Why do some teams seem unable to move past the same discussions, the same disagreements or the same unspoken issues? Often the problem lies neither in a lack of skill nor in a lack of commitment, but in essential conversations that never really take place.
This article explores the link between personality, team communication and leadership. Drawing on the work of Gustavo Razzetti, who founded and runs Fearless Culture and wrote Forward Talk: The Bold New Method for Getting Teams Unstuck, it shows why teams avoid difficult conversations, how certain personality characteristics can reinforce that tendency, and what part a leader can play in restoring trust and psychological safety.
For executives, HR directors and talent management professionals, the stakes are strategic: a better grasp of personalities and relational dynamics makes it possible to spot what is going unsaid, to head off collective dysfunction and to create the conditions for more sustainable leadership and higher-performing teams.
You know the plan will not work, but everyone else seems to be nodding along, so you would rather keep quiet.
Or perhaps you find yourself in the same meeting again and again, without anything ever truly being settled.
You may feel that your manager brushes certain remarks aside too quickly, but you do not dare say so.
Or you choose not to speak up because you are convinced that nothing will change anyway.
These frustrations are not isolated incidents. They may be symptoms of team communication that has broken down. They may reflect an avoidance of difficult conversations and, at times, point to a far deeper dysfunction within the team.
Episode 149 of the podcast The Science of Personality features Gustavo Razzetti, who runs the consultancy Fearless Culture that he founded and who wrote Forward Talk: The Bold New Method for Getting Teams Unstuck. He explains why some teams end up stuck and what can help them recover a constructive dynamic.
"If you want to change your culture, you have to start by changing your conversations," Gustavo Razzetti explains.
Teams reach a dead end when they avoid precisely the conversations that could allow them to move forward. Anyone who has ever worked in a team will probably recognise the feeling.
To diagnose stuck teams, Gustavo Razzetti proposes a matrix with two axes.
The first determines whether the team is focused on the past or on the future. The second indicates whether it chooses to address the problem or to avoid it.
Three of the four resulting situations leave the team unable to progress:
The fourth quadrant corresponds to forward talk, meaning a conversation resolutely turned towards the future.
In this situation, the team agrees to deal with the real subject while focusing on what it wants to build next, rather than remaining locked in the past.
This ability to hold useful conversations is an essential component of team transformation and of sustainable management.
Our emotions can stop us from starting the most sensitive conversations.
Fear is one of the reasons some people do not take part in exchanges, do not share their point of view or do not dare to ask certain questions.
When Gustavo Razzetti asked team members why, in their view, their colleagues were not taking part in important conversations, most of them answered that their colleagues were afraid.
But there is another reason: resignation.
Some people do not communicate, can no longer communicate or simply no longer want to, because they are convinced it will make no difference.
When Gustavo asked them why they themselves were not taking part in those conversations, the most frequent answer was:
"Because nothing will change."
When an organisation ignores the results of its engagement surveys or handles its change initiatives badly, trust erodes step by step.
When teams avoid important conversations, they build up what Gustavo Razzetti calls conversational debt.
He compares it to credit card debt: the debt is there whether or not you open your statement.
Exactly the same applies to unresolved conflict.
"The more we avoid them, the more the situation is likely to get worse," he explains.
Conversely, when people agree to have a sincere and genuine conversation, even a difficult one, they generally feel afterwards that the exchange went rather well. They also feel a degree of relief: some of the fear that was holding them back disappears.
Seen through the lens of developing relational and managerial skills, learning to handle these conversations therefore becomes a genuine lever for collective performance.
Certain personality characteristics make some people more likely than others to avoid conflict.
Such people may be more sensitive to, or more influenced by, their working environment, for example by the level of psychological safety present within the team.
"If the setting feels safe, people will speak up more than if it does not," Gustavo Razzetti points out.
And the reverse is equally true.
Others, by contrast, will be more inclined to speak up or to challenge a decision, whatever the setting they find themselves in.
In Hogan terms, these behaviours can be associated with several scales of the Hogan Development Survey (HDS), which assesses how a person is likely to behave when they are regulating their behaviour less consciously.
Someone scoring low on Cautious or on Dutiful will generally be more likely to speak up and to question authority.
Conversely, someone with a high score on Cautious may be more inclined to avoid conflict, while a high score on Dutiful may leave a person particularly vulnerable to groupthink.
Personality assessment offers a particularly useful reading grid here. It does not mechanically determine how someone will behave, but it helps explain why two colleagues placed in the same situation can react so differently.
