Interview

How leadership teams can face and fix

their “undiscussable” dysfunctions
John Sterling

n their 1994 landmark book on corporate strategy, Built to Last,[1] Jim Collins and

I Jerry Porras emphasized that the cultural success factor that distinguished high
performing companies from their underperforming peers was operating according
to a shared “Core Ideology” and a set of “Core Values.” In his follow-up book in 2001,
Good to Great,[2] Collins demonstrated how understanding those core values,
authentically living up to them and challenging others to do so contributed to
competitive advantage. Fundamentally, strategic success depends on leadership
embracing values such as honesty, humility, empathy and inclusivity and ensuring
those values are lived, especially when leadership teams are making strategic
decisions.
But in many corporate settings, leadership team dysfunctionality can undercut the
process of applying a core ideology and core values to decision making. To address
this, Professors Ginka Toegel and Jean-Louis Barsoux at the International Institute for
Management Development (IMD) have identified four categories of “undiscussables,”
toxic team and leadership behaviors that subvert the performance of leadership teams.
In their recent Sloan Management Review article “It’s Time to Tackle Your Team’s
Undiscussables” they prescribe a number of assessment, coaching and team building
approaches that help leadership recognize, address and
overcome these four categories of undiscussables.[3]
Professor Toegel is a teacher, facilitator and researcher in
leadership and human behavior and Term Research Professor
Barsoux works with organizations and teams seeking to perform
more effectively. They were interviewed by John Sterling, a Strategy
& Leadership contributing editor and Chief Marketing Officer at the
law firm Sterne, Kessler, Goldstein & Fox (jsterling@sternekessler.
com). He’s the author of Strategic Planning for Law Firms: A
Practical Roadmap.[4]
Strategy & Leadership: Thinking about corporate leadership and
decision making broadly, what are “undiscussable” issues and
how do they affect corporate strategy and culture? Are
undiscussable issues peripheral to corporate leadership or are
Professor Ginka Toegel, IMD photo they central?

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Professors Ginka Toegel and Jean-Louis Barsoux: When leadership teams are
struggling to make decisions or experiencing tensions, we’ve found that the symptoms
they tell us about often turn out to be red herrings. With dysfunctional teams in
organizations the root causes are always “undiscussables” of some kind – unexpressed
thoughts and feelings that, if addressed effectively, could help the team work more
productively.

It is a ubiquitous problem throughout most organizations. Team members are either

unable or unwilling to express what ails them, which systematically distorts their formal
and informal interactions. A team’s effectiveness depends on its capacity to discuss
what is holding it back. The more undiscussables there are, the harder it is for the team
to learn or adapt. So, this is really central to corporate leadership – especially when the
top team malfunctions – and the unreconciled tensions percolate down and are acted
out throughout the organization.
S&L: Can you summarize what “undiscussable” means? What are the four categories of
undiscussable issues you identified?

Toegel and Barsoux: “Undiscussables” is mostly taken to mean “issues we don’t bring up in
meetings.” We find it helpful to distinguish between four varieties of undiscussables, each
with its own drivers and solutions:
䊏 Things we think but don’t say.
䊏 Things we say but don’t mean.
䊏 Things we feel but can’t name.
䊏 Things we do but don’t realize.

Differentiating undiscussables helps teams tackle them more effectively.

S&L: You note that leaders often underestimate the consequences of not addressing and
confronting undiscussables issues. What are some of these consequences? Are there
examples of firms that have achieved a competitive advantage or avoided critical missteps
by addressing undiscussable issues?

Toegel and Barsoux: The consequences of ignoring

undiscussables – especially in top teams – range from toxic
cultures or a climate of frustration, to chronic underperformance,
predictable surprises and botched successions. Several high
profile corporate disasters, from Enron to Theranos, are rooted in
undiscussables – with dysfunctional top teams stifling questioning
voices – and slowly creating a culture of fear, denial and delusion
that ends up leading the company astray.

Conversely, certain corporate disruptors – such as Netflix and

Salesforce – have been very vocal in promoting transparency and
candor as core values. This starts with a top team whose members
are willing to challenge each other productively.

