Careful

Your team speaks up, carefully. Some things get said. Mistakes sometimes reach you first. Someone has disagreed with you in the room, once, perhaps softly. But the pattern in your answers is a team that calculates before it talks: what is safe to raise, with whom, and when. A Careful result from your own chair is an honest one, and once the benchmark publishes you will see how many leaders land here.

The tell in a Careful room is the gap between private and public. Look at item three. If the people who disagree with you privately are not the same people who disagree with you in the room, you have a team that has decided the meeting is not the place. The decisions in that meeting are made with half the information, and the corridor has the other half.

The second tell is who speaks. Careful rooms have two or three people who say things and the rest who wait. Items seven and eight are about the rest. If your newer or quieter people are not asking questions in front of the group, the room is safe for the confident and careful for everyone else, which is the same as careful.

The first change I ask for is small. Every issue on the agenda opens with the words "the issue is", said by whoever raises it. It sounds like a formality. It is not. It separates the problem from the person involved, so nobody has to defend themselves before the room has agreed what is wrong, and it stops the meeting jumping to solutions before the cause is clear. The disagreement that used to wait for the corridor now has a place to go. I run my own operating meeting this way.

One thing to do this week. In your next team meeting, when you propose something, say "I want one argument against this before we decide" and wait until you get one. Then thank the person, specifically, for the argument, whether or not it changes the decision. The thanks is the part that moves the room. Do it every meeting for a month.

Look at your lowest dimension. If it is Ask, people are not admitting what they do not know, and the cost is item twelve: someone taking on something beyond them and not saying so until it slips. If it is Voice, concerns are travelling around you rather than to you.

Next step: the one on one is the other place safety is built or lost. Score yours with the 1:1 meeting builder.

Next step

Score your one on ones

The other results

• QuietOn what you have seen, your team does not speak up.
• OpenYour team speaks up, most of the time, for most people.
• CandidYour team says what it thinks, if you really saw it.

About this result

This is one of 4 results from the Psychological Safety Scale, a free tool that shows the score without an email. Aggregate figures are at the statistics page once 30 completions have been reached. More free tools are at the tools shelf.