Why this matters
To mitigate against Impression Management, the Impression Management Counters encourage your team to work on reflective logs to understand how and when they have not spoken up that day or week.
Over time, this will turn into less fearful, negative behaviour and more honest conversations.
The questions you ask here give you a great, in-the-moment chance to see how Impression Management is affecting you and your psychological safety in real-time.
Doing the work on impression management is a direct antidote to low psychological safety.
How to run it
- 1
Facilitator to prepare a virtual board with the following questions and ask everyone to read them for 5 minutes, answer them (in their heads) for 5 minutes and then to share one example each
- “In the last period, have I stopped myself from saying something?” - “Why have I done that?”
- “Was I afraid of X?!”
- “Was I fearing looking incompetent?”
- “Was I protecting against looking ignorant?”
- “Was I concerned about appearing intrusive?”
- “Was I worried about seeming negative?”
- “Have I seen myself do that?”
- “Have I seen others stop themselves from saying something or biting their lip instead of speaking up?”
- 2
All commit to use these questions, and take them to heart as day-to-day week-to-week Impression Management Counters to help you bring Impression Management down and send Psychological Safety up.
What next
Keep an eye on improvement variation for a month by closely monitoring the amount of Impression Management Alerts and do the extended version if necessary
Related resources
- Why Do We Impression Manage? (article)
- Ignore Impression Management at Your Own Peril (article)
- 5 Tips for Lowering Impression Management (video)