Mary Barra at GM offers a praiseworthy example of this kind of

leadership. Shortly after taking over as CEO of the beleaguered
carmaker in 2014, she asked the top 300 executives to name one
collective behavior that they would change if they could. Their
anonymous responses clustered around five behaviors, including Professor Jean-Louis Barsoux, IMD photo

VOL. 48 NO. 1 2020 j STRATEGY & LEADERSHIP j PAGE 13

 more candor and more accountability. Barra then ran a two-day 300-person conversation to
talk about the behaviors that were getting in their way.

That meeting proved pivotal in helping Barra to reset the culture and steer the notoriously
risk-averse and inward-looking company into new areas and partnerships – including ride
sharing, self-driven and electric vehicles – enabling GM to disrupt its own core business
from within.[5]

S&L: Your model addresses four layers of undiscussable issues. The first layer
involves teams or organizations that “think, but dare not say.” Is this a self-protection
strategy for individuals who do not want to speak-up about an undiscussable issue?

Toegel and Barsoux: At GM, Mary Barra complained about a widespread behavior she
called the “GM nod” – when people in meetings simply nod along to proposals without
raising their real objections. This reluctance to speak up is particularly acute if the
controversial issue concerns the person who holds the power and his or her management
style, decision-making approach or treatment of people.

S&L: You suggest that the “think but dare not say” layer can be addressed by a “straight
talk” approach. How does this work in practice?

Toegel and Barsoux: “Straight talk” is a concept proposed by Sherod Miller and his
colleagues at the University of Minnesota. They contrast it with “fight talk.” While both styles
of communication are based on candor, straight talk distinguishes clearly between the
individual and the issue. Fight talk tends to conflate them.

In one top team, the incoming CEO sensed the reticence in his team to challenge each
other so he got the head of HR to run an “honest dialogue” workout with the whole team.
Together they explored the differences between “straight talk” and “fight talk” to ensure that
risky or sensitive topics were brought up in a constructive spirit.

S&L: What happens if the leader is the main obstacle to straight talk?

Toegel and Barsoux: We often encounter situations where leaders want us to “fix the team”
without realizing that they are an integral part of the problem – either because they don’t
create a “safe environment” or because they seem to prefer the deference that is inherent in
overly cautious feedback.

The leader must educate followers to interact differently with him or her. For example, Mary
Barra pledged that GM’s top team would also be part of the culture change. She told her
senior executives, “If you see us not living these behaviors, call us out. Do it respectfully, but
call us out.”

“With dysfunctional teams in organizations the root causes

are always ‘undiscussables’ of some kind – unexpressed
thoughts and feelings that, if addressed effectively, could
help the team work more productively.”

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 “Team members are either unable or unwilling to express
what ails them, which systematically distorts their formal
and informal interactions.”

