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Thanks for listening and see you next time. Hi everyone, Welcome to Coaching
Performance and Wellness by a DMX Coaching. I'm your host today, Zamita Jayanti.
Joining us on our show today is coach and author Elaine Lynn Herring.
She's a reformed lawyer who works with individuals and organizations from a variety of backgrounds
across a range of industries to help them enhance their communication, collaboration, and
conflict management skills. Her upcoming book, called Unlearning Silence, is being called
an essential read because of its actionable practical strategies. Elaine has a track record
of coaching professionals globally and is really all about breaking down barriers to give everyone
a voice, essential for anyone, a small or large team. Today,
we're going to dive into the why and how of why we silence ourselves and
how to break that silence, both for ourselves, our colleagues, our families
and friends. Elene, Welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having
me so Lene, I want to start by defining what we're discussing today.
In some ways, it's very simple. We all know what silence is.
We all engage in it regularly, we watch others do so, but we
often don't think about it at a deeper level in terms of how it impacts
who we are and our behaviors, whether that's in a personal or professional context.
So I thought it would be useful for our listeners if I provide an
example from my own life which might be relatable to many of our listeners.
When I worked at pound Heer, a technology company, the culture was very
putarticular. I'm not sure that that culture was by design, it was just
sort of by default in many ways, but there was an environment of what
I call sort of false transparency. And what do I mean by that?
Right, So you'd go to a meeting where you'd have an open discussion with
a group, and as a group, you'd come to some set of decisions
on the best path forward, and everyone would sort of leave that meeting feeling
that they had clarity on that path forward. And then a few days later,
one of the members of the team would be told to pursue a different
path and that was clearly sort of pretty different from what it had been agreed
in the meeting, and that person may or may not convey the reason for
the change, just that the change was necessary. And so now we were
kind of on this new path right, And after this happened a few times,
you'd notice that many of the people in that group who had previously contributed
would stop speaking because they would either feel that their voices weren't being heard or
weren't being valued based on that previous pattern that they'd observed and the lack of
communication around why a course of action had changed, not just that it had
changed. Right. Yep, some of our listeners might be wondering why that's
negative. So tell us why that's negative, and so we can understand I
think, at a deeper level the problem that we're really dealing with absolutely the
fact that midway through your story, I knew it wasn't yet the end of
the story started to signal that it was problematic. We got to the meeting,
we had alignment, and then something changed. So people often tell the
benefits of silence right meditative you can think more clearly. There might even be
regeneritive brain cells. All of that that is great. The silence we're talking
about is when there is not enough room for your perspectives. The silencing as
a verb is when you share your thoughts in this meeting. But then there
are signals and data points later on that tell you your perspective doesn't actually matter.
And so in this case that you've set up, if I go to
a meeting, I put my neck out, I am taking a stand.
On the surface, we all agree, but then it has no impact and
in fact things change in the meeting. After the meeting, why show up
at all? Why not just sit there and nod because it's useless to speak
up anyways. So the silence that we're talking about is the ways that we
learn that our voices don't matter, our opinions don't matter, our insights don't
matter. And companies, in this false transparency that you mentioned, say all
the right things. The values in the employee handbooks say that we value collaboration
and innovation, but it seems like only some people's ideas matter or are celebrated,
and that's so exactly right. We're left with what am I supposed to
do? Because if I continue to push for my voice to be heard,
I am labeled and branded as aggressive or a troublemaker, or non compliant or
not a team maker, a team member, team player. I have to
stomach all of the costs, and each of us, particularly those of us
with marginalized identities, whether there's race, gender, class, education, able,
all of it. There are disproportionate costs to continuing to push, and
so when leaders say things like I am inclusive, my door is always open,
your voice really matters. All of those words are empty if your actions
don't back it up. And too often, even well intentioned leaders, the
way they behave sends the message your voice doesn't matter. By the way,
we just need to get shit done if I can say shit, and that
has a silencing effect. Essentially, you're building a culture of silence when you
purport to have a culture of voice, and that disconnect is really jarring,
disorienting, and damaging. Yeah, so well put. I think so many
companies suffer from this, right, And it's it's often not a conscious tone
that's being set, right, It's not malicious or malintended, but it's sort
of an atmosphere that has been created almost as some sort of default from a
series of, as you said, behaviors that don't mirror or aren't consistent with
the intentions. However well articulated, those may be completely I mean, we
did hire a consulting firm to craft those intentions and values for us, so
they must be well crafted right. What I love, Tamita about what you
said is the difference between default and design. That in the workplace environment you
were mentioning, it wasn't that someone designed this lack of congruence between what you
said and what you did, but it almost defaulted to that. And that's
one of the observations that I've had across industries and across leadership teams is that
when we do not actively design the culture, not just in aspirations and in
named values, but in how we're going to implement that, we default to
the culture that serves the people who are ready in power, yeah, who
tend to be the people who hold the dominant identities in the room. And
so when I think about design, it is thinking very tactically, things like
what communication mediums best support the voices of the people on my team, what
time of day are they firing on all cylinders versus I'm firing on all cylinders.
