For collaboration to flourish in a workplace, employees need a judgment-free environment that welcomes both hard questions and bold solutions. As a chief learning officer, if you want to foster cross-departmental collaboration and teamwork, you must build and nurture a safe, transparent culture in which information can flow freely.
In this article, I will focus on the fear of being honest. CLOs who not only encourage openness and honesty as part of their organizational culture, but also model and embody transparency themselves, will find that collaboration comes more naturally to their workforce.
Your to-do list
Here are five ways to encourage open, healthy communications throughout your organization as a CLO. With these in place, collaboration will naturally follow.
Create a sense of psychological safety. This is a belief that there are no “silly” ideas or questions. Your team needs to be able to bring up ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes. Keep in mind: This will take time! Modeling this from the top-down is the best strategy. If an employee sees their manager or department leader speaking freely, they’ll know they can too.
Build effective systems for constructive feedback. Teach both managers and employees to frame feedback in a way that’s specific and issue-focused. Using a peer-to-peer survey will offer your team practice in both giving and receiving constructive feedback that benefits both parties.
Offer experiences that cultivate empathy. Allow time for your team to periodically shadow each other so they can get a sense of their co-worker’s day-to-day responsibilities and challenges. This will break down invisible workplace barriers, allowing team members to be more honest and real when and where it counts.
Guide employees through conflict. If an employee often comes to you for intervention, use this opportunity to mentor them through the situation, rather than solving it for them by talking to their managers. Give them conversation prompts, suggestions on how or when to approach the team member and give them praise when they handle it on their own.
Reward failure and smart risks. To bolster your organization’s culture of psychological safety, make it a point to celebrate failures when something was learned from it. Give kudos to a team member who took a leap and made it work.
Your next executive team discussion points
The next time you get together, talk about your team’s level of psychological safety: What are your areas of strength? Your areas of weakness? Which of the items on the to-do list would have the most immediate impact on team culture?
