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Professor Celia Moore, Kate Coombs, Dr Minjie Gao,Juliane Schittek, ³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ Business School, in partnership with Carol Franceschini and the Financial Services Culture Board. August 2024.

Problem

Constructive challenge is one of the most powerful safeguards against poor decisions, misconduct and organisational failure. Yet many leaders struggle to create environments in which people feel able to question decisions or raise concerns. Although organisations increasingly recognise the importance of employee voice, there is little evidence about the specific everyday leader behaviours that make challenge more likely. Our research set out to identify those behaviours and test whether they work in practice.

Science

We partnered with the Financial Services Culture Board (FSCB) and a major financial institution to run a field experiment inside a real risk and compliance team. We asked team leaders to chair a meeting in which they proposed what they privately knew was the weakest idea on the table. We coded every strategy leaders used to invite challenge and measured whether those strategies worked.

Outcome

The most common strategies leaders use to invite challenge are among the least effective. Vague open questions such as "Anyone else?" produced challenge only half the time. Asking specifically for disagreement raised the likelihood of challenge to 62%. Acknowledging a team member's challenge as legitimate raised it to 87%. Leaders who used humour and informal interaction had 55% of meeting turns devoted to challenge, compared to 43% in meetings without it. In five of the six meetings where leaders used voting to reach a decision, teams successfully overturned the bad idea.

Change

Our research gives leaders specific, tested behaviours that make a measurable difference to whether teams speak up in a practical framework, summarised as ACTS: accountability, conversation, time and soliciting specifically. The research is used as live teaching material on the Responsible Leadership in a Complex World programme and in the Centre's masterclass series.