Quotes About Communication

Often in meetings, I will ask people when we're discussing an idea, "What did the dissenter say?" The first time you do that, somebody might say, "Well, everybody's on board." Then I'll say, "Well, you guys aren't listening very well, because there's always another point of view somewhere and you need to go back and find out what the dissenting point of view is.

In framing silence as an unethical choice, Dalio is taking a more extreme stance than I have adopted. But it's worth reflecting on this idea, which to me implies that you owe your colleagues the expression of your opinion or ideas; in a sense, those ideas belong to the collective enterprise, and you therefore don't have the right to hoard them.

failure of an employee to speak up in a crucial moment cannot be seen. This is true whether that employee is on the front lines of customer service or sitting next to you in the executive board room. And because not offering an idea is an invisible act, it's hard to engage in real-time course correction. This means that psychologically safe workplaces have a powerful advantage in competitive industries.

Proficient teaming often requires integrating perspectives from a range of disciplines, communicating despite the different mental models that accompany different areas of expertise, and being able to manage the inevitable conflicts that arise when people work together.

Workarounds can occur when workers do not feel safe enough to speak up and make suggestions to improve the system.

Communication frequency among coworkers also led to psychological safety. In other words, the more we talk to each other, the more comfortable we become doing so.

Sullenberger later wrote about [air traffic controller] Harten, "his words let me know that he understood that these hard choices were mine to make, and it wasn't going to help if he tried to dictate a plan to me.

Removing your mask helps others remove theirs. Of course, this means acting as if you feel psychologically safe, even if you might not be fully there yet. Sometimes, you have to take an interpersonal risk to lower interpersonal risk.

They concluded, "psychological safety was far and away the most important of the five dynamics we found."10 Other behaviors were also important, such as setting clear goals and reinforcing mutual accountability, but unless team members felt psychologically safe, the other behaviors were insufficient.

We now know that psychological safety emerges as a property of a group, and that groups in organizations tend to have very interpersonal climates. Even in a company with a strong corporate culture, you will find pockets of both high and low psychological safety. Take, for instance, the hospital where Christina works.

Jazz at Lincoln Center, says of his work with other jazz musicians: "There are always tensions that come up. Part of working is dealing with tensions. If there's no tension, then you're not serious about what you're doing.

We now know that psychological safety emerges as a property of a group, and that groups in organizations tend to have very interpersonal climates. Even in a company with a strong corporate culture, you will find pockets of both high and low psychological safety.

The good teams, I suddenly thought, don't make more mistakes; they report more.

Teaming is the art of communicating and coordinating with people across boundaries of all kinds – expertise, status, and distance, to name the most important.

A key insight from this work was that psychological safety is not a personality difference but rather a feature of the workplace that leaders can and must help create.

What we can learn from this extreme case, as well as from many cases of normal business conversation, is that psychological safety must be paired with discipline to achieve optimal results efficiently.

When a work environment has reasonably high psychological safety, good things happen: mistakes are reported quickly so that prompt corrective action can be taken; seamless coordination across groups

Emphasizing interdependence lets people know that they're responsible for understanding how their tasks interact with other people's tasks. Interdependence encourages frequent conversations to figure out the impact their work is having on others and to convey in turn the impact others' work has on them. Interdependent work requires communication. In other words, when leaders frame the work they are emphasizing the need for taking interpersonal risks like sharing ideas and concerns.

The Braintrust's recipe is fairly simple: a group of directors and storytellers watches an early run of the movie together, eats lunch together, and then provides feedback to the director about what they think worked and what did not. But the recipe's key ingredient is candor. And candor, though simple, is never easy.

Pixar director Andrew Stanton offers advice for how to choose people for an effective feedback group. They must, he says, "make you think smarter and put lots of solutions on the table in a short amount of time."6 Stanton's point about having people around who make us "think smarter" gets to the heart of why psychological safety is essential to innovation and progress. We can only think smarter if others in the room speak their minds.

For speaking up to become routine, psychological safety – and expectations about speaking up – must become institutionalized and systematized.

301.10 Universe is the aggregate of all humanity's consciously apprehended and communicated nonsimultaneous and only partially overlapping experiences.

Speaking up is only the first step. The true test is how leaders respond when people actually do speak up. Stage setting and inviting participation indeed build psychological safety. But if a boss responds with anger or disdain as soon as someone steps forward to speak up about a problem, the safety will quickly evaporate. A productive response must be appreciative, respectful, and offer a path forward.

But the two most frequently mentioned reasons for remaining silent were one, fear of being viewed or labeled negatively, and two, fear of damaging work relationships.