In the early 2000s, the Australian public school system introduced the Responsible Thinking Process, or RTP. Teachers were given five questions to address disruptive students.
When a student misbehaved, teachers asked what became known as ’the questions’.
1. What are you doing? 2. What should you be doing? 3. What are the rules? 4. What happens when you break those rules? 5. What are you going to do now?
(Is it telling that I wrote these questions from memory?)
After the questions, the next disruption landed you in the RTC (Responsible Thinking Classroom). Once in the room, you sat in silent supervision, with the task of writing your teacher a plan and justification for why you should be allowed back in class and how you plan to follow the rules moving forward. I hated the process, which may or may not be because of my regular RTC visits.
With the gift of hindsight and maturity, I’ve come to appreciate how the process made unspoken rules clear. To correct someone, the teacher first had to identify the classroom rules. When a student broke those rules, the teacher had an established agreement to point to. If one didn’t exist, the teacher would let it pass and see it as an opportunity to reset expectations.
Some of the leaders I work with just hope people will figure out the rules in time. The result is a team that feels parented rather than led, good behaviour rewarded and bad behaviour punished, and everyone reading between the lines for what’s actually expected. Tori Eleto, @nytherapist, names the cost of that.
“What isn’t communicated is felt, what’s felt is interpreted, and what’s interpreted is often inaccurate.”
This is where I think the shift needs to happen, from rules to agreements. Rules are imposed. Agreements are shared. The best way to build them is to bring unspoken expectations to the surface, in an expectation conversation, ideally held early and again as the team changes.
There are three questions worth asking in that conversation. What do I expect of my team? What does the team expect of me? What does the organisation expect of us?
Ask all three, and a pattern usually appears: a handful of themes that show up across the answers. Those themes are your values, already agreed, just never named. It’s not about everyone being the same. It’s about being aligned at the core and inclusive at the edge.
When you make the unspoken spoken, you end up with external agreements everyone can point to, and confronting bad behaviour becomes easier, because you decided how you would respond before the behaviour happened.
In the classroom, the teacher’s question was never really about what you were doing. It was to get you to take ownership of what you should be doing, because you should know the agreement, and because it was already established.
Raise it in your next team meeting and ask a simple question: What expectation do we hold of one another here that we have never said out loud?
Then give people space to think and to answer.