In the absence of information, employees will tell their own stories
It’s Saturday night and you’ve waited all week to attend the traveling Cirque du Soleil show that’s in town. You have center stage tickets, mid level, giving you just the perfect view of what is sure to be ninety minutes of pure entertainment. You have friends who attended the show the week prior, and they told you just enough to tease the entire act, but you can’t wait to see it with your own eyes.
You take your seat a few minutes before the show starts, and you notice there are characters walking around entertaining the crowd, there is a light mist of fog towards the back of the stage, lights illuminating the side, and a curtain that is shielding your view of what’s to come. Your senses are all on edge as you’re hearing, seeing and feeling the allure of the show that you have waited all week to watch.
At this point, you turn to your partner and begin to speculate about what’s going to happen.
“I wonder what’s behind the curtain? I bet there is water. No, I bet they have trapeze swings that they will fly from. Actually something tells me they may have fire shooting down. Wait, what if they have that mechanical dragon like the last show we watched. Perhaps those guys on motorcycles will drive on stage again. It would be cool if the back of the stage opened up and there was lightning bolts shooting out or if they had rain that came in from the ceiling”
You start to build some anxiety of the unknowns because you can’t see with your own eyes what is hiding behind the curtain. You feel the anxiety in your bones as you consider all of the things that could happen that you’re uncomfortable with. You’re trapped in the center row, center of the theatre, and what if things start happening that you’re not prepared for? You start to tell your partner of all the fearful things that could come and you only begin to double the amount of concern between the two of you.
After a few minutes of what turns in to ridiculous speculation, the show begins. While you’re incredibly entertained and thankful you spent too much money on the tickets for a fun night out. However, you don’t witness lightning, motorcycles, fire, dragons, or any of the other ridiculous tricks that your mind tried to tell you. You enjoy a typical show that brings you joy and satisfaction, it follows the same format of previous shows you’ve watched for the most part, and everything goes normal to plan.
Why did your mind start to play these tricks on you? Why did you raise your own blood pressure and speculate on things that were probably never going to happen? Why did you bring fear in your partner as a result of the ideas in your own mind?
The reason is simple; you were never told what would happen over the next ninety minutes and the curtain blocked your ability to visualize the show.
In the absence of information, your employees will make up their own stories. They will create false anxiety, rile up their peers, lead customers down the wrong path, and eventually drive a toxic culture.
As a people leader, your job is to communicate the vision, the story, the roadmap, and the journey that lies ahead. Your job is to create a transparent culture that allows your employees to buy in and believe in where you’re headed. You must find ways to pull the curtains back and show your team what’s hiding behind there. In most cases, nothing is hiding behind the curtains, but to the ill-informed, the mind will play tricks that will lead you down the worst of paths.
Teams that are well informed are able to work with the mental security that they know where they are headed. They focus on the future, executing on tasks that are in their control without fearing what’s out of their control. Employees that know the path ahead are able to navigate the good, the bad, and the ugly because they’re unafraid of what they don’t know. Employees that don’t know the road map tend to speculate the worst case scenario. They use the fear of the unknown to rally their peers into believing what it’s the company against them, rather than one team working together.
Even in times of massive change, teams that are going through struggles will stick through it because they’ve been communicated the “2.0” of what’s next. These teams have leaders that agree with the problems while highlighting the success of how they are operating.
Imagine being on an airplane and the plane takes a nose dive for thirty seconds. Your heart begins beating faster than ever, your mind starts racing, you’re sweaty, you text your loved one telling them what just happened and you fear the worst. The plane levels off, but you know that you have another hour until you land at your destination. You spend the next hour assuming that the plane will crash.
Now let’s think about that same situation in a different way. Seconds after the plane levels off, the Captain comes on and says, “ladies and gentlemen, I’m sorry about what just happened, it was a minor issue with the turbulence, but we don’t anticipate that happening again and we assure you that you’re safe.”
Now, you’re texting your loved one telling them that you’re fine, you’ll be on the ground in an hour, and turbulence is scary.
See the difference in how communication and transparency can make us feel? So why do leaders fail to tell the roadmap or share the journey ahead with their teams? If transparency with your teams allows them to operate more effectively and efficiently, then why would you withhold that information from your most valuable assets; your people.
It’s fairly simple; some leaders are just bad communicators, some just are out of touch with what their people want or need, and some simply don’t have the roadmap at all, which means they have nothing to communicate. Perhaps they never requested or needed the roadmap on their journey so they question why anyone else would need it in return. It’s also quite possible that they are afraid of telling too much information to their teams for various reasons.
While the mystery of a Cirque du Soleil show is quite fun, the mystery of where is my company, department, or team headed is not something you want to treat as mythical. Create an honest, open culture and rewards transparency and builds trust and remove the mystery of what lies ahead.