If I'm a morning person, I naturally default to thinking and scheduling high
priority, high value conversations in the morning. But if someone on my team
is not wired that way, which typically they're not because people are different,
I am essentially inclining them towards silence, even as I purport to invite them
to the meeting, and you know we've all got an equal say at this
table. Yeah, absolutely, I think you know this is such an important
point for anyone in any kind of leadership role. And I mean that really
broadly, right, whether you're you're leading a tiny team to a big team,
to you're the parent and your family, whatever that may be. Because
I think as a leader, your role in a sense is to be part
coach and part caregiver and part kind of moderator, right, because you're the
only one empowered and positioned to think about each of the individuals on your team
and what serves each of them to bring their voice and their best ideas to
a gathering and gives them the space and kind of the psychological safety. Right.
We talked a lot about this on a previous podcast episode with Professor Amy
Edmondson, to consistently bring their best ideas and their best selves to those interactions.
And you can't have psychological safety if you are unintentionally silencing people, right,
Absolutely so. In your experience and you've worked with individuals and with teams,
how and when do you find people silence themselves most commonly or most frequently
when my calculation tells me that it's not worth it for me to use my
voice. And I'll say that for me defining voice because I am a recovered
Did you call me a recovering lawyer? Recovered? I reform, So I'll
go with that. I'm reformed. We still need to define our terms.
Voice is not just the words that you say in a meeting, but voice
is how you move through the world. Ye, So as a leader,
how do I create the space for people to do that? Knowing that each
of our voice is how we move through the world, the gifts that we
bring, the expertise that we have is going to be different. But part
of the challenge is, as I'm doing this calculation of whether it's safe and
worth it for me to use my voice to move through the world the way
that I want, I have all these data points from my past. So
when I walk into a new team environment, I'm still thinking about and I
have the data set of the last team I worked in and whether that was
low power, high high power differential, whether that was actually only the leader
gets to speak. So part of the defaulting to a set of learned behaviors,
right, is what you're saying, Yeah, completely and understandably. So
yeah, because until I know differently, why would I test the waters to
find out the hard way. This is how employee silence is created because very
few of us want to test it out for ourselves. So when we're new
to an environment, we're looking around to see what other people do. Yeah,
and if other people stay silent, like I have intuited, I have
observed what the culture is, and I should probably play by those rules.
Right. So I want to take your example from earlier, which is,
you know a leader who says, well, my door is always open,
you know, everyone's welcome into the tent, and sort of just think about
the counter argument, right, because those are often people who say, well,
once I've conveyed that, it's kind of everybody else to sort of pick
up that gauntlet and go right and come in and talk to me or voice
their opinion whatever that is. And at the same time, so why isn't
that enough? First of all? Right, because there's a school of thought
that I think leaders often have, which is, hey, like I've done
all the right thing, yes totally for my part, yes, and like
if it's not working it's not my problem or it's not my fault. Right.
