Impediments to open communication

In providing value-add business development services to our expansion stage software portfolio companies, OpenView tries to provide best practice frameworks that can help management teams achieve their goals.

One key framework we’ve shared in the past year is Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team.

This framework helps focus teams on creating a solid foundation for successfully executing against goals.

It basically states that for high execution performance, a team needs:

· Trust, so that it can have

· Open Communication, so that issues can be fully discussed, and everyone can give their

· Commitment to the goals and steps for meeting them, so that they can be held

· Accountable for doing their work effectively by the team, and ultimately everyone can focus on

· Results

It is a simple framework in theory, but very powerful, and difficult to implement, in practice.

In this post, I want to bring up three very related impediments to Open Communication that I see surface at our portfolio companies and sometimes even within the team of venture capital investors at OpenView. The key to success, for us and our portfolio companies, is to keep surfacing up these impediments and working toward their removal, something we’re improving on every day.  

The three impediments to open communication happen when a discussion participant:

-Personally attacks another

-Becomes overly and emotionally defensive

-Accuses another of being defensive in the middle of debate

All three shut down open communication, leading to lack of commitment, accountability, and ultimately results. All three both hurt trust and can result from lack of trust. All three can stunt a company’s growth, and blunt the positive impact of expansion capital. 

Personal Attacks

When a debate drifts from being about ideas and their merits, and instead becomes a series of personal attacks and accusations of those people proposing the ideas, the likelihood of an open, rational, fact-based conversation that leads to a decision that everyone can commit too becomes quite small. This in part because it makes everyone emotional, shifts conversation from next steps to a blame game, and makes everyone defensive.

Furthermore, not only do personal attacks hurt the current discussion, they make it less likely for anyone to engage in open communication with the attacker in the future, severely hurting a team’s flow of ideas and performance for a time to come.

Being Defensive

In any good debate, there is a lot of healthy back of forth on ideas, and effective participants will state their points and defend them. But when someone takes an argument against their ideas personally as an argument against them, and feels like they’re defending their reputation rather than discussing an idea, he or she tends to become closed-minded, reducing prospects for truly open communication. As in the case of a personal attack, defensiveness shifts the conversation from ideas and facts to emotions and people.

 

Calling someone Defensive

Calling someone defensive in the middle of a debate is just a disguised, vicious version of a personal attack, and it is the fastest, most effective method I have ever seen for shutting down open communication.

What makes this personal attack particularly vicious is that it is presented as a rational comment by the accuser, who is apparently trying to make the conversation rational and productive, unlike the accused, who is suddenly cast as the one who is making the conversation unproductive.

When the accused really is being defensive, their reaction is almost always to become more emotional and more defensive, making the conversation less productive. Or they shut down, killing the discussion altogether. 

When the accused is not being defensive at all, and the accuser is simply using this as a weapon to shut down discussion, the accused will either actually become defensive and make the conversation unproductive, or will shut down, killing the discussion.

What’s more is that the accused has little recourse, because anything they say in response is just being defensive.
 

Either way, calling someone defensive mid debate is like dropping an atom bomb on open communication. It should never happen. 

When you do see someone being defensive, the best thing to do is to recognize it, and then do your best to defuse the situation, making the person feel safe, not attacked, and bring the conversation back to a different plain. And do all that without calling anyone defensive.