– Vee Haslam –
Why the elephant in the meeting room holds the key to building trust?
Hmmm do you think we can talk about this?
If we don’t talk about this, where does it go?
Does it disappear?
Or does it accumulate?
And what does this mean for how trusting we feel the space is?
Imagine lots of different unspoken thought bubbles…
I often wonder what sense would be made if we could literally see each other’s thought bubbles at any moment in our meeting environments!
AND, what if we added to that picture, lots of different ‘feeling’ bubbles too!
We would have multiple layers of information to process…
- What we hear spoken or silence
- What other observations of the interaction points us to e.g. body language, eye contact
- What we see that is thought and not shared
- What we see is being felt and not shared
In other words, our more holistic, natural human processing of our experiences.
Perhaps the sharing of the thought and feeling bubbles will damage trust!
My view on this is in the words of Carl Jung, ‘What we resist persists.’
When we feel unsafe to discuss things and it builds up over time through avoidance, this persists. It might be seen on the surface as:
- Moving on with the agenda
- Being surface-level pleasant
- Assuming it will pass
Meanwhile, as humans sharing these spaces together, we can sense that something else is going on.
We don’t actually know what… really!
What we don’t speak about, becomes an ongoing unknown.
And even more than that, the space of the unknown gets filled with what’s often fear-based biased assumptions.
We are left to our own imagination… and the lack of safety felt directly correlates with the trust shared.
What if there was a way that you could flip the narrative?
What if you could focus with intention on new ways of sharing what’s coming up for yourself and the group?
Without judgment… with curiosity… and with compassion?
In a way that opened a sense of relief for all as:
- That chip on the group’s shoulder is lifted.
- The endless merry-go-round of feeling unheard and frustration does not have to just continue…
- You don’t have to take drastic steps to find a new job or restructure your team.
This is absolutely possible!
While it requires a different choice and a willingness to learn new ways of sharing the team space together.
This is not about task clarity or accountability about who does what. This is about being able to sit in the natural human messiness of making sense during uncertain situations together.
Otherwise, the same old results will keep coming back to the meeting room table and the elephants will continue to build under the rug until we can’t ignore it:
- Perhaps culminating into an urgent ‘issue’ needing to be addressed – manifesting through performance indicators deemed unsatisfactorily met?
- Individual performance management approaches?
- Maybe becoming part of the great resignation?
The elephant is a natural part of being human particularly during times of change 😊
In uncertain times, it’s natural for these moments to potentially visit more often.
It’s part of our natural sense-making as humans. Being in unknown territory, we need to make piece together the meaning we are making of what we see, what we feel and what we believe and assume.
We can carry over meaning from the past. We can project our perceptions into the future.
There’s a great deal of thinking and feeling often going on in an elephant moment.
Even though, the overt behaviour might be silence.
And maybe a few avoidance tactics 😊
Given its natural place in our meeting rooms, I am a big believer that we can learn ways to pro-actively sit in and with these moments.
Where we can practice new ways of:
- Exploring what is happening in our thought bubbles together – and learn to be empowered in our own stories.
- Sharing our thought and feeling bubbles with each other as invaluable, insightful shared data.
- Communicating without blame and without judgment.
We can learn skills and practices to share this human space with the intention to deepen our individual and collective understanding.
Enabling each one of us to step into more meaning, purpose and trusting connection together.
May you have a magical workday, every day!
Vee