It takes me a little bit back to what you said earlier of as
leaders, you are coach, you are a caregiver. You play all these
different roles, and I can imagine some listeners bristling, I'm not a caregiver.
I'm a parent at home, but at work we are all grown adults.
So what is my role? Actually? I would argue that saying my
door is always open is insufficient for at least two reasons. One is,
it is only an expression of intent, and we all know that there's a
difference between intent and impact, so it is useful to articulate my door is
always open, or I am here, But it fundamentally underestimates how hard it
is to walk into someone's office. And if you don't understand the challenge of
walking into someone's office, that to me is a blind spot that needs examination,
right because it suggests to me that you have always had the privilege and
the welcome to walk in and have a positive experience, Which takes us to
our second reason, which is when someone comes into your metaphorical office, how
do you react or respond when someone shares with you a question? A concern
a point of view. If your reaction in the moment is to debate,
to get defensive, you are not living up to this promise or this invitation
of my doors always open. You are contributing to the case that it's too
costly for me to actually say what I think show up how I intend with
you. Yeah, I mean it's really you know, certainly I had to
learn this in kind of growing into successive leadership roles in the past, where
I think when you first become a leader, you're sort of under stressed to
perform, right, There's this kind of performative quality to it where you're like,
it means I have to know everything, and it means I have you
know, there are all these kind of misconceptions, right that are in your
head, which you I think quickly learn are totally ill conceived and are super
counterproductive. Right, But then you sort of ask yourself the question of,
okay, well, so how do I kind of evolve to be a different
kind of leader? And you know, some of that obviously can happen through
coaching, and yet I think many people struggle to arrive at what you just
articulated, which is it's not about you it's about what is the environment that
you are seeking to create, right, Like, I think so many people,
almost everyone has gone through this where you go into meetings and there are
always a couple or a few people who are the loudest voices in the room,
and those are the voices that get heard, and the other ones just
sort of start to fade farther and farther into the background over time. And
I think as a leader, it is up to you to hear every to
bring out every voice and hear every voice. Yes, you're going to make
a decision ultimately, because somebody has to make a decision at the end of
all this, right, And I think people often are uncomfortable with the idea
of hearing all those views and then coming to whatever decision they come to that
obviously is in disagreement with some of those views. Right, tell us a
little bit about that. It's sort of getting comfortable with the idea of hearing
lots of different points of view they may often be opposing to, and then
getting comfortable with the idea of making a decision and standing by that. Let's
break that down into two phases. One is, how do you even get
differences of opinion, because in that room, when you say, you know,
in a six person meeting, typically two people do most of the talking,
and it feeds into this Babbel hypothesis of leadership, that quantity of airtime
signals leadership, and it is often perceived in that way. So how do
we even break that down? This is our role as leaders, as facilitators
to invite in different perspectives, but how we do it also matters because just
to say, guys, tell me what you think. That seems like an
open again, magnanimous invitation. I'm saying I'm inviting you in. But if
I'm on the receiving end of that statement, I'm thinking, do you really
want to know? How honest should I be? The last time I was
really candid, it did not go over so well. So what I would
recommend, and what I coach people to do, is to use standard questions.
It could be what are the pros of this idea? What are the
cons of this idea? What about this works? What about this doesn't?
From your perspective, What that does is invite in the dissenting perspective without people
having to worry as much about being disagreeable. And also you're training your team
over time. Okay, I know that Samita's going to ask us what works,
what doesn't, pros cons good, bad, ugly. So those of
us who process differently and process better with time can sort of pre process and
show up with more of our insights. So that's one set, which is
how to even get those perspectives. The second is the construct I use most
in coaching, which is three buckets. In any situation, there are people
who are going to be informed about the decision, they are going to be
people who are consulted about the decision, and then there are people who are
actually going to make the decision. And that is just how things work.
