Addressing the elephant in the room

Leadership Lesson #1: Point Out the Elephant in the Room

As I look back on this past year, I cannot tell you how many times I have attended an in person or virtual meeting where no one wanted to talk about or bring up what everyone was thinking. At first, I simply brushed it off as people just being polite. However, as time went on, I realized that avoiding the elephant in the room was endemic within our organization. I quickly realized that what I had excused away as simple polite behavior was actually a smokescreen clouding an inability and an unwillingness to have hard conversations. At times, it was accountability that we avoided. At other times, it was a discussion about the efficacy of our initiatives that we avoided. And in some rare cases, it was downright toxic leadership that was ignored.

Whatever the issue, there was an elephant in almost every room I visited. And what I learned is that effective leaders need to know when and how to address those elephants. We need to be willing to have the hard conversations and ask the hard questions. We do this not to be combative. We don’t do it simply to make a point. We do it because toxic, complacent, and uninspiring organizational cultures are created by allowing those elephants to be long term inhabitants of our workplace. And when left unchecked for any long period of time, these elephants become almost impossible to point out. This can occur either because they have been avoided for so long that they are difficult to even notice them anymore or because through each passing year, the courage required to have the difficult conversation grows exponentially.

So, are there elephants in the room at your organization that no one wants to point out? If so, I hope this lesson that I learned over the past year serves as a gentle encouragement to courageously and gracefully point them out for simply this reason–because that’s what we as leaders are called to do.