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Rasa Baltė Balčiūnienė / photo by R. Verseckaitė

15min.lt

Having worked extensively with organisations and their leaders, I often hear how important openness is in their teams. Why has it become such an aspiration and what kind of openness are we talking about?

Often people equate a manager with authority and feel that they are less than them - less valuable. That is when our behaviour becomes unconsciously oriented towards how the authority wants to see me, which makes it difficult to talk about openness.

Often in such cases, patterns from childhood, from the family, come to the fore: maybe we unconsciously avoid conflict and therefore agree more often, or maybe we want to prove something, to be praised, or we start to rebel. Such reactions are often not related to the "here and now" context, and we tend to absolutize and take them personally. A brief personal story: as a child, it was always important to me that my mother not only allowed me to do something, casually saying "well, that's good", but also that she emotionally approved of it.

It was only after a while that I realised that I had transferred this model to the organisation I run - the emotional support of some of the staff was very important to me.

Now that I have recognised this, I realise that it is futile to strive for total emotional compatibility and I am able to catch such moments.

Contexts and levels of openness

Openness is not possible without a sense of self-esteem. For example, my supervisor or a colleague in a professional or business context has more competences, knows more, but that does not mean that he is more valuable than me as a person. Openness is only possible when a person is able to accept himself as valuable. We should also clarify what kind of openness we are talking about - is it sharing one's personal life experiences? Not exactly. The most desirable openness in organisations is business openness - it means that we are all focused on a certain outcome and we need openness to achieve that outcome.

There are several levels of openness at work:

First level. There is no openness - people at work say what they want to hear and play word games: I know what I need to say to be believed, and I know when I will be misunderstood and frustrated. The manager basically doesn't even raise the issue of openness, or feels that everyone is already open. In such organisations, you can only please but not feel that you belong.

Second level. The manager deliberately encourages openness, speaks openly and wants employees to be open. But the manager's unconscious behaviour kicks in and it just doesn't work. Everyone, not least the manager, has unconscious patterns of behaviour from childhood, strategies that worked well at the time and are completely irrelevant today. For example, some people identify their actions and decisions with their own personality and, as a result, are often offended when criticised. Employees quickly learn this and are open enough not to embarrass the manager. The manager must learn to understand in which situations. The leader must learn to understand in which situations he/she reacts emotionally because of his/her unconscious behavioural "buttons" and that this blocks openness.

Third level. The leader encourages openness and is able to recognise his/her own unconscious behaviours, and is able to reflect on them, bypass them, suppress them. At this level, openness is hindered by some employees who do not dare to say certain things because of behavioural scripts acquired in childhood.

Do we all have to be open?

Let us not be too idealistic - the number of people in organisations capable of being on an equal footing may be as low as 20%. The question is, do we need to demand 100%? After all, openness does not determine performance in all positions, and in some cases the employee is just doing his or her job. However, if a person has great potential in an organisation, it is certainly worth investing in individual work with him or her so that he or she can overcome personal barriers to openness. High-quality, systematic awareness training could help. When a person starts on the path of awareness, the first major achievement is when he or she becomes unafraid of himself or herself, when he or she becomes the author of his or her own life (at work - his or her own task, project, etc.). When he leaves the position of a passive observer (I do everything, but I don't feel responsible) or a victim (I am constantly expressing my dissatisfaction with inadequate conditions and feel deprived). Openness within the team is also encouraged by joint activities. I'm not talking about when a colleague says everything that's on his heart and is relieved when he's drunk at a party - that's more like short-term therapy, which doesn't bring any more openness into the team.

I would highlight those activities where there is reflection and a sense of shared wonder. It's like a team bonding for growth. If everybody in the team is doing something together and discovering something new about themselves, the organisation or life, that's when the culture of the company develops and the environment for openness becomes much more favourable.