Research

• 16% of employees call their manager/company' horrible at soliciting feedback. They never do.
• 69% of managers are uncomfortable communicating with employees.
• 2017 Quantum research found that 53% employees are handling “toxic” situations by ignoring them.
• A 2016 survey of 1025 employees found that each single conversation failure costs an organisation $7500 and more than 7 work days.
• 50% of employees quit their boss, not their Job.
• Among the nearly 90,000 discrimination complaints made to the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 2015, 45% included a charge of retaliation—which suggests that the original report was met by the manager with ridicule, demotion, or worse.

Statement

Enhancers of this driver

• A psychologically safe environment.
• A culture in which authenticity is valued.
• Regular catchups with managers and leaders.
• Clear roles and job descriptions.
• Healthy conflict approaches.
• Strong support of diversity

Detractors of this driver

• An environment in which failure is punished.
• When employees do not trust their manager.
• When employees don't have job security.
• Not embracing expertise among the many.
• Poor conflict skills.
• Poor understanding of diversity.
• Absence of or poorly researched and established diversity approaches.

Individual

• Identify your solution or approach. Explain how you've already tried to solve the problem and what you've learned from those attempts. Recommend a specific approach, along with alternatives, to provide your manager with options. Clearly define each possible option, addressing the pros and cons and any potential risks or barriers. Finally, explain the logic behind your recommended approach. You want your manager to be aware that you've considered several possible outcomes.
• Be prepared. When you approach your boss regarding some conflict or issue, it's crucial to have all of your ducks in a row. Present the facts and try to stay away from personal opinions. How and when did the conflict arise? Who or what has made it worse? How will eliminating the conflict improves morale for all of those involved?
• Make sure your side of the street is clean. When your boss confronts the other party—or tries to defend him or herself—what will they have to say about you? A risk of approaching your boss is that you may invite an inspection of your own behaviour to date. If any loose ends may come back to bite you, be sure to tie them up before running things up the flag pole.
• Put yourself in the other person's shoes and assemble the key issues from their perspective. This will not only improve your empathy but enable you to pre-prepare mutually appealing solutions to challenges.
• Check your intentions - for example, a goal of revenge and retaliation will cruel any attempts at resolving tough issues

Leaders

• Leaders can set the stage for incremental change by establishing team expectations for factors that contribute to psychological safety. With your team, discuss the following questions: (a) How will team members communicate their concerns about a process that isn't working? (b) How can reservations be shared with colleagues respectfully?(c) What are our norms for managing conflicting perspectives?
• Challenging situations are best faced in a proactive, objective and timely manner. Using a supportive, person-oriented approach, the leader can plan for the conversation by i. considering where to have the chat, ii—describing the event/circumstance objectively, iii—describing the impact iv. Suggest alternative solutions for resolution, v. ensure feedback is genuine and honest towards a solution, vi. following up and providing support.
• Save surprises for birthdays. Employees typically do not like surprise reviews, news or anything serious in nature from managers. However, managers can build trust with employees with regular communication, scheduled updates regarding work performance, and transparency about the organisation's health. When an employee knows they can rely on their manager for the truth, it can be motivating and help build trust.

Organisation

• Provide training that promotes dialogue and productive debate and how to resolve conflicts productively. Leaders can set the stage for incremental change by establishing team expectations for factors that contribute to psychological safety.
• Positively recognise courageous input even if controversial. Provide training in conversation skills that promote the ability to raise difficult subjects safely.
• Build organisational awareness that conflict that sits “above the table” is healthier than divisive differences that sit “under the table.”
• Endorse principled negotiation. Encourage a culture where mutual goals and gains are sought after - a win-win rather than winner takes all environment.
• Reward and recognise principled negotiation practices and agreements that support the interests of all parties.

