Undiscussables help people avoid short-term conflicts, threats, and embarrassment. But they also short-circuit the inquiries and challenges essential to productive feedback. This not only impedes performance and team learning but can have a disastrous effect on the organization at large.
Most teams suffer from undiscussables in four broad categories. They overlap, with two being more or less conscious behaviors and two less so. Instead of trying to fix all of them at once, take a sequential approach. Start with the first of the two more conscious undiscussables, knowing but not daring to say, because you can impact this immediately and get comparatively easy wins. (We will tackle the other “conscious undiscussable,” saying but not meaning, in Part 2 of this series.)
Go through this checklist to see if your team is struggling to be productively honest with each other:
Undiscussables are most commonly associated with risky or difficult questions, suggestions, and criticisms that are self-censored: people may joke about them or discuss them confidentially, but never openly. Views are left unspoken when people fear the consequences of speaking up, whether the risk is real or imagined. Often, the main driver of this fear is team leaders with an emotional, erratic management style and a reputation for responding harshly when people disagree with them. This makes team members feel unsafe.
Acknowledging your own responsibility for team members “knowing but not daring to say” is a powerful way to unblock the discussion and set an expectation of candor. This will help them realize that what they gain will outweigh the pain, generating momentum to move from above-the-surface undiscussables to deeper ones that usually require facilitation or external intervention (see Part 4 of this series). This will enable you, as team leader, to identify the dominant undiscussables in your team and kick-start the conversations necessary to bring them to light.
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