Most teams don’t fail because they lack talent. They fail because they’re not having the conversations that matter.

In this episode of Career Sessions, Career Lessons, I sit down with workplace culture expert, consultant, and author Gustavo Razzetti to discuss his new book, Forward Talk. Gustavo argues that the biggest threat to team performance isn’t conflict—it’s silence. When concerns go unspoken, tensions remain unresolved, and difficult issues are avoided, organizations accumulate what he calls “conversational debt.”

This conversation explores why people often stop speaking up, why agreement isn’t the same as alignment, and what leaders and team members can do to create healthier, more productive conversations.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why teams often struggle because of avoided conversations rather than a lack of talent
• What “conversational debt” is and how it compounds over time
• Why employees frequently stop speaking up—not because they’re afraid, but because they believe nothing will change
• The difference between agreement and true alignment
• How groupthink, blame, and avoidance keep teams stuck
• Why psychological safety alone isn’t enough
• Practical ways leaders and team members can foster more honest, productive conversations
• How high-performing teams create cultures that encourage participation and shared ownership

Tune in every week for more episodes like this. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or follow Career Sessions wherever you’re listening.

Check out the full series of “Career Sessions, Career Lessons” podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcasts/gustavo-razzetti

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How To Overcome The Conversational Debt That Holds Teams Back, With Gustavo Razzetti

Defining The Concept Of Conversational Debt

Most teams do not fail because they lack talent. They fail because they do not have the necessary conversations. Think about all the meetings that you have been in, and I have certainly been in some where everyone nods and agrees and leaves, only for nothing to actually change, or worse, where the real conversation is happening afterwards in the hallway or in a messaging platform or behind closed doors somewhere.

Our guest, Gustavo Razzetti, argues that this phenomenon is much more than bad communication. He calls it conversational debt. The hidden cost of avoiding tensions, unspoken concerns, and the decisions that never really get made. The interesting part is that we assume that people stay silent because they are afraid to speak up. I am sure there is some truth in that. Gustavo’s research also suggests that something far worse is going on. People are silent because they do not believe speaking up will matter.

That sense of pointlessness erodes trust, it kills momentum, and it keeps even the smartest teams stuck. In his new book, Forward Talk: The Bold New Method For Getting Teams Unstuck, Gustavo lays out a practical approach for turning conversations from something we avoid into something that actually drives progress. We are going to explore why teams get stuck, why psychological safety may not be the full answer, and what it really takes to create conversations that move both people and organizations forward.

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Gustavo, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me.

We are going to dive right in. You have a new book out, which talks about teams. I know you argue that teams often do not fail because they have a lack of talent, but because they are not having the right conversations, which is a pretty bold claim. We would love to hear you talk a little bit more about the conversations that we’re missing in our teams.

I’m talking about strategic conversations. Not the coaching, the how-to communicate clearly and so on and so forth. My focus is on teamwork. There are conversations, not one-on-one, but collective conversations. What is missing is basically the difficult conversations, the topics that we do not want to address, and the different perspectives. Sometimes, we look like we are aligned. We look like we are all on the same page. Simply because we do not want to rock the boat. We do not want to upset our manager. We do not want to look like, “You’re not a team player for speaking truth to power or challenging the status quo.” Those conversations that are missing at some point are going to explode.

You make the point that these conversations compound over time in a nonlinear fashion, and there is a bit of exponential growth to them if you let them linger for longer.

There is a phenomenon that most people work a lot with teams in workshops and consulting, and they always have the illusion that things are going to happen magically. When I have a one-on-one conversation, everyone knows what is happening, but then when they get together in the room, no one wants to address those issues. I call this compounding effect conversational debt. It is like, “We are making some money. Maybe I overspend, maybe go out for dinner too frequently. We see nothing is going to happen until the credit card statement comes, and we see that the debt starts to pile up.” The same happens with teams. We think, “It is not a big deal,” but when you have not a big deal, one after the other, then it becomes a big deal.

