Do You Like Me?
This may surprise people, but I am incredibly insecure about my likability. I seldom have a first encounter with someone where I made the conversation awkward by not being more genuine. Often, in workshops or when working in teams, my insecurity manifests by a sense that I am dominating the space. I feel like I need to ‘fill’ the space. If you are like me, silence can be deafening. Unfortunately, the result of my feelings often lead me to not following up with people I just met or to seek feedback from the groups I am working with.
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.’
Here are two questions I want leaders to ponder:
Do you or other team members allow assumptions about your own likability impede transformative collaboration?
What is your team’s level of psychologically safety?
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, challenging 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 Iannini is an education management consultant that is recognized by the Council of International Schools as an expert in Strategic Planning, Governance, Human Resource Management, and Leadership Development. He is the author of Hidden in Plain Sight: Realizing the Full Potential of Middle Leaders, and coordinates professional development for a network of over 250 private schools in Asia for the Association of China and Mongolia International Schools and Search Associates. You can learn more about Michael and his work by visiting www.pdacademia.com and www.middleleader.com.
