On tell versus suggest culture
Many people are familiar with the concept of ask culture versus guess culture, and how those different modes of interacting can impact relationships. I’ve also written previously about interrupt versus wait culture and how that can affect workplace relationships and team dynamics. There is one other pattern that I’ve noticed over the years that I think bears mentioning, and that is something I’m calling tell versus suggest culture.
These two modes can be seen in situations such as when a team is trying to decide on their next course of action.
Tell culture might phrase their opinions like this: “We should do X.” “Let’s start with Y.” “Z is the best option here.”
On the flip side, suggest culture might sound more like the following: “What about doing X?” “Have we thought about Y?” “Is there a reason we don’t want to do Z?”
Tell culture phrases sound more confident in their opinions, or it might seem that those opinions are more strongly held. However, that’s not necessarily what is happening. There can be various reasons why someone who is confident in their opinion might phrase it as a suggestion — for example, women in tech are often penalized for being “bossy” or “too aggressive” when they use tell culture phrases, and have learned over the years that suggest culture phrases get them better results.
On the surface, neither of these modes of communication is better than the other per se. But as with the other different cultural norms mentioned above, problems can start to arise when you have a mix of both groups but neither is explicitly aware of these dynamics or the impact they can have on overall team communication. The key is in the unspoken assumptions that underlie the different phrasings. Tell culture people seem to most often be operating under the assumption that they are just making a suggestion, and that anyone who disagrees with them will speak up and tell them so. Suggest culture people often think that if they aren’t actually telling people what to do, they shouldn’t phrase it that way, saving their imperatives for situations where they feel they’re really needed. When these two dynamics mix together, it can often lead to the suggest culture people feeling like they’re being steamrolled by the tell culture folks.
This is even more true when the tell culture people are at the upper end of a power imbalance.
I have seen plenty of managers over the years who seem genuinely confused when they say something like “we should do X” and nobody speaks up to disagree with them. “I just meant it as a suggestion,” they said, “I don’t understand why people didn’t feel comfortable saying something if they thought I was wrong.” I’ve seen this a lot in new managers who up until very recently were still individual contributors (ICs) — what they fail to realize is that the same words or phrasing that they used as an IC can carry a very different weight now that they’re a manager because of the power imbalance inherent in the manager-managee relationship.
The same thing goes for other ways that power imbalances might manifest themselves in a team. Someone who is a team lead, or who has been on the team for many more years than anyone else, or who just happens to be very well-liked throughout the org — these are people whose tell-sounding “suggestions” are going to come across a lot more like imperatives than they might have realized or meant.
(“But we have a flat org,” you protest, “we don’t have any hierarchies or power imbalances or—” No. I guarantee you that no matter how flat you think your organization is, there are still power differentials. The only difference is that you’ve made more of them invisible and harder to talk about. It’s really easy to not see a power imbalance when you’re the one with more power, because you’re not the one who is running up against the friction of it all the time.)
There isn’t a quick fix for this sort of thing. And if you’re a tell culture person with any reasonable amount of institutional power in your workplace, you might not have even noticed that there’s a problem.
Having a mix of suggest and tell people on your team doesn’t guarantee that there will be problems — depending on the personalities involved and the relationships between them, you might end up with tell culture people who are really good at accepting feedback, hearing implicit nos, and making room for other people to speak up, and you might have suggest culture people who feel perfectly comfortable throwing their ideas in the ring even if they’re phrased differently.
But it’s all too easy to end up in a situation where your suggest culture teammates feel steamrolled or ignored or talked over, and when that pattern persists for a while, resentment and distrust can start to build up. So what can you do to try and prevent those sorts of breakdowns from happening?
Raise awareness that different styles/norms exist. Even just making people aware that some people phrase what they mean as suggestions differently can make a difference — it’s one of those things that can sound obvious once you say it but oftentimes goes unconsidered until then.
If your team or org has a code of conduct or social rules that are documented, consider if you want to address this in those rules. If you’ve found that documenting social expectations works for you, clarifying expectations like this can be helpful.
Make sure people feel safe giving feedback about people and interactions within the org. If you’re a manager, it’s your responsibility to create a workspace where people feel safe and empowered enough to speak up if something is bothering them. And, as a manager, you also need to make sure there are processes in place for what people should do if they have an issue with their manager (i.e. you)! Nobody wants to think they’re the kind of coworker/manager that might be making other people uncomfortable, but pretending that situation will never happen isn’t going to prevent that possibility.
Managers and IC leaders should work to ensure that everyone on their team has room for their voice to be heard. This might mean things like facilitating meetings or group discussions to make room for suggesters, or having 1:1s with both tellers and suggesters on your team to help find communication patterns that work for everyone.
Some people (especially tellers) might want to say, “well, the suggesters should just be more confident and just speak up more,” but I would argue against that mindset for a couple different reasons. First of all, it’s not necessarily about confidence — and like I said about interrupt culture, insisting that everyone change towards a more aggressive style doesn’t necessarily get you the type of culture that you want to have. Secondly, “just” speaking up more isn’t always possible, especially when you consider different axes of marginalization and other workplace power dynamics. People who have less power within the organization for whatever reason aren’t necessarily going to be able to “just” challenge those dynamics — especially if they’re in a position where they have a lot riding on their continued employment, such as people on a work visa or people in a country where health insurance is tied to their employer.
It shouldn’t be the responsibility of those in a group with less power to try to change the dynamics of a group, especially not if trying to do so puts themselves at risk. Instead, those with more power — whether that be due to their role on an org chart, their tenure at the company, or because they’re generally playing life on easy mode — to be aware of how much space they take up and deliberately make room for others.