An Argument for Speaking Unarguably

Photo by Cherrydeck on Unsplash

Giving emotion a seat at the conference table can divide your team, or unite it.

In my last article, I wrote about the lack of perspective that may arise from founders seeing their companies as their “children,” and of the benefits of using retreats to switch to seeing your company from a consultant’s perspective. In this article, I want to focus on a second, related problem: “poking the baby.”

Poking the baby refers to saying something about a child that the parent might find offensive, such as commenting on the child’s physical appearance or behavior in almost any other way than complimentary. When applied to business, the obvious problem arises when those to whom the founder looks to help her build the business are afraid of speaking their minds for fear of, yes, poking the baby.

I’ve heard entrepreneurs exclaim, “Why didn’t you tell me that before?” to employees, co-founders or other stakeholders. Sometimes these folks had, indeed, tried to voice their opinions, only to be ignored or unheard by the founder. But more often, they held their criticisms or opposition in check out of fear of angering the founder.

I’ve sat in meetings in which a founder was expounding a grand vision and felt myself actually getting a little queasy. My head might start hurting, my neck might tense up, or I’d feel a knot in my stomach as I listened to something that wasn’t making sense.

What to do?

The Conscious Leadership Group, in whose program I participate, offers a technique called “speaking unarguably” that can help your team find their voices when they are most needed. The technique relies on giving your emotions their day in court but doing so in productive rather than divisive ways — effectively turning your thoughts and feelings into facts.

There are three ways of doing this.

Describe what’s going on in your head: The easiest form of speaking unarguably is describing your thoughts in the moment. “I”m having a thought that if we go ahead and try this, then XYZ will happen.” Or, “I’m wondering if what you are talking about is similar to what we tried back in 2015, where we did XYZ with this result?” Notice how you are not challenging the other person’s credibility or intelligence but rather describing thoughts that have popped into your head. They may be true or false, but they are not debatable because they’re yours.

Share an emotion you’re feeling: This one is a bit harder because emotions are harder to share than thoughts. Conscious leadership defines five core emotions including joy, fear, anger, sadness, and sexual creative feelings. We can cover this last one as it relates to the workplace in a separate article, but just think about it as creativity. You might say, “I’m feeling afraid, and I’m making up the story in my head that the same thing that happened to me five years ago is going to happen now.” Admitting that you are experiencing fear will make somebody feel closer to you and want to listen and, once again, your emotion is unarguable because it’s yours.

For example, I once led a retreat for a company and noticed that things had become tense between the founder and his team. Gradually, the founder admitted to feeling “frustrated” that his team seemed to be pushing back too much. His team felt this as “anger” and clammed up. However, when I asked him to clarify, he said his primary emotion was actually not anger but fear of not being a successful leader. This admission produced an immediate softening effect on his team, and allowed the founder to dispel the erroneous narrative that had been swirling around in his head!

Describe a physical sensation associated with emotion: This one probably takes the most practice and involves evoking our understanding that sometimes our bodies make us aware of something before our brain can process it. That knot in your stomach or pounding in your head may be giving you a heads up that you need to speak up — and the sooner the better. While you wouldn’t say, “Your ideas are making me sick to my stomach,” you might very well say, “I’m feeling a knot in my stomach hearing you talk about XYZ.” Can’t argue with that. Sometimes if you just allow that to come out in the meeting, people will want to understand why.

These kinds of arguments are meant to strip away the drama and accusatory behaviors that undermine trust and put up emotional walls cutting off conversation and creative problem-solving. The alternative — not finding a productive way through core emotions — can lead to more or less permanent divisions in which what is left unsaid in the meeting appears in more toxic forms outside the meeting to another trusted confidant but not to the whole team.

Speaking unarguably when you’re at retreats or even when you’re just thinking out loud and brainstorming is a great way to bring a team closer and soften the perceived “threats” of disagreement. Check out this one-page worksheet to learn more about the components of speaking unarguably.

And let me know how it works for you!

Sincerely,

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All credit to my ghostwriting partner, Dave Moore, who is instrumental in getting my thoughts out in a coherent manner & into these blogs. Thanks Dave!