For professionals working in talent management, assessment and development, and coaching, this understanding can help anticipate certain team dynamics and improve the quality of interactions.
A leader's personality also plays a decisive part in how a team communicates and responds to its environment.
Leaders who tend to dominate conversations need to learn to stop simply driving the exchange and start facilitating it.
Effective leadership involves, among other things, building and sustaining a high-performing team. That means the leader delivers results through their team, and is therefore not meant to supply every answer themselves.
"You [as a leader] have to draw the answers out of your team and let everyone give their best. You have to understand those different personalities so that they can inform your decisions," Gustavo Razzetti explains.
This stance marks a significant shift in how leadership potential is understood: a leader's value lies not only in the ability to know, decide or answer, but also in the ability to create an environment in which others can think, contribute and challenge decisions.
On the surface, the team is working well.
Then, all of a sudden, the performance indicators start to slip.
Why?
"If you do not deal with the real issues, it will end up harming the team," Gustavo Razzetti explains.
Several signals can reveal that a team is stuck.
A persistent absence of consensus is one of them. Constantly revisiting decisions that have already been taken is another.
A tendency to shift responsibility onto others, whether a colleague, the budget, the deadlines or any other factor, can also indicate that communication within the team is not working properly.
Gustavo Razzetti recounts the story of an executive committee he worked with.
The organisation's CEO was preparing to leave the company after many years at its head.
The team was plainly stuck.
Some members thought they would become the next CEO themselves.
Others wanted the current leader to stay on longer so that they could reach their own objectives.
But none of them was genuinely willing to face the reality of his departure.
They had never had a real conversation about what came next, either for themselves or for the organisation.
This example shows how far a team can remain trapped in individual expectations, unspoken issues or implicit assumptions when it is unable to put the difficult subjects at the centre of the discussion.
For a leader to be able to see that their team's communication is stuck, they first need enough humility to accept that they do not hold every answer.
They also need to create an environment that is psychologically safe enough for members of their team to speak up.
Finally, they need to set an example of courage, not least by being able to acknowledge their own mistakes.
Leaders who confine themselves to passing down instructions are unlikely to notice that their team is itself facing a leadership problem.
The quality of communication thus becomes as much a question of organisational culture as an individual one.
For a leader, asking for feedback is an excellent starting point.
On this subject Gustavo Razzetti mentions Steve Jobs.
At all-hands meetings at Pixar, he initially met with nothing but silence. Things began to shift when he asked two very simple questions:
What is working?
What is not working?
Those two questions gave people permission to acknowledge what was going well, but also to name clearly what needed to improve.
Even when it starts with small things, this openness helps build trust.
"Trust is the foundation of effective conversations," Gustavo Razzetti explains. "Trust is built through actions and interactions."
The two questions also send a clear signal: the leader genuinely intends to improve the team's communication and to reduce collective dysfunction.
Trust, then, cannot be decreed. It is built gradually, conversation after conversation, through consistency between words and behaviour.
When team members have been working together for weeks, months or years, certain conversations can become particularly hard to start.
Avoiding them, however, only makes the problem worse.
"We all play a part in conversations. If others are not joining in, that is no excuse for not joining in yourself," Gustavo Razzetti points out.
He therefore urges leaders not to end up regretting all the conversations they chose not to have.
Team communication really can improve.
But it requires the leader to have enough courage to look for why their team is stuck and to put the real subjects on the table.
Communication difficulties are rarely simple communication problems.
They can reveal deeper mechanisms: fear of conflict, the relationship with authority, a need for safety, difficulty in voicing disagreement, excessive conformity, or managerial behaviours that limit what people say.
This is precisely where personality assessment proves its worth within a talent management strategy.
Approaches such as those offered by Hogan Assessments make it possible to better understand certain behavioural tendencies that may surface under pressure or when personal vigilance drops. Combined with coaching, skills development and team support, they give leaders a reading grid for making better sense of interactions, anticipating relational risks and strengthening the quality of leadership.
The aim is not to do away with disagreement.
On the contrary, a high-performing team must be able to bring disagreement to the surface early enough and to handle it constructively.
Building that collective capability contributes directly to trust, to team transformation and to sustainable management able to reconcile performance, accountability and the quality of relationships.
At Authentic Talent, we believe that objective assessment of talent and potential within organisations is a decisive factor in their future success. If you would like to discuss it with us, let's talk!
This article draws on an article published on the Hogan Assessments website: Is Your Team Stuck? What Personality Reveals About Team Communication
