You’ve been away to pray and have a journal full of new ideas. You’re excited by each of them and now want to get the honest feedback from your team. You all gather in a room and you begin to enthusiastically share each of the ideas – the more you say them out loud, the more your enthusiasm rises. You look around the room to gauge from facial expressions and body language what each person is thinking.

Do they think your ideas are crazy? Are you proposing one idea too much? Are they sharing your enthusiasm or do they think you’ve lost the plot.

These are questions you would love to know the answers to – so you ask them ‘What do you think?’

It’s a genuine question and you want to know their honest answers – but there are a few dynamics going on here that make the invitation for honest feedback challenging.

Reasons they may not give you their honest thoughts

1. They respect you – they are measuring your enthusiasm and conclude that you have thought or prayed about this more than they have – therefore they feel that any critical first reactions are not as valid as your effervescent enthusiasm

2. They are employed by you – no matter how open hearted a leader you are, there is likely to be a subconscious response in them about the security of their position. They will likely want to impress their employer and showing exaggerated enthusiasm for your ideas may be the outworking of this

3. They were critical of your last idea – they don’t want to be ‘the negative’ team member and in a desire to counterbalance their expressed concerns for your last idea they decide on this occasion to fein their enthusiasm

4. They have committed themselves to support you – they make a decision that they will run with you on any project out of a desire to serve your leadership – therefore voicing anything that doesn’t communicate their unequivocal support for your leadership won’t happen

These are some of the reasons which may cause them to not give a truly honest review of your ideas even though you’ve asked for it. So how can you avoid these obstacles to hearing their thoughts?

One Simple Question

I’ve learnt to frame a simple question following sharing an idea. The question goes something like this:

“Now I would like us to take some time to consider together the reasons why this idea won’t work”

I don’t ask for their thoughts, personal comments or anything that could be considered to be an approval or rejection of my idea. I ask them to get their brains in gear to think of every hazard, challenge and potential roadblock if this idea was to be put in practise. Each thought will be added to a list, probably on a flip chart and we will keep going until the page is pretty full. If their responses are not thinking deeply enough around the issues then I will provoke them by saying ‘come on team – there must be more challenges than this’ and I may even break them into smaller groups to think through – I may even volunteer a few challenges that come to my mind. It’s important that I’m not defensive and avoid giving any ‘fixes’ at this point. I need to affirm each articulated response as I genuinely want us to create as exhaustive a list as possible about the needs, difficulties and challenges that implementing this idea is likely to encounter.

Then I will invite them to consider ways of addressing these challenges

I love watching creativity flow at this point. If the issues are sufficiently complex we may create working groups or assign individuals to go away and produce some thinking in advance of a future reconvened meeting but often I find the team are able to weigh up sufficiently whether a challenge is insurmountable or not.

Outcomes

Once we have had sufficient thinking around the challenges and potential fixes I find that one of the following outcomes becomes clear:

1. The room has come alive with the concept and no amount of challenges have put people off – instead they seem to have been energised and displayed a determination to overcome each

2. The energy has drained out of the room and the idea is clearly destined for the bin

3. I have become more energised the more in-depth we look at the idea – but the team are hesitant. I may then propose to put the idea on the shelf for now and keep praying and researching it personally. The idea may need to die in me, or maybe there is a seed of an idea that needs tweaking or reshaping. I can consider this before further exploration with the team

We need team

We need their perspective and insights. We need to create teams that shape ideas and visions together and I have found this process of empowering them with a simple question to be very empowering.

I would love to hear any strategies you have found to work in soliciting honest feedback from others.