That phrase conversational debt really resonated with me. It captures the essence of it perfectly. As I think about my own experience working in the corporate world for several decades, when you have those situations where people just do not talk about the things that are really necessary. The elephants in the room, or whatever you want to call them. It just gets worse and worse. The point where the team is for all practical purposes, even if they are getting along, it is a dysfunctional team.

The best way to address conflict is when it starts, and the next best moment is now. The more we keep waiting, the more it is going to get out of hand. We have that fantasy that a conflict disappears, and it does not. I work with leaders who do not want to have those hard feedback conversations with team members because they do not want to go through that tense conversation. They do not want to go through that moment in which people get upset, or maybe they are not going to like them as leaders, whatever.

I always tell them the person who is having some kind of performance issue knows. They know that you are not happy. They know that you are looking at them, frustrated. They are waiting for that conversation to happen. It is like a couple that is going through a rough patch, and both know that they need to sit and say, “How are we going to relaunch our marriage, our partnership?” Someone has to go first.

One thing that I thought was more of a bold claim, I guess I know I used that phrase a minute ago. You make the point that people often do not speak up, not because they are afraid to speak up, but because they do not see the point. That is dark in a way that people have just, in essence, given up on their teams.

Overcoming Pointlessness Versus Just Fear

It is dark, but it is also clear, and it gives us a different kind of path. The point is when leaders say, the team is not speaking, I always say, were they speaking in the past? Try to get when you started. At the first meeting you had with them, did they share their concerns? Did it tell you what was wrong with the former leader? Probably they did. People at some point stopped sharing their perspectives, and this is because nothing has changed. This is very interesting because people usually think that people do not speak up because of fear or because of their culture.

I have seen a lot of cultures that are really nice where people are happy, leaders promote and nurture a safe environment, so people feel safe. No one wants to basically rock the boat. They do not want to create any friction, so people do not speak about, “Your leaders are going to listen.” They are going to hear your concerns, but then there is no action, no change. It is like those employee engagement surveys that we complete every twelve months, twice a year, whatever the cadence is. After sharing, nothing changes. I would continue to raise my hand and share my opinion if nothing mattered.

For people who are sitting in a team, that gets to be a very frustrating existence. I can think of times when I have been there. You feel like you’re talking to a wall, or you make a controversial point, or you bring up something that will create a sense of conflict and tension in the room. Everybody else just looks down, and your peers leave you hanging out there.

It becomes not a team discussion anymore, but it is you and the boss going to engage on this topic, or is the boss just going to move on and change topics? When that happens enough, they just change topics. You just realize, what’s the point of bringing these things up? You are not going to pay any attention to them anyway. That is where I feel like you have hit a person on a team who has just given up for all practical purposes.

It is a paradox because it is like you are shooting yourself in the foot, because if you do not raise the issues, once again, those issues are going to harm you and the team as well. There is an interesting point about what you were saying. We talk about the walls. Of course, the manager plays a big role, and probably many of your audience are managers, but there are also people who are not in a position of power, but still contribute to this kind of defeat mindset. I always say agreement happens in the room.

Alignment is what happens after, because we can all agree when we are together, but then, when we implement, are we really aligned with the implementation? During those water cooler conversations with my team members, we start saying, “I do not care about this.” We are feeding that darkness using the term that you used before. It is not just the boss who is the problem. Sometimes our own colleagues pulled us down.

Teams are teams. You use a sports analogy. You can blame the coach on the sideline for everything that goes wrong in the game, but there are five in basketball, eleven of you, and a soccer football team out there on the field, the pitch. If you are not working well together, you cannot really blame the coach for that. Again, thinking about my own experience, I have sat through meetings where teammates are really not carrying their weight of making the team effective. Even a well-intentioned boss is going to struggle unless they get that dynamic right. This idea of individual agency comes with this. You have got to take some ownership. Even if you are a team member, you cannot just put all the blame on the boss and say this team is not working and it is all their fault.

We contribute both to the harm and to the solution, or part of the solution and part of the problem. Part of the problem, part of the solution. Agency is a keyword they just brought up because I think that people do not realize their contribution. Silence is contagious. When I am going to raise my hand, and then I see no one speaking, then I say, “Maybe it is not the right move to make.” When I facilitate workshops, and I ask a question, people start looking at each other and say, “Something is going on here.” On the other hand, when someone takes that action, they act with courage, they break the silence, and they ask a question. They are blunt in front of others. They are also modeling that positive behavior.

When that happens, it feeds the opposite cycle. You can have a negative cycle that compounds debt. You can have a positive cycle that compounds interest, conversational interest. If you want to use the opposite of your conversation with that phrase.

Totally. If you do not mind me asking, in your experience, because you mentioned earlier that you have seen those teams where people are shutting each other down by looking at each other like, “This is not the right moment. We do not want to get there.” What are the signals that you observe working with teams when the opposite happens?

It happens in one of a couple of ways. Either somebody in the right tone says, “Mary, I know you were expressing some concerns the other day. Share those.” There is a little bit of putting the person on the spot when you do that, but done in the right way, it gives them the confidence that you are going to support them because you have already said, “I want to hear what you have to say. I know you have an opinion on this, one teammate to another, not in the position of leader.”

The other way is when somebody does bring that up, and somebody else then comes on top and says, “I have been thinking about that as well,” or “That is an excellent point,” or asks the question and just allows the conversation to get some oxygen in it. When it is just one person making that point, and you get crickets, nobody says anything, and people are not making eye contact. That is where I think it feels really awkward and where that debt does accrue. I have seen it work both ways, but it is definitely harder to get that dynamic going, which obviously is the point of your book.

Sometimes we think that it is harder, but it is not as hard. There is this thing called the vulnerability loop to a point in which the second person is as important or even more important than the one who starts the conversation. I am going to say, “Maybe not naming Mary,” but saying, “I heard that some team members had some concerns about the deadline, the timeline. This project feels a little bit like we are rushing it. It is too complicated.” Someone says, “Yes, I heard the same when someone builds on that conversation.” The rest say, “Now we can jump too.” That second person plays a huge role in building that loop.

For sure. Your book is called Forward Talk: The Bold New Method For Getting Teams Unstuck. Help us understand what you mean by forward talk and how it creates this kind of team construct that you are arguing for here.

Of course, we want, and leaders want, and you, as a team member, want to move forward. The most important thing is that teams get stuck in conversations because most of those conversations are focused on the past. We have, for example, one pattern that is to blame. When all our conversations are about that bad hire, the bad decision the team or the leader made, or a project that went wrong, or maybe we never completed it, or we had to redo it, whatever the case may be, that blame drags people into the past, and we cannot get over it.

Implementing Forward Talk To Neutralize Groupthink

Rather than focusing on how we can improve from that mistake, what have we learned? We get stuck on who screwed up. Avoidance is also the same because, building on our conversation, “Nothing happened in the past. I stopped caring. I am going to keep myself silent, or I am not going to really speak up my mind. I am going to just adapt.” The other pattern is groupthink. It is the most deceiving of all because it looks like we are moving forward, but we are just moving on.

We just want to go along with the team, we want to agree, we rush decisions without having the proper conversation. We are dancing around the issues simply to be a team player or just to “Let’s move on.” That is why decisions never stick. Forward talk is about conversations that not only focus on moving into the future, making progress, but also do that by addressing the real issue, not ignoring it, not tackling it superficially.

You talked about groupthink perhaps being the one that is most deceiving because you think you have got agreement, but you really do not have agreement. Which one do you think happens most often?

It all depends on the type of culture. In cultures that are more nice, groupthink is the one that you see the most often. In cultures that are driven by fear, blame is the easiest pattern because when there’s fear, someone’s going to get punished. We would rather not be the culprit. We find someone else or even another department.

You also feel that psychological safety isn’t necessarily the answer.

I have been working with psychological safety before it became a thing, following Amy Edmondson’s work for over eight years or more. I have been training people, facilitating stuff, but going through the research of my book, and also working with teams, I realized that it is not a complete solution because psychological safety focuses on the context. We need to create a safe space for people to speak up. Two things are happening. First, as we mentioned before, some companies are safe, but that still does not mean that they want to hear the truth.

