In an Agile team / organization / environment, collaboration is key. Agile is a team sport where communication, joint decision making and shared responsibility are the cornerstones of success. If any member of the team has a doubt about speaking up, then you might be aiming lower than your full potential obviously. 

Get up, stand up, and speak up for your team!

In today’s work, most stories, tasks require more than one skill and often more than one person to mark the work as “DONE”. Even though sometimes we stumbleupon on cross-skilled people, like full stack developers who can deal with a project / product from start to finish, they are hard to find. However the focus here isn’t on being a multi-skilled individual; instead, it’s about being part of a high-performing cross-functional team.

So how do you become a contributing member of such a team? More importantly, how do you foster an environment where everyone feels empowered to speak up and participate fully?

Deniz Uludağ, one of the advisors of oNabu, highlighted the importance of creating a roadmap for empowering Speak-Up Culture. As leaders, it’s crucial to understand how to nurture such a culture.

What is Speak-Up Culture?

Speak Up Culture is the key ingredient for high performance teams and learning organisations. It is a social climate where people can ask questions, share their ideas, concerns and mistakes without fear of humiliation, and/or punishment. People feel included, safe to learn, safe to contribute and safe the challenge the status quo.

Speak Up Culture does not mean we can say whatever we like in a way we prefer. Speak up Culture necessitates Radical Candor in which we challenge directly while we care for people. This is the culture that creates a learning organization for innovation and growth.

Amy.C.Edmondson (2019) The Fearless Organisation & Scott.K (2017) Radical Candor

Why Does it Matter?

Google has made a research called Project Aristotle, including 180 teams and 37000 people to understand what makes a perfect high performance team over a span of 2 years. As Google is good at finding through data, they did not find a common pattern until they focus on psychological safety, inspired by the Amy. C Edmondson’s Work published in 1999.

Google has obtained the same result as Amy C. Edmondson. Of course, there were some other indicators of a high performance team but psychological safety was in the first place.

Patrick Lencioni, spoke about the same ingredients but according to his observations of dysfunctions. In his book, 5 Dysfunctions of a Team, he clearly explains that lack of trust causes fear of conflict, and in order results in lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability and inattention to results.

It is important to observe teams, and hear what is said and beyond. If some of these are your observations in Agile events and when you are with teams:

• Deep silence,
• Mostly one or two people speaking up and lack of discussions about different ideas,
• Errors not visible or not discussed,
• Fake positive atmosphere altogether but gossiping behind the scene,
• People complaining about others but not giving feedback to each other,
• Not at all risk taking, preference to stay in comfort zone,
• Too much impression management and politics,
• Blaming, Drama triangles….
• People are unhappy and not motivated,
• etc.

It is time to invest in Speak Up Culture. Because these behaviors are obstacles to high performance teams.

You can see the “How?” section which offers ready-to-use artifacts you can easily apply with oNabu Subscription.

To prepare a Speak Up Culture roadmap, you need to focus on Teams and Leaders and the Organisation. Speak Up Culture flourishes firstly in team level and supported at organisational level. In an organisation, there may be variant levels of psychological safety at different teams. Your steps to construct a Speak Up Culture Roadmap will be: