“Understanding ourselves, navigating the world around us, making sense of others, and recognising the impact we have on them. Because who are we, really, if not shaped by one another?“
Happy Wednesday, everyone. I’m Shaida Darian, a Business and Organisational Psychologist. I’m fascinated by three questions: Why does this happen? What can we do about it? And when should we act? Join me down the rabbit hole. With any luck, we’ll find Wonderland.
This week in workplace whiplash 🌀
Agreement in the room can unravel during delivery. BCG examines why leaders who share a strategic direction can still differ over what their teams should do next.
👉Read the story: When Leaders Say They Are Aligned, but Aren’tSeeing the speaker didn’t always help. In five experiments, people judged speakers’ reported feelings more accurately when they could hear them without seeing them.
👉Read the story: Voice-Only Communication Enhances Empathic Accuracy.Small words carry social clues. Across samples of speech and writing, patterns in everyday words such as I and we can offer clues about status and attention. A single pronoun tells us much less.
🤝 This edition is kindly brought to you by NINJIO
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Wednesday reflections
Who am I speaking to? I know my colleague’s role. I may have worked with them for years. What I don’t necessarily know is what they hope to achieve in this particular conversation, what is giving them pause, or what they think we have just agreed.
I’m Shaida Darian, an organisational and business psychologist. I started my career as an engineer, and I still have an engineer’s instinct for efficiency: state the goal, explain why it matters and get on with the work. I’ve come to appreciate how much can hide in that first step.
A team can agree on the common goal and still disagree about how to reach it. One person may judge the strategy by what it delivers for the project; another may be weighing what it means for the wider organisation. Personal stakes can sit alongside both. Someone might have a target to protect or a concern they hesitate to voice. Repeating the goal won’t resolve a disagreement whose cause we haven’t understood.
Which leads me to wonder: when someone hesitates in a boardroom or a team meeting, how well equipped are we as leaders to notice what hasn’t been said without assuming we know what it is?
Reading between the lines
🧠The organisational psychology lens
When a leadership team agrees on a strategic goal but hesitates during execution, it is easy to read that hesitation as a lack of commitment. Yet a colleague who says, “I don’t feel this is working for me,” may still support the goal. Their concern could be about the plan, a competing priority or a consequence the rest of the team has overlooked.
Transactional Analysis offers a way to understand how a leader’s interpretation shapes the response. Berne described three ego states:
Parent draws on learned rules and familiar ways of guiding, protecting or correcting others.
Adult assesses the present situation and the evidence available.
Child draws on patterns of feeling and responding formed earlier in life.
A person can move between these states. Hesitation alone tells us little about which state a colleague is speaking from. They may already be assessing the situation from Adult and trying to raise a legitimate concern.
In TA, the exchange matters: which ego state a person speaks from, which state they address in the other person, and which state actually responds.
🚀What this means for leaders
Agreement on a goal does not settle every decision about how to achieve it. When a colleague raises a reservation during execution, the leader’s response can make it easier to examine the plan or harder to question it. Three practices help keep the discussion useful.
Practice 1: Clarify what is being questioned. When someone says, “I don’t feel this is working for me,” the word that needs clarification is this. Responding with “We’ve already agreed on the goal” asks the colleague to defend their commitment before they have explained their concern. Start with: “Which part isn’t working from where you sit?” Give them room to identify a practical constraint, a competing priority or a personal stake you may not have considered.
Practice 2: Invite their judgement before offering yours. Notice the impulse to say, “You should have done it my way,” or “Let me take this one.” The first invites a defence; the second can transfer responsibility before either person understands the problem. An Adult-to-Adult invitation is more useful here: “Given what you’ve seen, what would you keep and what would you change?” The leader remains accountable for the decision, and the colleague gets to contribute the judgement their experience affords them.
Practice 3: Make clear how the concern affected the decision. Before moving on, summarise the issue as you understand it and give the colleague a chance to correct you. Then state what the team will keep, change or investigate, and why. A concern can deserve a hearing without warranting a change of plan. The practical test is whether the colleague can recognise their concern in the reasoning behind the decision, even if they would have chosen differently.
💬 Final thoughts
When disagreement surfaces, it helps to recognise the ego state a colleague may be speaking from and the response they may be inviting. An Adult-to-Adult exchange can help two colleagues examine what is happening. A nurturing Parent-to-Child response can offer reassurance when someone is seeking support. A Parent-to-Parent exchange can affirm a shared standard, though agreeing on the rule may still leave open whether it fits the situation.
The risk comes when a leader mistakes one invitation for another. A colleague who raises a concern about the plan may be asking for our judgement; if we respond with correction, they may leave knowing what we expect while we still do not know what they saw. Recognising that shift gives us a chance to return to the disagreement that brought them to us in the first place.
“They may leave knowing what we expect while we still do not know what they saw.”
How's the depth of today's edition?
If something here speaks to you, I’d love to hear it.
Until next week,
Shaida
P.S. For a Child-to-Child exchange, picture two colleagues cycling home in the pouring rain, laughing all the way. Neither will admit whose idea it was.
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