They want to hear the perfect truth, the illusion of alignment. Second, the concept of psychological safety has become a little bit weaponized, both from leaders and team members. I have a lot of team members saying, “This team is not safe, so I am not going to speak up.” They use it as an excuse because, in the end, they are part of the problem. They are not doing anything to change it. They are using the excuse that it is not safe enough. They are not accountable.

That is a really fair point. A lot of things end up getting taken too far and used in a way that ultimately is not constructive. Certainly, the concept of having a team environment where people can speak freely, share opinions, be vulnerable, and bring up conflict if that needs to be brought up. Say the unpopular thing. All of that is important at the same time. I have seen situations where people have said, I do not really feel psychologically safe. Therefore, they are just casting blame on the system as a defensive mechanism. Exactly what you said.

They are removing their agency, right? The point is not with the framework. It is how the framework has been turning into something that basically is not helping some teams, but also, there is an additional layer in my research identified, like three groups. Some people are susceptible to psychological safety. If the environment is safer, they tend to speak more. If it’s unsafe, they speak less. There are team members who, regardless of whether it’s safer, do not participate. There are people who, even in unsafe environments, speak up because of their personalities.

For somebody in our audience who is listening or watching and is having their own team experiences like this. We talked a little bit about being that second voice and the powerful effect that that can have. What are some of the other ways that a team member sitting in one of these meetings can help turn the conversation in the right direction?

Two things come to mind. The first is becoming more aware of the patterns. I always like to say forward talk is like a direction. No team is perfect. We are always going to have a little bit of blame. We are going to have a little bit of avoidance. The point is not having those patterns. The point is when those patterns become the team’s norms, and we default to those. We are going to have better and worse days. When we start seeing how the conversations happen through those three lenses, are we avoiding the topic?

Are we focusing more on blaming people or other people, or maybe even the customers, instead of trying to solve the problem, focusing on the system? Are we trying to find a solution that maybe, for example, a group thinks. It is about finding the safest idea instead of the idea the team really needs, because we want an idea that everyone is going to support, instead of the idea that is going to be a little bit uncomfortable, but it is the one that we need. This is the first thing.

When you start noticing the patterns, you can start sharing that with the team members and say, “Guys, I think we are getting too much into this.” Not judging, not finger-pointing, but at least it creates awareness. The second and quick intervention is what I call reframing conversations. Many times we have, we tried that, and it is not going to work, or it did not work in the past. How can we make it work, considering that the conditions have changed? For example, you reframe it into an opportunity.

We cannot make this decision because the leader is not in the meeting. What decision can we make with the power that we have? We do not have a budget. What can we prioritize? We make money or fund this project. Many conversations get teams stuck because they feel absolute, and they focus on a problem. Reframing the conversations, turning that obstacle into an opportunity, trying to see the other side, and not getting stuck. You turn into a question to explore.

You have done a lot of work with teams for the ones that you have seen that are really high performing. What else do you see them doing that really stands out both in and outside the room?

First, it is important that leaders realize that their role is to facilitate, not dominate, conversations. That comes to letting go of what happens in the room, being more intentional about tapping into the collective wisdom, and also admitting that they are not right or they are not the only source of truth. I was writing an article about this in Mark Zuckerberg’s AI version, so people can access the CEO 24/7. That is built on the idea that the CEO is always right and is the source of answers. High-performing team leaders are not in that position. They are in the position of curating the information through their teams rather than being the ones who provide the solution.

You’re hitting on a couple of things that really resonate with me. One is the idea that we are in this era where the idea of star CEOs really seems to be particularly prominent. When you have a star CEO, to me, that is a weak team because it has a singular dependency on one person. Even if that person is legitimately a star, I mean, sometimes it is, they are so controlling that nobody else really gets any air to speak or to express their own opinion or to take their own actions. The idea of the star CEO just works against everything that a team really should be about, which is a collection of people trying to achieve more than they would have been able to do if they were working independently.

Even if they see us as stars, they should not play the star part. They should let their team thrive.