And we do a round robin of sometimes you are making the decision and I'm
consulted or I'm informed, and sometimes I'm making the decision. So as a
matter of a leader, as a leader, if I can get clear which
decisions do I own, and let me be clear and transparent and everyone is
aligned, you're being consulted and consulted, means share your opinion, share your
best take on it, and let's be clear. At the end of the
day, decisions are not made by consensus. They are made by this One
two or three people, but allows us to show up fully and then to
also own the decisions that we have, and also to delegate the decisions that
are not ours to make, and to remember as a leader, if I've
delegated the decision to someone else, I am only a consult or, an
inform I need to back them up and not undercut them. Yeah, no,
absolutely, I think that's such a good point. I also think clarity
around who is making a decision just as important, I think is an evaluation
of past decisions and some honesty and some honest discussion around hey, we got
that right, or I got that right, or we also got that wrong,
or we could have done a better job, whatever that is, because
I think the lack of acknowledgement of the things that didn't work almost seems to
suggest that every decision has worked, and that's never the case, as we
know, for anybody, however brighter, whatever they are. And it really
SAPs the transparency and the openness in a group right to not have that acknowledgment,
because in the end, it's a leader not displaying their vulnerability completely.
And I would argue, as a leader, if you're not talking about those
things, what message does your silence on that topic, on that failure,
on what did not go as well, or on what we learned from this?
What does your silence communicate? Yeah? And is it communicating the message
you actually want if not say something about it? Ye, So you get
to craft the narrative and influence the narrative rather than letting people fill in the
narrative of what you meant by that silence, Because maybe you didn't mean anything
by the silence, maybe you were too busy. But the message that's out
there is I guess we don't talk about how we messed up here, We
just moved on, or they're just trying to cover their own Yeah. So
Lene, as we're talking, I'm struggling to reconcile something with the need and
the work that you do to help individuals and teams unlearned silence. You know,
we live in a world where opinions are constantly being expressed in every medium,
even on matters that don't necessarily pertain to the individual expressing their opinion,
and often with sort of a lack of knowledge and facts, right Like,
we see this in the media, where so much reporting has become a series
of outbed pieces. We see it pervasively on every type of social media,
and so people don't have a problem expressing opinions clearly, often even not fact
based ones. And yet even though there's no silencing of themselves, there there
is often in a professional sphere. Help us understand that inconsistency. Well,
I'd argue that there's a couple more of layers to it, because we love
complexity. One is, not everybody is viewing opinions, so there is a
population that is very vocal, often not fact based. And then there's another
contingent of people who are like, I don't want to say anything, and
if I worry about saying anything makes me look like them. And I'd argue,
if you're in that camp, or have that proclivity of worrying about whether
you are overbearing, taking up too much space to opinionated, you're not,
you're not. You can probably up that anti but also thinking not just about
how do I share my opinion, but why am I doing it? For
what purpose? For what impact? And in what way can I communicate to
have the impact that I actually want? Because it doesn't mean tweeting everything.
Yeah, it could mean the one on one conversation. It could mean you
know think again about your voice is how you want to move through the world.
So I se see less of an inconsistency and I see more of the
challenge of so many different voices us getting tired of the noise. How do
we cut through that noise and also how do we get different voices in the
mix because we know that the systems around us, Let's take corporate America for
example, tends to prioritize the ways that white cis men communicate. Emotions are
really tricky territory. Vulnerability in and of itself, authenticity in and of itself
is really tricky territory for anyone who has subordinated in identities because you are inherently
othered, or you stick out as a sore thrum, or your credibility is
already on the line. So there's just complexity to it, which to me
leads to this question of what are the levers that we can pull and push
if what we care about is actually belonging, dignity and justice for every human
being, including in our workplaces. And my answer is one lever is let's
examine the ways that we silence ourselves, the ways that we have internalized the
messages that people have sent us, unintentionally or intentionally over time about our value,
our worth, our perspective. Second leaver is what impact are we having
on the people around us? In what ways are we silencing them? Even
as we talked about that well intentioned leader whose door is always open even when
we don't intend. And third well is what ways do the policies and practices
that we have in place silence certain people while celebrating others? Yeah totally makes
sense. Yeah, totally makes sense. So I want to shift gears a
little bit. I think we've talked a lot about why people silence themselves and
how environments matter. Right, let's talk a little bit about some of the
practical, tactical strategies to unlearned those behaviors. You know, I'm reminded of
a coaching client that we had who was, you know, super high performer,
kind of ascending the levels in the organization. And one of the problems
that she identified was that she doesn't feel heard or and acknowledge that she doesn't
feel she can contribute to discussions in you know, kind of the broader team.
