Saying the quiet part out loud
By Tom Renner
- One minute read - 194 words
“Saying the quiet part out loud” is a phrase I’ve just made up, to describe a method of building alignment on practices within a team. It’s the habit of stating why you are doing things a certain way, even when you would assume it’s obvious.
For example:
“We want to do [obviously moral thing] because we are not evil”
or
“We shouldn’t leave shitty comments in code reviews because we want to build a positive working environment”.
It’s easy to assume your colleagues a) know these things and b) would do them without prompting.
But it’s a form of leadership to state your expectations and beliefs out loud like this. It provides a chance for disagreement and debate by making them public, giving your team the opportunity to challenge your assumptions, or to ask for clarification if their own beliefs don’t align with yours.
It takes confidence in your team to offer your priors up to examination in this manner. But also encourages an open and trusting environment, and a culture o f honest feedback. I’ve noticed colleagues I admire doing this, and I’m trying to incorporate it into my working habits as well.
Reactions collected from around the web using webmentions
Some-Independence864
Agree with this. Surprised it's not been upvoted yet.
Librekrieger
it's a form of leadership to state your expectations and beliefs out loud
One of the best managers I ever had started the group off by spending 90 minutes with a whiteboard eliciting a set of working agreements from the team. He began with two questions: name what has inhibited your work, relationships, and productivity in the past, and then name things that have enhanced those things. From that, we chose the ten that seemed most important and printed the list to hang on the wall. Stuff like "we value each other as people" and "we do not hoard information".
A year later he observed that we had grown to excel in all ten, so we had another meeting and developed a new set of working agreements. Then again a year after that.
That was a fabulous team to work with.