Most people have something they’d like to say at work and don’t. Maybe it’s asking for a raise, or for more responsibility, or for some flexibility while something is going on at home. Wingspan Founder Christina Wing has spent a lot of time thinking about why that happens, and she talked it through with careers columnist Vicki Salemi in “Talking about taboo topics at work,” a Tribune Content Agency column that ran on Yahoo.
Christina, who has written a book on these topics called Unspeakable: The Taboo Topics We Avoid and How to Talk About Them, traces most of that silence back to fear. The first is fear of punishment, the worry about what speaking up could cost you in promotions, assignments or how you’re treated day to day. From there it branches out. Fear of authority makes people defer to someone because of their title. Fear of judgment makes them anxious that others will think less of them. Fear of conflict keeps them quiet when they know a conversation will get uncomfortable. Fear of ambition stops someone from saying they want more responsibility, because they don’t want to come across as entitled or ungrateful. And fear of failure keeps people from taking risks at all.
These fears tend to show up together, and when they do, people stop sharing information and stop saying what they want. Christina’s view is that the person and the business both pay for it.
The column also gets into two subjects that make a lot of people nervous at work. On politics, which comes up more often around elections, her advice is to listen instead of debate. Don’t try to change anyone’s vote, stick to issues rather than candidates, and think about how much of your own politics you want to share. On money, she knows many people grew up being told it’s rude to talk about it, but at work that habit gets in the way. Ask about the pay range when you’re discussing a job, and if you feel underpaid, tell your manager. Speaking as a company owner, she said she’d much rather hear that directly than lose someone over an amount the company might have been willing to pay.
Christina is also clear that it isn’t all on the employee. In the book, she writes about a leader who sat down with every person on his team once a year for what he called a “capacity and life-stage conversation.” He asked what was going on outside of work and what flexibility would help. Because everyone had the conversation, nobody felt like they were asking for special treatment when they needed something.
“Speaking honestly and openly is a skill and people get better the more they practice it.”
She sees the same thing with the families Wingspan works with. The hard conversations get easier once people start having them.
Link to the full article below.
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To order a copy of Unspeakable, visit Christina’s website.