And we talked about, you know, her coach worked with her on
kind of all the reasons why, which goes to your point of like,
what are the things in our background and experience that kind of lead us to
that point? And I think developing self awareness around what those are then helps
us to think constructively about the path forward. And her coach gave her a
really the practical tactical thing that the coach gave her to do was she said,
you're going to go back and from this day on and you're going to
write this down every day in a interaction of some kind that is more than
one on one, it's some kind of group setting. You're going to force
yourself to say one thing. You're not going to think about how intelligent it
is, you know, whether it's exactly right. You're not going to do
any of those things. You're just going to force yourself to say one thing
in each of those meetings, and you're going to write down that thing that
you said. And it was such a powerful thing for her, you know,
I mean it was it was It really helped her stick her toe into
a new behavior that was strange and alien at first, but then became more
and more familiar as she went on, and it launched her on this path
you on learning her own silence and figuring out what her preferred mode was going
to be of engaging with groups. Yep, I only bring that up as
an example, but you know, you've worked with so many people tell us
about some of those practical tactical strategies. Yeah. I noticed my heart rate
going up a little bit when the coach was saying, you have to do
this every day for the rest of your life, because no, no,
it was like, try it every day for the next week. That was
okay, good, Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, that's what I
heard. I would recommend a time bound experiment, right, because we can
do something for a week, we can do something for three weeks even,
but for the rest of your life. I know it's too infinite. Yeah,
yeah, too infinite. The other place I would start is why why
do you want to speak up? Not speak up for the sake of speaking
up or adding to the cacophony, But what is it you bring? What
is the person perspective or the value or what do you think is missing from
the conversation. This is all of the change research, whether we're changing systems
or behaviors, but having to have a bigger why to anchor to so that
when the waves get rough, you can anchor back to well, this is
why I'm doing it. On the personal front, this is because I want
a different life from my kids at work, because representation matters or whatever it
is. What is your bigger why that makes the ruffles if there are worth
it. The second is something I find in incredibly frustrating but necessary, which
is how do you connect the dots between your pieces of data and your reasoning
to get to the conclusions? And this is Chris Archers and John Sean right.
But the rigor necessary because of how differently we see the world and the
differences in our life experience, is especially in a global workforce. So that
rigor of I think this is obvious, obviously we should take this course of
action. Where is that coming from? Because it's not usually as obvious to
others. The third I would add is what are you specifically asking of the
other person? Are we clear what we're asking of them? Because if we're
not even clear for ourselves, how will they understand what we're asking? And
this is the bigodous YouTube video of It's not about the nail, where it's
a it seems like a romantic partnership and they people should just google, not
about the nail, but are we clear what we're actually asking the people?
And the fourth that I would add, and these four pieces are in chapter
seven of the book. The fourth is engage resistance. In an ideal world,
when we show up, we would be welcomed with warm embrace. And
we don't live in an ideal world, and so often when we're met with
someone's defensiveness, someone's pushback, someone's silence, we get thrown off kilter and
that is often the end of our negotiation or of our conversation, because we
need recovery time. But going in with the mindset of yeah, there's going
to be resistance means that we're less surprised when it happens, and we're more
able to see resistance, friction, frustration, their concerns, their defensiveness actually
is information. Yeah, And then a question of what do you do with
that information? Right? How do you have the patience and the wherewithal to
come back? How many rounds do you go? And those are all really
important questions, but those four anchors tend to ground us in how do I
actually show up? Those are great practical, tactical things. I'm so glad
that you articulated it that way. Last question, You know, each of
us has some work to do on how to bring ourselves into spaces, groups,
conversations, but equally sometimes our own behaviors inadvertently, as we were saying,
right, not consciously, are the result of them is to silence others.