Leaders need to demonstrate to followers that they prefer it when people push back
and make them think. The leader has to make sure that people have a positive
experience when they do speak up. Emphasize how much it helps: “Your comments
really made me think. . .” or “I spent a lot of time thinking about what you said. Thanks
for raising this issue.”
S&L: The second layer of undiscussable involves “saying, but not meaning.” Many readers
can identify with this layer – organizations that don’t live up to their values or missions,
teams that effectively go through the motions, with no intention to follow through on what is
said.
Toegel and Barsoux: Spoken untruths are a prevalent problem in teams and organizations.
These undiscussables relate to discrepancies between what the team says it believes or
finds important and how it behaves – reflecting the distinction between “espoused theory”
and “theory-in-use,” famously highlighted by Harvard professor Chris Argyris and MIT
professor Donald Schön.
The main driver of spoken untruths is group-protection rather than self-protection. Team
members pointing out the mismatch between intentions and actions feel as if they are letting
their colleagues down and killing the cohesion and team spirit.
S&L: Often the “say, but don’t mean” issue arises because teams or organizations are trying
to protect each other or the organization from confronting unpleasant realities – a market
place undergoing dramatic restructuring, a competitor performing at a much higher level.
How do you get a team to recognize that such behavior is harmful? And, how does a team
move from “say, but don’t mean” to “doing what it says?”
Toegel and Barsoux: The more close-knit a team, the more prone it is to group-serving
biases – whereby the team takes credit for its successes while blaming external factors for
its failures. An important role for the team leader is to listen for recurrent discrepancies
between words and actions, to highlight their dangers and to signal a willingness to
address them.
A good starting point is to be honest about the difficulty within the team of telling each
other the truth – in terms of jeopardizing team harmony and relationships. This leads
into a discussion of the longer term risks they are taking as a team by failing to live up to
the challenges they have set for themselves. The leader can ask team members
to complete the question: “This is what we say, but what we mean is. . .” The aim is to
create a context where criticism is an expected norm and questioning each other’s
reasoning is not viewed as disloyal but rather as a valuable chance to learn and
improve together.
S&L: The third layer of undiscussables involves “feeling, but not naming.” Essentially, team
members can find themselves feeling dysfunctional in some way – annoyed, mistrustful,
disillusioned – but unable to express those feelings constructively.
Toegel and Barsoux: These are emotional undiscussables based on perceived
incompatibilities between team members. When team members interact, what one person
says or does – or fails to say or do – can be taken by a colleague as unhelpful, disparaging
or threatening. Such negative thoughts and feelings trigger defensive behavioral
responses, ranging from withdrawal to retaliation, that aggravate the situation.

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 What start out as professional differences of opinion between reasonable colleagues can
escalate to thinking, “Why are you being so stubborn/unreasonable/aggressive?” As
positions become polarized, meetings become arenas for point-scoring and finger-pointing
rather than issue-related deliberation.
S&L: How can leaders recognize that team members are experiencing the “feel, but not
name” layer of undiscussables? What are some common symptoms leaders should look
for?
Toegel and Barsoux: At a team level, you might notice signs of what Professor Donald
Hambrick of Penn State labels “behavioral disintegration,” characterized by diminished
interaction, meaningful exchange and collective effort. To get at the root cause, you first
have to label the emotions. As Dr. Daniel Siegel, clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA
School of Medicine, says about unarticulated emotion, “You need to name it to tame it.” One
way for the leader to encourage verbalization is to ask the team members to complete the
sentence “I am concerned about. . .” or “I feel frustrated because. . .” so that people can
share their concerns.
S&L: One of the fixes you recommend to the “feel, but not name” layer is formally assessing
leadership, personality and learning styles to help team members better understand the
roots of one another’s behavior. How can executive coaches and individual assessments
help individuals and teams overcome this layer of undiscussable issues?
Toegel and Barsoux: A neutral coach can help the feuding parties to investigate the drivers
of their apparent incompatibilities. One way of doing so is to use an audit that allows the
parties to surface unsuspected differences in worldviews, thus helping them to demystify
the behavior of colleagues and correct misattributions. They may discover that for cultural
reasons they differ dramatically in their communication styles or perception of their roles.
More generally, a coach can also highlight the value of having multiple personality profiles
on a team. A useful approach is to evoke a team project, where it might help to have a
succession of different personalities taking lead roles. If you can appreciate the value of
having outlier profiles on your team, it makes it easier to cope with the downside of their
strengths – and to accept diversity as a source of complementarity rather than friction.
S&L: The final layer of undiscussable, undoubtedly the most difficult, involves teams that
“do, but don’t realize” what the root cause of their collective dysfunction is. How does a
leader go about recognizing the undiscussable dysfunctions that are not consciously
realized? In other words, how does a leader see what he or she can’t really see?
Toegel and Barsoux: These are dysfunctional modes of functioning – such as excessive
dependency on the leader or fight-flight behaviors – that distract the team from its core task,
resulting in its ineffectiveness. While the leader may not be able to discern the underlying
causes, she or he will notice the symptoms – weak engagement, lack of ideas or delayed
decision-making.

“Several high profile corporate disasters, from Enron to

Theranos, are rooted in undiscussables – with dysfunctional
top teams stifling questioning voices – and slowly creating a
culture of fear, denial and delusion that ends up leading the
company astray.”

