How little do we know about each other when we are working as a team? Can we really work as a team when all I know is the professional persona of the person in front of me, or his or her role representing a particular constituency?
Many decades ago Harry Ingram and Joe Luft devised a clever two by two framework, known as the Johari Window. The history of this important contribution to the human relations field can be found here.
I have always liked this framework as it not only shows why feedback is important but also why disclosure is important, the kind of disclosure that gives others a peek behind the persona curtain.
I have had plenty of experiences with others who I was quick to judge, rather harshly, only to find out later that their life experiences were worthy of my respect . This discovery led me to change my judgment and increased my tolerance of the behavior I previously disliked.
When people start to disclose things about themselves there is a palpable shift in energy in the room; sometimes people even move in closer with their bodies as they don’t want to miss anything about how the other is shaped by the past. People’s life stories are endlessly fascinating – that is why we humans like to write, read and make movies about other humans.
There used to be a time that people were admonished to ‘leave their personality by the door.’ As if half a person could do the work of a whole person. Some people may still believe that it is possible to do so, but I think they are in the minority now. Anything personal, and in particular feelings, had no place in organizations, at least not when I started working, some four decades ago. I am glad that this is now changing thanks to the enormous body of research on emotional intelligence and the flood of neuroscience experiments measuring the presence, surges or absence of certain neurochemicals in our blood and how that changes our behavior and our thinking.
Because self-disclosure nearly always includes information about feelings (and if not explicitly mentioned, then at least some feelings will leak out), we see a more complete person emerge, complete and faulty, just like we are ourselves. This, contrary to beliefs about workplace efficiency from the days of the industrial revolution, helps with the task that the team has at hand. There will be less interference of assumptions, judgments and other energy drains that take us away from the work we have to do together.
I have seen teams derail completely by getting to work right away, with work meaning a review of the team’s terms of reference, charter or mandate. This is especially likely if the team leader abhors self-disclosure and thus cannot tolerate time for this upfront investment of time, as it seems frivolous, unprofessional, irrelevant.