How can we develop some consciousness around when we're doing that? You know,
I think of in my family with three children, you know, certainly
one is kind of often the loudest voice in the room, and for me,
I've always tried to, you know, kind of encourage everyone to speak
right and make sure that each person is heard and not interrupted in all those
things. So talk a little bit about that. How can we be conscious
about that? Yeah, that to me actually goes back to design rather than
default, which we started at earlier today. Also knowing that voice doesn't have
to look like airtime, right, vo two very different things. So part
of the design is are there a synchronous ways or written type text based ways
that people can share their thoughts because we know essentially the awarenesses we're all wired
differently, which we know here are some ways that we're wired differently. We're
wired differently in how we process in the ease of communication, in the way
that we prefer to move through the world. And how do we optimize for
voice, meaning is there some combination of put things in slack or in email
or you don't have to speak in that meeting and I can hear people's resistance
already happening. But that's just the way things work around here. Think about
whose voices come forward in those meetings and how can you lower the barriers to
communication. And that may take some pre planning and some intentionality, but it's
really just forming different habits than the ones that we have defaulted too. So
if we're having the meeting, do we leave the decision at the end of
the meeting? Here's the placeholder, here's where we're at. Everyone go home,
sleep on it. For those of us who are post processors, you'll
probably figure out in twenty minutes after the meeting what you really wanted to say.
And we want your genius to be in the mix to stave off the
crisis down the line. Can we build that process in so that different voices
forward and their research and our experience shows that that actually is to everyone's benefit.
It takes some unfront work, but the awareness that we're all different and
that we can actually design differently rather than just defaulting is key. That's yeah,
I think that's it's so relevant. And you know, many times you
hear people say all these different channels are a source of overwhelm for them,
right, because some people prefer to express themselves on Slack and other people do
it on the zoom call and somebody else goes into someone else's office, and
everyone's modality is sort of slightly different. Yes, but I think because of
the differences among us and because of the different comfort levels that people have with
the way that they want to communicate, and those can be different by individual
too, right, Like it's not as the one person just uses one way
all the time. It's it's sort of a reality I think of the workplace,
and I think it doesn't need to lead to overwhelm. Like because someone
slacks you doesn't mean that you have to answered that slack at midnight. You
know, you can process that the next morning and deal with it then,
right, Well, And what helps, though is clarity as to the norms.
Yeah, So one of my aims would be, can we actually just
have a discussion, right, what about the ways we're communicating works and doesn't
work, is optimal or suboptimal, And you may find that actually everybody in
your team hates slack. Right then, why are we using it? Probably
because we assumed that someone else preferred it. Right now, what are the
norms around how quickly we need to reply, what it actually means? All
of those, if it is discussable, helps us optimize and also lowers again
lowers the barrier to entry for communication because one of the fundamental challenges about speaking
up or using your voices, how am I supposed to get through to you?
Reply to my emails? I get lost in it. You keep canceling
our one on ones of texting, you feel a little too personal. But
have we had that thirty second conversation of Hey, if I wanted to send
you an urgent message, what's the best way for the best way, what's
the best way? Because we spend so much time whack them all trying and
not knowing. Yeah, I want to speak more efficient totally. WELLNN,
thank you so much for your thoughts, for your advice, and we look
forward to your book. Thank you, thanks for having me, Thanks for
listening. Please subscribe wherever you listen and leave us a review. Find your
ideal coach at www dot viidmix dot com. Special thanks to our producer Martin
Mluski and singer songwriter Doug Allen.