Nine minutes into the meeting, somebody says the thing nobody wanted to talk about.
The room does not engage with it. Two people find something suddenly fascinating on their laptops, one starts explaining why the timeline was always going to be tight, and the person who raised it gets a thank you and a promise that it will be picked up offline.
Everybody leaves agreeing that it was a productive meeting. The problem is still sitting there three weeks later, and by then it costs double to fix.
Nothing in that room was hostile. What happened is that The Wall went up in four people at roughly the same moment, and everything after that was theater.
What The Wall Is
The Wall is the divide we create between ourselves and others, rather than being 100% open. It is the internal divide you create the second you stop being open to another person, and it arrives in a second, sometimes in a blink.
One distinction is worth holding onto, because it is the one people get wrong. The Wall is not the disagreement. The Wall is what you do with the disagreement before you have heard it. A team with no disagreement in it is a team that has stopped being honest, so the disagreement was never the problem. The Wall is the decision to stop processing and working to understand the other person, and it gets made before they’ve even finished their point.
Once it is up, nothing can be received.
Openness is the opposite of this, and it can be difficult to put into practice. We define it as listening without reservation, putting your needs and wants on pause for someone else. That is a hard and meaningful thing to do. The Wall is what stops it from happening.
Why The Wall Goes Up
It goes up when you disagree with what is being said, when you judge the person saying it, or when you feel challenged, distracted, or tired.
None of those require anybody to behave badly, which is the part that surprises people. A reasonable leader who genuinely wants to hear hard things will put up The Wall on a Tuesday afternoon because they slept badly and have a board deck due Thursday.
The speed is what makes it difficult. The Wall rises fast, and you usually do not see it until the conversation is already over, which is why someone can walk out of a meeting certain they were open and completely unable to explain why nothing changed.
The Seven Walls
After 1,400+ assessments and thousands of hours in rooms with teams, the same walls appear over and over. These are the ones that recur, the list is not exhaustive, and you probably default to two or three of them.
The Aggressive Wall. You attack the idea so you do not have to consider it.
The I’m-Always-Right Wall. You have already decided who is correct, and the conversation is a formality.
The Nervous Wall. You’re so internally focused that nobody’s words even reach your ears.
The Busy Wall. Your attention is elsewhere, and the person speaking can feel it.
The Mad Wall. You are carrying something into the room that has nothing to do with what is in front of you.
The Exhausted Wall. You do not have the energy to process, so you do not.
The Control Wall. You are managing the outcome, so the input never gets in.
Knowing your own two or three defaults is more useful than knowing all seven, because those are the ones you will have to catch while a conversation is still happening.
What The Wall Costs a Team
A culture full of walls is a culture full of meetings that do not move anything.
Decisions get re-litigated weeks after everyone “agreed” to them, because nobody voiced their questions or concerns before nodding their heads. Real problems stay hidden until they are too expensive to ignore, and a thing that could have been named in a ten minute conversation in March turns into thousands of dollars of rework by summer that nobody traces back to the meeting where it almost got questioned, but didn’t.
The version of the team that shows up to the room is not the version of the team that exists. Speed dies first, and trust goes after it.
There is a quieter cost, too. The person who raised the hard thing and watched the room go polite learns something about what honesty is worth here, and they do not raise the next honest thought. You keep the employee and lose the contribution, and nothing you track will show you the week they decided and stopped giving their best ideas and opinions.
How to Take The Wall Down
Three steps, in this order.
Catch it. Name the wall to yourself the second it appears. “I am putting up the Busy Wall.” Naming it is the entire step, and it works because it turns a reaction you are having into an object you can look at.
Pause. Three full breaths before you respond. The pause is the practice, and three breaths is far longer than it sounds when somebody is sitting across from you waiting on an answer.
Reopen. Ask a question that signals you are still in the conversation. “Say more.” “What am I missing?”
Starting with The Agreement helps this go over more comfortably too because you actively show the process of remaining open. It challenges us to show up differently:
“Will you agree with me on how we’re going to communicate? I want you to be 100 percent honest, meaning be truly and freely yourself, speaking into what you want and how you feel. I promise you I will be 100 percent open to it. I will listen without reservation; I’ll put my needs and wants on pause for you. In return, I will be honest with you, and I ask that you be completely open to it.”
The Point Is Not to Never Put One Up
You will put up walls for the rest of your life, and so will everybody in your organization. The goal is to see it the moment it appears, which is the only moment when you can still do something about it.
Two questions help, asked afterward and somewhere quiet: What is my goal for this conversation? What assumptions am I making that might not be true?
The Pursuit of Honesty Assessment gives you an openness score and an honesty score in about ten minutes, at knowhonesty.com/assessment. The distance between your two scores tells you which side needs the work. Know Honesty is available on Amazon.