259. Quick Thinks: Task-Focused to People-Focused—A Smarter Way to Communicate

What It Covers

Megan Reitz, associate fellow at University of Oxford SAID Business School, explains her research on spaciousness in workplace communication. She contrasts doing mode versus spacious mode attention, explores how chronic busyness prevents psychological safety, and provides methods for leaders and team members to create environments where difficult conversations can happen.

Key Questions Answered

• •Doing Mode vs Spacious Mode: Organizations operate in two attention modes. Doing mode focuses narrowly on goals, targets, and short-term control with instrumental thinking. Spacious mode enables expansive, unhurried attention that generates insight, creativity, and relationship building. The doing mode has overtaken most organizational conversations, suffocating discussions about purpose, learning, and meaningful connection. Teams need both modes but currently over-index on task-focused doing.
• •Busyness as Cultural Barrier: The most common excuse preventing psychological safety development is people saying they are too busy. After a decade of organizational research, this pattern emerges consistently. When teams operate exclusively in doing mode, they cannot pause to create environments for speaking up and being heard. Teaching psychological safety techniques becomes pointless if people remain trapped in pathological busyness without capacity to shift attention modes.
• •Superiority Illusion in Listening: Research surveying 24,000 employees globally reveals a clear pattern where people consistently rate their own listening skills generously while judging others harshly. This occurs because individuals assess themselves on intent to listen but evaluate others on observable behavior. This gap prevents improvement in psychological safety because people fail to recognize their actual listening deficits and their impact on silencing voices around them.
• •Response Determines Speaking Up Culture: When people speak up with challenging ideas, they often do so clumsily or imperfectly. Leaders frequently respond in ways that completely shut down future contributions rather than appreciating the courage required. These moments represent intelligent failures that require learning and reflection. How leaders respond to imperfect speaking up attempts determines whether team members will risk vulnerability again or remain silent permanently.
• •How You Show Up Affects Others' Voices: Individual presence within any system directly impacts whether people around them feel able to speak. This applies regardless of hierarchy position in workplace, family, or community settings. Rather than trying to fix silent people, organizations should focus on helping everyone recognize their impact on others. Building this awareness and capacity for self-reflection creates conditions where psychological safety can develop organically through changed behavior patterns.