I was coincidentally listening to Stanley McChrystal’s book, Team of Teams. At the very end of the book, he talks about the leader as a gardener. It was a good analogy. I have not heard before, just this idea that you’re tending to something. You are nurturing it. You are not growing the vegetables or the fruit or whatever you’re growing. You are not making the flowers.

You are tending to them. You are creating the conditions for your garden to grow. If you think about it in that construct, you’re going to play a very different role than if you’re the controlling, top-down, micromanaging leader. That difference really stood out to me as a very relatable metaphor for thinking about the role that a leader needs to play if they really want to bring out the best in everybody on their team.

That is the culture. It is an environment where you want other people to flourish. You just need to nurture it, not take over it.

Let’s talk a little bit more about the broader organizational context and just some of the things that I will say exist outside of the team itself and the broader culture of the organization that is creating these conditions where people just feel like it is not worth speaking up, pointless, or otherwise.

There are two takes on that. The other day, I was facilitating a workshop, and there were like 600 senior managers, and I asked them, what is your stronger sense of belonging? One extreme had your team, the people that you work the most frequently with and are closest to, or the larger organization, and everything in between. The vast majority of people say that their strongest sense of belonging and their connection was with their teams. The larger culture plays a big role and influences a lot of patterns when it comes to conversations. In the end, you can have a very toxic organization and still have great subcultures that are healthy or semi-healthy. Conversely, you can have a very healthy organization and have pockets that are really toxic or harmful or silent.

I am curious to get your view in terms of the orientation of the individual to the team versus to the organization. Is one necessarily better?

Probably, but I want to think more about what the natural tendency is, because I think that leaders need to work with the energy we’re talking about in the garden. If a tree wants to move in one direction, it can push. They are going to look for where the sun is. You should not fight against that. That is nature. Nature is that we have a stronger sense of belonging to the people that we are closer. You get connected to the place that you live, the sports team that you follow, your neighbors, then your family, and your friends. The closer that community, the stronger that sense of belonging. That is human nature.

When we want to create an identity, especially for companies that have tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of employees, it is very hard to make sure that everyone has the same pattern, the same agreements, and they all look alike. Actually, by trying to do that, we basically erode people’s uniqueness. It is easier to create that connection and have stronger subcultures at a team level than trying to force one identity that is going to bring us around to us. We need to bring the connecting tissue between those subcultures and the larger org.

Think about teams that are so team-centric. Almost to the point where they are ignoring the broader context. Positively or negatively, I think that can be pretty unhealthy because it does not scale particularly well. It could be that the team becomes very set on doing something that is misaligned with what the broader organizational culture or purpose is about. At the same time, I think it is unrealistic to expect people to gravitate more naturally to a big organization because they are not dealing with the 10 or 100,000 people that are in their company every day.

They are dealing with the ten people that are on their team and how to balance that centricity. If you want to call it that in terms of my centricity to my team and my centricity to the broader organizational purpose, I think it is one of the hardest parts to get right in terms of having team focus, because you do not want them to act in isolation. You also do not want them to completely ignore the ten people around them.

You capture it brilliantly. You do not want to impose your organizational identity. You do not want to isolate teams into their subculture. It is a balance. In my book, I talk about the three key elements of culture. Those are basically the three key elements of commercials that are conversations about alignment, belonging, and collaboration, or I call them the ABCs of culture. When it comes to alignment, what’s our purpose, value, what are we in business for? What’s the impact? Everyone should be on the same page.

I do not care which business you are in or which unit. When it comes to how we do the work, the collaboration, that is more up to the team to decide what is going to work for them. We talk about being innovative. Innovation does not mean the same for your legal team, your procurement team, your finance team, or your product team. It is different. The belonging, that emotional side, is a combination of both how leaders lead at a company-wide level and also how teams operate on their own.

You have worked with teams all over the world. When you go in and work with a team that is maybe not where they should be or where they want to be, what do you see as the tension to separate the ones that then head in the right direction versus the ones that just stay stuck?

