideas about what’s happening? What else could be going on? By giving yourself distance, you can more easily identify other possibilities without becoming emotionally triggered. This step also helps prevent bias because you’re not identified with a point of view, side, or outcome. To begin, start each thought with a “maybe statement.” Maybe … something else could be true.

Step 3: Name what you observe to others, without judgment.

More often than not, something is stuck or undiscussable because it is thought to be threatening, undervalued, or simply wrong. Naming it and holding it without judgment opens up the floor for learning and discussion with those involved. This step requires that you describe your observations about what’s impeding progress (step 1). To do this, you have to hold the possibilities (step 2) as equally valid. This step normally starts with these words: “I notice…”, “I observe…”, “It seems…” or “I’ve heard…”

Step 4: Set an intention with others for learning.

This step helps you, as the leader, create a psychologically safe container for discussing something potentially threatening to others. This is important because research shows that our spontaneous framing in difficult conversions, particularly those characterized by competing views or conflict, tend to be self-protective. Self-protective framing all but precludes the opportunity to learn and improve. When a leader shows their intentions to learn, it makes a productive conversation about various points of view possible. This step can sound like, “I’d like to learn…” or “Help me understand…”

Step 5: Invite reflection and input from others.

Your final step is to now engage others and invite them into the frame — allowing all conversation participants to address a shared reality. This invitation transforms the undiscussable, or stuckness, to an issue that everyone can focus on. This step can be as simple as saying, “What do you think?” or “How do you see it?”