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Hello *|FNAME|*,
This may surprise people, but I am incredibly insecure about my likability. I seldom have a first encounter with someone where I walk away feeling like a made a good impression. Also, in workshops or when working in teams, I feel like I need to ‘fill’ the space. If you are like me, silence can be deafening. I project a lot of untested assumptions on myself that ultimately undermine my ability to take greater interpersonal risks.
Fortunately, Paul Smith, a good friend, leadership expert, and prolific writer, reminded me in his monthly newsletter to not let my insecurities get in the way of my work. Or to put it more simply, to stop making assumptions about what other people are thinking about me, as those assumptions can undermine how we perform in a group.
In Paul’s newsletter I learned about the ‘the liking gap’, a study completed in 2018 that found:
…many adults routinely underestimated how much others liked them in small group settings and while working in teams.
The liking gap is very closely related to studies about psychological safety in teams. For example, in the liking gap study, a co-author commented that, ‘If you think you’re well-liked around the office, you’re more likely to give honest feedback about teammates’ work, helping your team communicate more effectively and perform better.’
Addressing the Liking Gap and Psychological Safety
- Would you like to see yourself or your team members taking greater interpersonal risks, such as sharing constructive feedback and proposing new ideas?
- Do you or other team members allow assumptions about your own likability stop you/them from taking interpersonal risks?
- How psychologically safe does your team feel?
Now is the best time to assess how psychologically safe your team members felt this year. My ‘go-to’ resource for team leadership is Google’s Let’s make work better website. This has several great tools for team leaders, including this tool for measuring your team’s level of psychological safety.
Don’t let this year end without taking time to collect feedback and evaluate how you could have contributed to team members feeling more psychologically safe on the team. The next 2-3 months will go by very quickly, and if you don’t feel safe to facilitate this exercise over a few meetings with the whole team, then you need to make time to speak with each team member individually, even those team members you harbor the most controversial assumptions about.
Measuring how psychologically safe team members felt isn’t enough, though, you need to also probe how they could have felt more motivated to take greater interpersonal risks. The kind of risks where team members feel safe to give honest feedback, challenge how things are done, and propose new ideas. Did assumptions about team members’ own likability inhibit them from taking greater interpersonal risks?
If the research about the liking gap is correct, you might find that the only thing that prevented team members from taking greater interpersonal risks were assumptions team members had about each other. Therefore, to help you grow as a leader and to ensure your team next year is able to collaborate more effectively, you may find that to improve psychological safety you need to narrow the liking gap.
Michael
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