Written by Laura Birch, Client Services Manager at Will It Make The Boat Go Faster?
I lead the relationship with a number of Will It Make The Boat Go Faster?’s clients, supporting the effective delivery of our work. I’m currently working on a range of projects helping organisations get clarity of direction and accelerating business growth – through making the very best of their people in teams and as leaders.
If I were to ask you “On a scale of 1-10 as a team, how open and honest are you?” where do you think you would sit? Perhaps your team sits lower down the scale than you’d like? We’re seeing many teams struggling with communication in our work with clients right now.
What is the value of open communication?
Think about the classic game ‘Chinese Whispers’. A message is passed down a line of people, in a whisper, until it reaches the end. How often do you recall the final message being the same as the original? Barely ever, right? As you move through the line, the message often changes into something entirely different from what the first person initially said. Now, consider how the same thing can happen in real life. A lack of open communication can cause mistakes based on miscommunicated messages and mixed signals. Without clear and consistent communication, tasks can go uncompleted, and things start to fall between the cracks. Team members can become disengaged, and a sense of teamwork is lost. In some cases, this can lead to friction and frustration among team members, resulting in a tense environment where people are not productive or collaborative.
Ultimately, how your team communicates can impact team and business performance. Workplace communication statistics show that 86% of employees and executives cite the lack of effective collaboration and communication as the main cause of workplace failures.
Good communication is required for a team to be considered high performing. When people learn to communicate openly and honestly with one another, trust grows and relationships strengthen, which has a wide range of positive effects on teamwork, morale, engagement, and productivity.
For many years, we worked hard, we were motivated, and we were really keen to win… but we didn’t. In actual fact, we didn’t work well together, we weren’t open to change or learning, and we weren’t open with each other. However, over the course of two years this changed. As it changed our boat got faster and faster. We became better at sharing what we thought and got better at making decisions. We became more open to change, we became more honest with each other. All the time our boat speed got faster and faster.
Ben Hunt-Davis
Why are teams lacking a culture of openness in their communication?
Having navigated the turbulence of the pandemic, a lot of companies are still navigating the challenges of hybrid working. Many teams we work with have barely been together face-to-face for over two years. Some still haven’t met each other in person! As many still have limited physical time together, it is vital now, more than ever that teams stay connected. Leader’s need to lead the charge by enabling that connection in their teams.
The value of psychological safety
“Project Aristotle,” which investigated the characteristics shared by Google’s most successful teams, discovered that the key factor driving high performance and openness was ‘psychological safety.’
Psychological safety is a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up
Amy Edmondson (1999)
Team members feel safe sharing and expressing their vulnerabilities, mistakes, and challenges when there is psychological safety. This means they are more likely to ask for help, which promotes learning and builds trust in a team environment.
Psychological safety is important because, not only does it encourage a culture of openness in communication, but when team members feel safe expressing themselves it inspires creativity, improves well-being and boosts performance.
Below are Will It Make The Boat Go Faster’s? top tips that are working for our clients. Try these out to encourage open communication in your team:
1. What relationships do you need to build?
Teams with strong, trusting, and authentic relationships are more effective overall than those without.
At Will It Make The Boat Go Faster? we use ‘The Rapport Ladder’ as a framework to demonstrate how to engage with colleagues on a deeper level. Each level represents the degree to which people are willing to communicate about themselves and demonstrates how you can have more meaningful conversations.
Of course, opening up makes you more vulnerable and has an element of risk, but it also builds a level of trust which encourages psychological safety within a team.
Take a moment to consider your team. Who could you improve your relationships with? Think about what stage of comfort you’d place yourself at with each individual. This may indicate which relationship you need to nurture.


How well do you really know the people you work with, outside of their day-to-day role? People need to understand each other, what their motivations are, what makes them tick, what previous experiences got them to where they are now and how can you get the best out of them?
The more you can engage in those meaningful conversations, the more you can connect facts and information to emotions and feelings. In doing so, this helps you to make more insightful decisions regarding your colleagues in terms of how they work, what motivates them and how you can get the best out of them. This will not only encourage high performance from individuals but from the team as a collective.
2. Giving and receiving feedback
Effective feedback opens up the communication channels between employees. It can be used in a wealth of ways:
Resolving issues early – It’s easier to get things out in the open so that issues can be resolved
Performance improvement – As a tool used by leaders and managers to indicate how well someone is performing and where they might be able to improve in their role
Growth and development – To foster positive leader-employee relationships by showing that, as a leader you are invested in each employee’s growth and development
No matter the context, it is essential that feedback is delivered well. It’s helpful to see the act of giving feedback as a “moment of trust”. If you deliver it with competence and care, the level of trust in a relationship can leap forward. Yet, fumble it and the opposite can happen.
At Will It Make The Boat Go Faster?, we use a simple model which provides a framework to enable you to focus feedback and help lead conversations constructively. We call it the AID model. This stands for:


For those relationships you identified earlier that need nurturing, try using the AID model. If it’s a difficult conversation you need to have but aren’t sure where to start, try structuring it around the three areas above to help ensure the feedback lands in a constructive way.
3. Team rules – clarify your ways of working
What’s consistent in high performing teams is they are very clear on how they work together in order to be most effective. Being clear how you best work with your team and stay connected in a fast-paced world is critical. Particularly if you’re working in a new environment or with a new team.
Ben’s crew had team rules to focus them on the behaviours that they need to improve on/do more of to become a high performing crew and achieve their goal. Everyone was involved in generating ideas and discussing them. The crew made it their job to know themselves and each other very well.


If your team is struggling with communication, try establishing a set of team rules around it. For example, a team rule that one of our clients came up with just this month is “Debate, Decide, Unite” which refers to how their Leadership Team must ensure that when they leave the room they are all in agreement/aligned on decisions. This nips any Chinese whispers in the bud before they could go any further.
Try moving through the above exercises with your team in mind. As you move through each, think about what actions you can take individually and with your teams to improve openness and psychological safety in your workplace.