When a TEAM full of capable adults tells me they need to communicate more openly

One of the first questions I ask delegates at our Team Coaching Workshops is: “What do you really want to change?” And more often than not, this ask surfaces promptly: “We need to communicate more openly with each other.”

Full transparency: I’ve come to treat that sentence with some healthy suspicion. Not because it’s untrue, but because, in my experience, the teams communicating it are usually already great communicators. So, what’s the deal, I hear you say?

I experience most delegates as articulate, rhetorically well-versed and self-aware people who, if anything (like myself), sometimes communicate more than they strictly need to.

So when a room full of capable adults tells me their problem is communication, I salivate. Why? Because it’s time to get really curious and start opening the doors behind the doors.

I’ve come to view the “We need to communicate better” sentence as a bit of a United Nations Aid convoy when it comes to the intricate world of office and team politics. In other words, it’s the diplomatic option, the one we can all say out loud without pointing at anyone or naming anything uncomfortable.

It is, more often than not, what a team says instead of the thing it won’t.

Bubbling away under this, in my experience, are several interrelated topics (spoiler alert: these are solvable). But no worries, this is not going to turn into a PhD thesis or some clickbait for my services.

First, the BIG P. As in PURPOSE (or the absence of a shared one). Sounds like an absolute given; unfortunately, it’s mostly not. Team Purpose, the keystone that locks all the other strategic stones in place, tends to be as elusive as Voldemort in a room full of Hogwarts students.

Here’s a challenge for you. Ask your team members to privately write down what the team purpose is. I’ll wager a bet with you here (50 press-ups at 7am for 2 weeks): you’ll get nearly as many answers as there are people in the room. Colleagues, lacking an understanding of any cohesive team purpose, will inevitably experience that misalignment as a communication problem. It isn’t. It is a direction problem wearing a communication costume.

The second, in my experience, is often competence in Relationship Management. Sounds a tad Facebook-y, right? It’s not, though. I experience workshop delegates arriving more self-aware and much more willing to speak openly than they were a decade ago, which is great progress. But willingness and skill are not the same thing. Plenty of confident professionals have never been shown how to navigate challenging workplace relationships; how to disagree without rupture, how to raise the awkward thing before it hardens. Confidence without method tends to produce much more noise than resolution.

The third is the one nobody writes on the flip chart: the ordinary human undercurrent. And until the time comes when the BOTS replace us all at work, this will never go away. Yes, those resentments never aired, the small jealousies, the quiet competition, the sense that someone else took the credit (we’ve all been there).

We politely file it under “office politics,” and every team carries some, because every team is made of people. This is the thing teams rarely say out loud, and the longer it stays unsaid, the louder it gets.

None of which makes communication irrelevant, rather the opposite. But notice the shift. These teams do not communicate too little; they communicate plenty. What they lack is the ability to communicate about the things that count, and a method for doing it well. That is a different challenge, and it responds to a different kind of help.

Another disclaimer: the perfectly harmonious team, everyone aligned and endlessly agreeable, does not and will not ever exist (and I am not sure I would trust it if it did). Harmony as the absence of tension is usually conflict that has learned to keep quiet. The aim is not to remove friction, but to give people enough clarity, skill and confidence to put it to work.

So when a team tells me it has a communication problem, I take the diagnosis seriously and then set it gently aside. The questions I find more useful are quieter ones. How would each of you describe what this team is here to do? How do you handle one another when it gets difficult? And what can everyone in the room feel, but no one will say out loud?