In their August 2024 white paper – Facilitating Constructive Challenge: Concrete ways leaders recruit (and repress) speaking up; Celia Moore, Kate Coombs, Minjie Gao and Juliane Schittek of Imperial College Business School tell us not only about the risks and consequences of not speaking up, but also give us some great insights into how teams can cultivate the practice of speaking up; of engaging in constructive challenge.
In their words, “when leaders fail to encourage their teams to tell them what they need to know – especially when that information might be challenging, critical, or costly to address – the consequences can be dire.”
In their research, they recorded and analysed 43 meetings, representing more than 30 hours of transcript data. They coded every turn of talk across the transcripts for the strategies leaders used, and whether their team members’ responses broadly challenged or supported them. And they reported five of the most important recommendations about the actions leaders can take to elicit challenge from their teams in real time.
1. Ask the right questions
Least effective questions to solicit challenge were open-ended questions such as “Anyone else want to contribute?” And the most effective questions (to elicit challenge) were questions that make team members accountable or build challenge into the question, such as “So, what do you want to propose as an alternative?” and “Can you foresee some of the challenges? What do you think would be difficult in terms of implementation?”
2. Acknowledge challenge as legitimate
Leaders who were concrete in acknowledging how welcome and useful a team member’s challenge was, encouraged more dissent. For example “Uniquely stated challenge there, [name] So, you would say that we would be further enhancing a dysfunctional product.” Or “I think that’s a fair challenge.”
3. Keep it interactive, fun & friendly
Because individuals find challenge hard, leaders need to make it as easy as possible for team members to do it. Individuals find it easier to challenge if they aren’t the first one to do it; they are much more likely to join in if several others are already participating. Challenge was significantly correlated with the proportion of the team members who spoke. In teams with the most challenge, more than three quarters of team members spoke, compared to teams with no challenge, where fewer than two thirds did. And team leaders whose discussions with their teams involved more turns of talk unrelated to the task at hand – cracking jokes and chatting – had a higher proportion of challenge from their team members in the meeting.
4. Give it time
The longer the meeting the more opportunity leaders had to recruit challenge, and the more opportunities team members had to speak up. If the leader’s goal is to elicit challenge from employees, then allowing sufficient time for the discussion is crucial.
5. Create accountability
Though individuals may prefer not to challenge their team leaders, they also don’t want to feel responsible for bad decisions or strategies. Team leaders who found ways to make team members accountable for their viewpoints elicited more challenge. The most effective strategies emphasise accountability. For instance, “We have to come up with one, sorry. That’s the objective here. So, between the two?” Or “So, you’re saying your preference is the crypto one?”
The data suggest that fostering a culture of constructive challenge requires leaders to reduce uncertainty among their team members. In general, individuals want to do what their bosses ask of them, so the more directly leaders ask for and acknowledge challenge, the more likely it is that they will receive it. Really emphasising that you want to hear their dissent, and that it is critically important and worthwhile.