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 “We often encounter situations where leaders want us to ‘fix
the team’ without realizing that they are an integral part of
the problem.”

When this happens, teams need the help of a coach for three reasons: first, because the
leader is invariably part of the problem; second, to manage the emotions unleashed and
third, to encourage the team members to go deeper in their thinking. Sometimes, these
team dysfunctions turn out to be manifestations of problems in the wider system, including
the organization and its stakeholders.

For the coach, a good way to get the team onboard is first to film a team meeting.
Using selected film clips, the coach can encourage the entire team to take an outside-
in perspective and jointly reflect on what they see going on in terms of the team
dynamics. The group will notice things that they missed in real time – about who
speaks most, who interrupts whom, whose comments go unnoticed, who stays silent
and who people look at when they talk.

Based on such cues, the coach can start to ask naı̈ve questions – in a spirit of what MIT’s
Ed Schein calls “humble inquiry.” This places the emphasis on careful listening and
questioning designed to help others become more aware of their assumptions, inferences
and hasty conclusions.

The coach can also use the “five whys” technique borrowed from the Six Sigma
methodology to surface factors that are more representative of the primary causes of their
problem. The good news is that these dynamics lose much of their destructive power when
the team brings them into consciousness.

S&L: What’s your advice to practitioners about where to begin to break the logjam of
undiscussables? How can a leader or a team get started in addressing their own
undiscussables?

Toegel and Barsoux: Typically, teams are afflicted by undiscussables in all four categories.
But it is very difficult to address all at once. We recommend starting with the two categories
above the surface, namely “things we say but don’t mean” and “things we think but don’t
say.”

These are issues a team can collectively agree are problematic. Success in surfacing
undiscussables in these categories helps lower perceptions of the pain-gain threshold and
provides momentum to tackle other categories. Our preferred sequence is to start by
tackling the hypocrisy within the team, then the fear, then the conflict and finally, the
unawareness. Team leaders may be able to handle the first two conditions unaided but will
likely require professional assistance on the last two.

That said, rooting out undiscussables is not a one-off purge. Teams need to set time aside
to reflect on how they function – and team leaders need to incorporate check-in routines or
time-outs into team meetings to catch emerging concerns before they become entrenched.
S&L: What if the root cause is effectively an “emperor’s new clothes” situation – the
leader is in denial and does not want to open the floor to discussing undiscussables?
Are there steps that team members can take to intervene and break through? Short of

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 leadership commitment to surface and resolve undiscussables, are you suggesting
team members take major career risks to break through?
Toegel and Barsoux: In the scenario where the leader is in denial, the team needs to
make the leader aware that there is a problem. One way is to persuade HR to conduct a
360-degree feedback assessment. This would allow the team members as well as the
leader’s peers and boss to hold up a mirror to the team leader. The feedback would
make it possible to confront a team leader who seems oblivious to subordinate
perceptions and to the team’s dysfunctions. For example, team members may feel that
the leader encourages hub and spoke relations with them and that they do not really
work as a team – this observation could be included in the written comments offered
anonymously.
Conversely, the team leader may be aware of the situation but reluctant to address the
problem. Team leaders may feel they will expose themselves to blame and loss of
authority if they delve into dysfunctions they may have played a role in creating. They
also worry that they may not manage to resolve the issue, creating an even worse
mess.
In fact, discussing the situation always helps leaders gain credibility, rather than lose it.
Leaders become role models for confronting undiscussables – as well as how to invite
discussion and draw out concerns.
S&L: You note that, “. . .without open, honest discussion, a team cannot learn from its
mistakes or correct course.” Organizations that have strongly embraced the idea of
inclusion have reached a very similar conclusion, from a different point of view. Are there
similarities and differences between openly addressing undiscussables and actively
working toward the inclusion of all viewpoints on a team or an organization?
Toegel and Barsoux: Fundamentally, the approaches are quite similar. Developing a
culture of inclusion is definitely a step in the right direction – in that tackling
undiscussables without giving everyone a voice is nonsense. That said, inclusiveness is
a necessary but not a sufficient condition because leaders can actively elicit all the
views on a team without addressing the undiscussables. To combat undiscussables
you have to create a culture that values not just inclusion but also diversity of opinion,
questioning and disagreement.
S&L: In a similar vein, you discuss the importance of diverse perspectives, particularly for
organizations struggling to do what they say they will do, and say what they mean. How has
literature and practice around diversity – ethnic, geographic, educational and generational –
influenced your thinking and/or the development of the undiscussables model?
Toegel and Barsoux: The key to leveraging diversity is to ensure that individuals feel equally
welcome and accepted within the team. This resembles the concept of psychological safety
developed by Harvard professor Amy Edmondson.
More generally, the literature on diversity has heavily influenced our thinking on the third
category of undiscussables – “Things we feel but can’t name.” Diversity scholars distinguish
between “surface-level” differences – age, race, gender, functional background — and

