This week, the company I work for announced that we will continue working remotely for the remainder of 2020. As coronavirus cases continue to climb at a disturbing clip, I’ve been thinking about the long-term effects of rapid remote transitions, and how culture is impacted by those changes.
As we all settle into the reality that things may never fully return to the way they were before, I think it’s valuable to assess what our communication and problem-solving looks like in our respective organizations, particularly as we embrace remote work for the long-term and let go of the idea that this is temporary.
Remote communication is always more challenging. The most challenging remote communication I’ve navigated was when I worked for a nonprofit with offices in Seattle and Eastern Congo. Not only were we overcoming time zone hurdles, we were also constantly bumping up against language barriers (French, Swahili, English) and different cultural articulations of power dynamics, both of which impacted how we communicated and how we solved problems on an international level. It took a lot of effort, energy, and intention.
Why assuming positive intent can be problematic
One office platitude I’ve never been a fan of is assume positive intent. While I understand the gist of what the phrase is trying to accomplish - enter into this work with good faith that everyone is doing what they believe to be good and right - I think in practice, especially in a remote environment, it creates issues for a number of reasons:
Being guided primarily by assumptions is never a sustainable way to operate for very long. Assuming positive intent unwittingly encourages us to communicate less, not more.
It ignores very real political and power dynamics. For many organizations unwilling to candidly tackle problems, “assume positive intent” is often used as a cheap top-down substitute for real communication and problem solving. “Just assume positive intent, no need to dig deeper into real issues.” More often than not, by implying that real problems needing to be solved aren’t actually there, assuming positive intent favors those who wield power in organizations, not the other way around. When this happens, assuming positive intent is a thinly veiled way to enforce compliance and shut down meaningful debate.
An uncomfortable truth about any organization is that some (hopefully not too many) people actually don’t act with positive intent. Some people are more interested in self-preservation and promoting individual agendas than contributing to the greater mission an organization is working to accomplish. We all have professional intuition that informs our awareness in these instances, and to demand the assumption of positive intent can actually cause harm. Ensuring actual alignment of values, mission, expectations, and so on requires more than assuming everyone is on the same page and moving toward the same goal.
How we view problems shapes the environment we create for our teams
It may seem like the opposite of assuming positive intent is to question every intention, but it’s not. I would argue that both assuming positive intent, and its inverse of relentlessly questioning intent, are two sides of the same paradigm that need replaced.
Both assuming positive intent, and its inherent inverse of questioning intent, are rooted in approaching problems as execution problems. When we view everything - communication issues, performance issues, organizational issues - as execution problems, we create environments that lack psychological safety.
Put simply:
Psychological safety is an environment where teams and employees feel safe to take risks and be vulnerable with each other.
Amy Edmondson pioneered this concept, and wrote a wonderful book laying out how to create psychological safety in our organizations. Google’s research also found that psychological safety is the number one trait of effective teams (they researched over 300 teams to inform their conclusion). Viewing things through the lens of an execution problem makes everything about the individual person’s performance rather than the organizational dynamics at play contributing to that individual’s performance. Because of this, environments that view issues as execution problems, platitudes like “assume positive intent” spread in an attempt to address the issue topically without getting to the root of the issues.
A better way forward
Rather than view issues as execution problems, the better way forward is to view issues through the lens of learning problems. When we approach issues as learning problems, our organizations are able to address the myriad problems requiring our attention and effort in a healthier, more productive way.
Interpersonal conflicts, missed deadlines, poor production, projects not meeting expectations, name any problem. When we choose to see each of these things as opportunities to learn, grow, and become better, our organizations improve because we remove the threat of personal attribution (and therefore the threat of “being on the chopping block”) and instead take a step back to address circumstances, environments, and dynamics creating those problems.
Viewing things as learning problems rather than execution problems is:
The difference between a manager asking an employee why a project wasn’t done right, and a manager apologizing for not making expectations clear before owning miscommunications and creating new expectations together alongside the employee
The difference between a company letting an unhappy but valuable employee quit, and a company unwinding the issues leading to that employee’s unhappiness to understand what went wrong and how to make changes where possible to retain them
The difference between a leader telling a teammate “you didn’t do what I asked” and a leader asking a teammate about their current work/stress load and how they can assist in helping prioritize their projects to ensure success
It’s all about understanding
When we view the inevitable issues that arise in our work as learning problems instead of execution problems, we not only address problems in a healthier way, we actually solve them better. We are able to ask difficult questions, look at things in new ways to reach novel solutions, and reach a place of understanding. Rather than the bandaid of assuming positive intent that restricts real communication, leaning into learning and solving problems helps us know our work and people on a deeper level. In a fully remote environment, understanding is what we need more than ever.
To be clear, this is much more difficult work that requires leaders to not rely on their titles and authority structures to get things done, but instead requires relationship, empowerment, and authenticity. Basically, leadership.