• Be willing to take advice. Be receptive to other people's ideas on how to resolve the conflict. Sometimes, it can be hard to back down or see another perspective right away. Be sure to thank your boss and colleagues for the input, and then try to work with their suggestions. One of the traits of a great manager is being able to take control of a difficult situation, so allow your boss to prove their value in this area and trust that they may also be doing something behind the scenes that you're not privy to. Give the situation a little time to calm down, and if it does turn into an ongoing issue, you can always revisit it. Remember that not all conflicts can be resolved immediately.
• Ask for help. Ideally, you want to approach your boss with a calm and collected attitude and let them know you're having an issue with which you'd like some help.
• Unless it's a real emergency, ask your boss for an appointment so that you'll have time to get your thoughts in order and time to talk about it. A sit-down conversation is more likely to yield a thoughtful response than a desperate and possibly emotional interchange sandwiched between meetings. As with other relationships, being coy does little to help your case. There's nothing wrong with saying you're having an issue with a co-worker or a client and could use some guidance, as opposed to saying something vague like, "we need to talk."

• Ask your employees what's most important to them. A most overlooked strategy for building trusting relationships is often the simplest. Just ask! Inquire what is most important to your employees for building trust, ask how they prefer to be recognised, find out how they like to receive feedback and prefer to communicate. Acknowledging and acting upon their preferences will build trust.
• Be open to feedback. Problematic behaviour may result from the employee's perception of and experience in their work environment. Managers must be open to receiving feedback. This could be about management style or any other problem your employee may have with the organisation. Create a safe space in which your colleague can express their opinions. Use active listening to make sure you understand what they're saying. Listen to your employee's side of the story without prejudice. Sometimes a difficult person needs someone to listen and understand them. This often helps change their attitude and behaviour.
• Listen effectively. Managers establish trust by asking effective questions and listening to employees' answers. The technique of "drilling" down with questions can take a surface-level conversation to a meaningful dialogue. Then, following up with action to support employees' ideas and concerns reinforces that the manager listened.
• Promote side-by-side working practices - create teams that allow people in different roles and functions to work together on projects as equals.
• Business practices that generate this kind of contact across groups lower fences since people see each other as equals.

• Make psychological safety an explicit priority. Talk about the importance of creating psychological safety at work, connecting it to a higher purpose of promoting greater organisational innovation, team engagement, and a sense of inclusion. Teach leaders to model the behaviours they want to see and set the stage by showing empathy in the workplace.
• Rotate management trainees through departments. This is another way to increase contact with others. Typically, this kind of cross-training allows people to try their hand at various jobs and deepen their understanding of the whole organisation. It also positively impacts diversity because it exposes both department heads and trainees to a wider variety of people.
• Create task forces to throw light on challenging issues - These can have a stronger impact than policy. In addition to promoting social accountability, they engage members who might have previously been cool to diversity projects and increase contact among diverse groups.
• Build on the back of the monitoring and metrics of your task forces. When top leadership is watching, change happens.
• Appoint a Diversity Manager. Companies that appoint diversity managers see 7% to 18% increases in almost all underrepresented groups. When people know they might have to explain their decisions, they are less likely to act on the bias. So simply having a diversity manager who could ask them questions prompts managers to step back and consider. The aim here is to prevent or at least limit some of the tough issues before they arise.

• Individuals can be empowered to be courageous by establishing some rules of engagement. Team members can form an agreement to take the following steps to promote productive dialogue and debate: (a)Ask colleagues powerful, open-ended questions, and then listen actively and intently to understand feelings and values, as well as facts. (b) Agree to share failures, recognising that mistakes are an opportunity to learn and grow. (c) Use candour, whether expressing appreciation or disappointment. (d) Ask for help, and freely give help when asked. (e) Embrace expertise among many versus a single "hero" mentality. (f) Encourage and express gratitude, which reinforces your team members' sense of self.

• Show them you aren't afraid of failure. Every employee is a threat to an insecure leader. Any mistake or struggle in performance will make the leader look bad, so every employee can be seen as a threat. This drives selfish, bad behaviour and creates an unsafe place for the team. Trust only happens in a fear-free environment. Every leader needs to work on their own fear issues to focus on building the team instead of their ego.

• Establish norms for how failure is handled. For example, don't punish experimentation and (reasonable) risk-taking. Instead, encourage learning from failure and disappointment, and openly share your hard-won lessons learned from mistakes. Doing so will help encourage innovation instead of sabotaging it.