How to Get Honest Opinions from Your Team

A simple technique can uncover the truth

The Queen lives in a world of fresh paint and furniture polish. Everywhere she travels, people adjust their lives to accommodate her every need.

Life as a new manager can feel similar. After getting promoted, your jokes become funnier, while your ideas are nuggets of pure wisdom from the gods. It’s fun at first, but you soon hanker to see past the sycophancy and discover what people really think.

If you cannot access the real opinions of your team, you’re doomed to half-baked ideas that haven’t benefited from rigorous debate. You can try to play Devil’s Advocate with your own ideas, of course. But, the same brain that concocted an idea is not the best tool for dissecting it. We need other perspectives for that.

Since adopting a senior role, I’ve been struggling to unearth my team’s real opinions. Along the way I’ve learnt to withhold my thoughts until others have spoken (although I’m not perfect at this). I also caveat my views with a weighting, so my team knows what’s a mild suggestion versus very strong opinion. But one method has stood out above the others: the good hat, bad hat technique.

My mentor explained the idea to me, and it’s very simple. In any argument, you can assign someone to wear the good hat or the bad hat. When wearing the good hat, the person must advocate for the idea under discussion, regardless of their true feelings. But more importantly, when wearing the bad hat, the person needs to find fault with the idea presented. Even if the boss came up with it.

The first time I tried this was during a weekly staff meeting. We discussed an important topic for a few minutes, and I sat back listening to the conversation. As we approached a conclusion, I stepped in to synthesise what I’d heard and propose a way forward. There…

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