Six questions every leadership team should be asking

By Sandra Oliver, Impact Founder

In the first two insights in this series, we looked at how teams that are overcome by one individual’s perspective can take the first step to return to balance, and some strategies that leaders can use to nurture a more collaborative and positive team dynamic.

Today, we’re looking at the key role leaders play in embodying a more inclusive team approach, and the impact it can have on the whole organizational culture.

Address fear, introduce standards, and hold space

When we’re addressing a dominant perspective in a leadership team, it’s important to remember that if there’s fear in the system, we need to address it directly. People won’t challenge a dominant reality if doing so has consequences. We should make it clear that disagreement, good-faith dissent, and raising concerns aren’t acts of disloyalty, and back up our words with consistent actions.

For example, are people who disagree punished? Mocked? Excluded? Labelled difficult? Talked about afterwards? Or are they taken seriously? Thanked for their perspectives? Encouraged to continue to contribute to the discussions? Culture is shaped in these moments.

It’s also critical to keep in mind that while people can see reality differently, we need to have clear behavioural standards. Unacceptable behaviours such as intimidation, retaliation, chronic undermining, contempt, dishonesty, public humiliation, or using power to silence others, damages the team and can’t be tolerated.

Finally, as leaders, we need to recognize that the leader’s job isn’t to impose their own story, but to hold a larger one. A broader reality can contain multiple perspectives without collapsing into confusion. While acknowledging perspectives, it can also say there are facts we need to examine or interpretations we need to test, bring attention to any pain in the system or behaviour that must change, and determine that there are decisions we still need to make.

This kind of leadership is steadying, helps people think again, and in a senior team, may be the most important intervention, because it helps the system move from certainty back to inquiry.

Take time, pause, and ask

When we feel the team is moving away from getting at the truth and reality is shifting around us, it’s a reminder to pause and ask:

• What are the facts and what are the interpretations?
• Whose view is becoming dominant, and why?
• Who isn’t speaking?
• What are people afraid will happen if they say what they really think?
• What process would help us test reality more fairly?
• What behaviour needs to be named, regardless of the different interpretations?

These leadership team dynamics are often very painful, especially when the relationships carry history, loyalty, money, identity, and power. And these strategies won’t make the situation painless, but they can help us stay oriented.

Because when one person’s reality begins to run the team, the answer isn’t to fight harder for our own version. It’s to build a stronger container for truth.