What's wrong with an open door policy?
How often have you said to people around you ‘my door is always open’? It’s such a common phrase, one that’s generally meant to make it clear that you are approachable, accessible, and ‘there’ for those around you.
Does it actually work though?
This is something that often comes up in the coaching I do with senior leaders. And actually the purpose is usually twofold: yes, it’s meant to deliver a message that people around you can come and talk to you if needed; but it’s also a way to ensure that as senior leaders you stay in touch with what’s going on in your organisation, and ensure an important and healthy flow of information and feedback upwards.
The usual response of most senior leaders is that they appreciate the ‘why’ for having this policy, but initially focus in on how to make it work in practice in a way that ensures it doesn’t become all-consuming and unworkable. In reality, what we generally see is that telling people that ‘my door is always open’ does not lead to a significant uptake of people making use of that open door.
Why is that the case? Well there is a huge difference between throwing out a blanket statement, and effortfully ensuring that people around you really understand that you mean it. This becomes even more of an issue the more senior you are, when there are issues of hierarchy, prestige and power that can impede people’s willingness to disturb your time and feel justified in doing so.
Thanks to Tom Geraghty, an expert in the field of psychological safety, I came across a piece of research which had some interesting findings. Using simulation of team scenarios in healthcare education, researchers identified a couple of common misconceptions around approachability:
Approachability is a fixed characteristic - the belief that you either are approachable or you aren’t.
Approachability is mostly about avoiding negative behaviours, such as overt rudeness, chastising people for disturbing you or punishing those who admit mistakes.
The research was aimed at tackling the “epidemic of silence” in healthcare and in doing so, improve patient safety. What their data showed was that approachability is “a dynamic state that is constantly reconstructed through action” and is “more fragile” than often assumed. And because it’s more fragile, we have to keep working at it, and do so more proactively to invite speaking up and engagement than we realise. This is especially true if we’re in a position of leadership or power.
As Geraghty explained, in other words it’s not enough to avoid the behaviours that make you unapproachable. You have to actively engage in behaviours that make you approachable.
This might seem like a lot of work, but the problem is, if we’re in a leadership role, and we assume that we are approachable - that this is a fixed state and that’s ‘job done,’ then we’re putting the onus for any change in ‘speaking up’ behaviour onto those around us. Unfortunately in many contexts, not just healthcare, this results in those with least power being asked to “speak up”, “be courageous” or “lean in” while ignoring the very real risks that doing those things may pose for them. And if they don’t speak up, it’s too easy to place the blame on them, when it’s likely that they want to speak up, or at least know they should, but the space they are in does not feel safe enough for them to do so.
Geraghty highlights that of course the flip side of this is the realisation that because “approachability” isn’t a fixed characteristic, it is also something we can improve, especially if approachability isn’t our natural strength, or the organisational dynamics mean we’re in a position where many automatically consider us unapproachable.
So what should we be doing?
What this tells us is that we need to be more proactive, more effortful, if we truly want people around us to feel that we are approachable and accessible. And this is even more the case where the norm is no longer that we all work in the same office, with an ability to just ‘pop in’ when needed. Using behaviour change theory to help our thinking in this space, a central principle is that we should be ‘shaping the path’ – ie making the good behaviour easy and the bad behaviour hard. Making it easy for people to approach you therefore, rather than making it harder.
One method of doing this is to have set ‘office hours’ where people know that you are free and available to be disturbed. For some this can be quite relaxed, for others they might need people to book into slots via their executive assistants – whatever the process used, the principle is that there is dedicated time where you are ‘expecting’ to be approached by people, thereby making it easier for those people to feel comfortable disturbing you. And this might be in person, or via slots on Teams or similar technology.
If it’s taking time for people to build up the habit of using these office hours, start ‘seeding’ them with friendly colleagues so that others see activity and the herd instinct starts to build and take over.
If that just seems too formal, it’s also important to look to how you react in a situation where someone does take advantage of your ‘open door’ policy and comes and speaks to you. How you react will be critical to their, and others’, willingness to come and disturb you again. If you react in a way that suggests their disturbance is unwelcome, if you react angrily, or impatiently, or say that you are busy and can they come back another time, they are unlikely to want to repeat the experience. And if they share this with others in the team, the impact will be broader than on just that one individual. If however you are welcoming, warm and responsive, then not only will that help that interaction, it will help encourage further interactions. What happens if you are actually in the middle of something? Deliver a message which makes them feel that you very much want to hear what they want to say, you just have something you are in the middle of which you can’t break from, and arrange a time for them to ‘pop in’ again (or for you to go and see/call them) that suits both of you.
There’s one final element of which we need to be aware. One of the reasons to have an open door policy is to ensure that people can come and speak when they’re not sure about something, or to ask for help. Modelling that behaviour yourself can really promote this kind of behaviour. So think about how much you ask for help from those around you. How much you look to discuss, and collaborate on, issues you are facing, and share when things are not going well. The more you do that, the more likely that your people will feel comfortable doing the same.
For more on this or any aspect of leadership and performance, with a healthy dose of mindset, sport, and I hope usefulness thrown in, do feel free to browse through all the articles in the Huddle, or get in touch with me directly on catherine@sportandbeyond.co.uk. To order a copy of my book - Staying the Distance: The Lessons From Sport That Business Leaders Have Been Missing – click here .