“Leaders need to demonstrate to followers that they prefer it

when people push back and make them think.”

PAGE 18 j STRATEGY & LEADERSHIP j VOL. 48 NO. 1 2020

 “The aim is to create a context where criticism is an expected
norm and questioning each other’s reasoning is not viewed
as disloyal but rather as a valuable chance to learn and
improve together.”

deeper level differences in values, attitudes and personality. Research by David Harrison
and his colleagues at the University of Texas suggests that the effects of “surface-level”
differences decline as team members get to know each other. By contrast, the conflicts
arising from differences in personality, values and attitudes tend to increase over time. Left
unchecked or unmanaged, those conflicts can cripple team dynamics.
S&L: There is often unconscious bias at work in both individuals and teams. How does this
four-layered model of undiscussables handle that particular challenge?
Toegel and Barsoux: Unconscious biases are integral to our model. Different ones dominate
the different categories of undiscussables. For example, the first category – think but don’t
say – is underpinned by “pluralistic ignorance,” the social psychological bias whereby
individuals within a group feel inhibited to share their misgivings in public but assume that
the silence of their colleagues indicates that no one else objects.
The second category – say but don’t mean – is influenced by the status quo bias, in which
people show a preference for the way things are currently – and tend to perceive changes
as losses rather than gains.
The third category of undiscussables – feel but can’t name – are mostly driven by
perception and confirmation biases. When colleagues trigger our anxiety, distrust, irritation
or contempt, we are inclined to attach unflattering labels to them and then to seek out
information that fits those beliefs but dismiss information that doesn’t.
The final category – do but don’t realize – reflects the blind spot bias which is the failure to
recognize your own biases. Teams under pressure adopt dysfunctional ways of working to
cope with collective anxieties without being aware of doing so. Rather than addressing the
source of their anxiety, they choose to remain oblivious to it. Instead, they look for saviors,
scapegoats or common enemies to assuage their anxieties.
S&L: How did research and theory in organizational design and organizational behavior
inform and influence the development of your undiscussables model?
Toegel and Barsoux: Our model tries to reconcile three major streams of research on
team dynamics: from the psychodynamic tradition, the perspective of social
psychology and the management literature on teams, learning and coaching. Each
approach has a different take on what is left unsaid in teams – and to what extent it is
conscious or unconscious and on the complexity of team dynamics. Our model helps
identify the conflicts and dysfunctions that are misdiagnosed or not readily apparent,
as well as those that are known but not discussed. Our aim was to make these insights
more accessible to executives and easier for team leaders to understand when and
how they could tackle these issues.

Notes
1. Collins, J. and Porrass, J., 1994, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies
(HarperBusiness; 10th Revised edition 2004).
2. Collins, J., 2001, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t
(HarperBusiness).

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 3. https://shop.sloanreview.mit.edu/store/its-time-to-tackle-your-teams-undiscussables.
4. Sterling, J., Strategic Planning for Law Firms: A Practical Roadmap 2nd edition (ARK Group,
2018). www.ark-group.com/product/strategic-planning-law-firms-practical-roadmap-2nd-
edition#.XbYH4ppKguU
5. In the five years since that meeting, Barra has twice been named “Industry Leader of the Year” by
Automotive News.

Corresponding author
John Sterling an be contacted at: [email protected]

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