Painting the Sky Blue

Creating Shared Reality for Your Team

While reading through posts in one of the Tech Slack communities I’m a member of this past weekend, I found myself absorbed in a thread about what leaders owe their teams. Much research has been done on the shared attributes of high-performing teams, and there’s no shortage of great advice on the internet about how to create psychological safety or clear direction for your team. 

However, over the past few years, I’ve observed that one of the practices that can be most impactful in helping your team succeed (and the thing I’ve seen teams suffer greatly from the absence of) is the basic act of creating a stable, shared reality. 

Leaders as Reality Makers 

Leaders and people managers play an outsized role in defining the worlds their employees live in. As we become more senior in an organization, we gain access to more and different types of information that make up the fabric of what’s “really going on” in the company. As layers in the change management schema and local informants about company changes, our role as information cascaders doesn’t just make us item owners on communication plans -- it makes us gatekeepers of what is and isn’t real to our subordinates. 

Think for a second of the American news landscape. In a world where people are living with different “facts,” our perception of what’s happening in the world, who is controlling it, and what their motives might be is overdetermined by who we get our information from and how they spin it. Regardless of which version of reality you subscribe to, most of us know (or more likely know of) people whose interpretations of political events are so different from our own that they might as well think the sky is orange. In this reality-splintered landscape, people form factions, declare enemies, and struggle to fix even the things that we universally agree are broken because our information sources paint divergent pictures of what’s happening. Without a shared understanding of what’s going on and why, working together productively becomes nearly impossible. 

Though the democratic consequences aren’t so dire, the same things are happening in teams and companies all the time. Leaders and managers -- the local news channels for their respective parts of an organization --  unintentionally create conflicting versions of reality that make different teams look at each other as though they’re living under different colored skies. 

To be clear, this reality distortion usually isn’t malicious. All of us are guilty of bringing our past experiences and personal beliefs to the table when we interpret and proliferate narratives about what’s going on around us. However, when leaders are not highly conscientious of the particular authority that their interpretations of reality hold, they risk creating “official” and contradictory versions of the truth that reflect their own biases. Those conflicting realities can be harmless. But they can also trap teams in endless cycles of frustration and stagnation, and in order to release people from those cycles, leaders have an obligation to get everyone back under the same colored sky. 

Keeping the Sky Blue

If you’re a reality-maker in your organization, actively investing in keeping the sky blue requires time and attention. How much time and attention can depend on your situation, but regardless of what your organization or team is like, you should be trying to do the following: 

1. Pay attention to the stories you’re telling yourself

To create realities for your team that are fair and as consistent as possible with what their organizational partners experience, start by regularly asking yourself what biases, experiences, and feelings are shaping the way you share information. 

How do your feelings about your own compensation affect how you talk to an employee about their opportunities for pay growth? Do your frustrations with another leader ever cause you to over-attribute blame to them or their team? Did you hire someone who you’re scared of being wrong about in a way where you’re overinflating their work or contribution? 

In order to figure out where you might be skewing reality, try to reflect on what parts of your work experience stir up strong emotions. What are you most frustrated or hopeful about? Who do you really struggle to work with, and how are you talking about that person with others? Knowing what your “hot spots” are can help you look out for places where your description of the truth is likely to be shaded with personal feelings. When you find these spots, try reflecting on them with the language “the story I’m telling myself is…” to build some detachment from your interpretation. 

2. Look for evidence your stories may be wrong

Regardless of how much emotion or narrative you have invested in a situation, it is always useful to try to find evidence that contradicts your first assumptions. A lot of us like to tell ourselves that we’re neutral on issues that we come across, but more often than not… we’re not. Instead of pretending you don’t have an opinion about a situation, take your existing story as a hypothesis instead of a reality. And then look for evidence that it’s wrong! 

While sometimes you might find out that you were missing information and your sky was the orange one, this practice will also improve your ability to articulate what’s going on to others even when you’re right. Being able to understand multiple sides of a story, present the evidence for each, and then compare them in a way that helps people get to a shared reality is a powerful leadership skill that many of us don’t spend enough time practicing.

Whatever stories you’re telling, try to write them the other way before sharing them with your team.

3. Teach your team reality-building rituals 

You can also teach your team how to productively question you so that you don’t have to be the only one watching out for your bias. Consider equipping your team with some pre-set “reality building” questions to deploy when they engage with you and each other. Even questions as simple as “What do you think the other side of the story is?” or “Do you think any part of this feels uniquely true for us?” can help you approach meetings, one-on-ones, and all sorts of information-sharing settings with the capacity to create truer realities. When you see people ask these questions (of you or each other), call it out and praise it. 

Not ready to challenge each other face to face? Try establishing “fact-finding” as part of how you and your team form opinions. Beyond looking for contrary evidence to your beliefs, also encourage people to find 3-5 examples of something before they draw a conclusion about it (e.g., “Oh, he always forgets to follow up after meetings”). Lots of us are quick to jump on one data point without holding room for the idea that sometimes we’re experiencing someone’s off day or an exception instead of a rule. 

4. Don’t lie

This piece of advice may seem the most obvious, but it can be the one that is hardest to live out. So often, managers and leaders have information they can’t or shouldn’t share or are even just given the opportunity to shape a narrative without being challenged. No matter how advantageous or harmless it might be to tell a small lie -- don’t do it. If you can’t share something, say that. It’s okay to say, “I don’t want to withhold information from you, but it would be irresponsible or inappropriate for me to talk about this right now.” It’s also okay to be asked if you know something and say, “Yes, but it’s not my place to share that information.” As a leader, there are things that don’t need to be part of your team members' realities (like their relative compensation or performance information or news that could hurt someone if it reached them through the wrong channel). Naming that this type of information is present in an organization can actually be healthy for keeping people grounded in the reality of hierarchical businesses. When you need to keep part of people’s realities out of sight, just remember it’s better to make something invisible than something false. If you take one piece of advice away from all of this: just don’t lie. 

Inevitably, we all show up to work and write different chapters of different stories featuring the same series of events, and we share information in confusing or conflict-inciting ways. While that’s a natural part of working with others, try thinking about how you share information, paint facts, and treat honesty on your team.

And if you’ve other tactics for keeping your team grounded in reality—let me know. 

Thank you, always, for reading. Talk soon!