This is one question, and it is the one I put to a room of legal leaders. You can bring it into a team meeting exactly as it is. It costs you twenty minutes and it tells you something no engagement survey will.
The Question
“What concern, risk, workload issue, communication breakdown, or developmental need might people be reluctant to raise on our team?”
What This Is For
Participants consider a leadership question that is especially relevant in legal environments. This exercise helps leaders identify where silence may be operating. It also teaches them how to invite candor without becoming defensive.
How to Use It
Bring your team together and ask the question above. Your role is not to defend, explain, or solve everything in the moment. Your role is to listen, thank people for their candor, and identify one specific follow-through action.
A Second Question, for a Leadership Team
“What is one issue our team should discuss earlier, more openly, or more constructively?”
The Response to Practice
When someone does say the true thing, this is what a leader says back. Practise it until it is the first thing out of your mouth.
“Thank you for bringing that forward. Let’s understand the facts, the impact, what support is needed, and what we can improve.”
Three Things to Hold Onto
Ask the question, then stop talking. The silence after it is the whole point.
Do not defend, explain, or solve in the moment. Listen, thank them, and name one follow-through action.
The room may go quiet first. That is not the exercise failing — that is people deciding whether it is safe.
Silence is not harmony. It is the thing that turns a small problem into a departed associate.
From the workshop “Leading Through Courage With Vulnerability” · Delivered by Carl Shawn Watkins Consulting™