Utilizing The Team Heartbeat Exercise For Alignment

What changes is that they move conversations from their head to the room. A lot of people are building narratives around their team members. They’re really totally off, and sometimes getting that narrative outside helps a lot. I am going to share a very basic exercise. One thing I call the team heartbeat. I ask. From the moment you join this team until today, capture all the highs and lows, then identify what are the key events that happen on each of those. That creates a pulse or heartbeat of the team.

When people share with each other, you start to realize that maybe a project that was limited in terms of budget and timing or whatever for you was exciting. You start to see how people react to different events. When you can bring all those perspectives together in terms of how we perceive the same events, the same experiences, but through our different personalities and roles, you start to create a very interesting context for people to realize that, “Maybe we are seeing the same movie, but everyone is getting hooked in different parts, and we love certain parts.” Sometimes we hate all the movies.

In that exercise, I would imagine what is particularly valuable is seeing what people agree on highs? What do people agree on lows? They are all bringing up the same situation, but they are seeing it differently. You probably also got some things where I thought this was a particular high that nobody else happened to notice, or a low that nobody else happened to notice. That is insight as well. It helps you see different people’s perspectives because you go into the room, you have your meetings, but then you all go off and do your own thing, and you’re living different experiences day to day. You’re only having that shared time every now and then. I am sure you see a lot of that in your work when you go through that exercise.

You said something that is really interesting. Imagine that, for example, the leader says, “This moment was fantastic.” They realized that no one else cared. It could be either that you’re clueless or that your communication skills are not there. Maybe the moment was great, but you make it about yourself. You want to be the hero in the narrative, not the people. People did not like it. There is a lot to learn from those things.

You made a point earlier about narratives. We are forming these narratives. We are interacting with our peers. We are saying some things, we are not saying some other things. We are walking away from every meeting with a point of view about where people are coming from. We have these opinions about teammate A, teammate B, teammate C that could be accurate or perhaps completely inaccurate.

Unless you start to vocalize some of those things and test them and figure out whether you have got a shared view of reality, you run the risk that you do not. That is where this idea of conversational debt comes back to what you talked about earlier, can really pile up because it just means that the team is not really having a shared sense of consciousness, if you will, about how all of this really ought to be interpreted.

If you do not know what the problem is, all solutions are going to fail. Conversation is the first step towards understanding what is going on. That is why we fail. When there’s silence and leaders in particular, but also team members, avoid the real issue, people are going to fill the void with narratives. In most cases, they are not going to be good. People start filling that void with lots of crazy stories. When we start a conversation that we fear, people say, “It was not that bad.” That is the realization that most people have. There is a lot of research that shows that the people who went through hard conversations most of the time do not regret it and actually feel that “That went much, much better than I thought it would.”

That is true a lot of the time, as you are saying that you have this belief that if you bring something up, it is going to be this huge issue. I will say 7 or 8 times out of 10, it ends up being less of an issue than you thought it would be 2 or 3 times. Maybe it becomes a bigger issue than you thought. If that is the case, then you really need to have the conversation.

It is like overspending, and I do not want to check your credit card statements. It is going to be here. Probably when you open, say, “I thought it was even worse.”

That is where the debt’s really going to pile up. Not conversational debt, real debt.

Yes, sir.

For our audience, what would you want people to walk away with? One mindset shift or one tool in their toolkit to help their teams be more effective?

Cultivating Individual Agency And Positive Cycles

First, the notion of regret. There is a lot of research from Daniel Pink that says that we do not regret what we tried, what we did. We usually regret what we did not do. You are not going to regret a conversation even if it goes wrong. You are going to regret the idea of I should have, I wanted to, but I never did. The second thing is that you’re part of the problem.

We talked a lot today about conversational agency in plain English. Own your part. Do not complain if you are not sharing your truth. If you are not asking the right questions, you are also part of that silent culture. You are also part of the problem. We need to stop waiting for someone else to do that. We need to go first. We need to model the courage we want to see in others.

If everybody starts doing just a little bit of that, you start to get the different kind of compounding effect that creates some of the positive energy that you need to then help the team become even more effective, more willing to confront hard topics together, more willing to speak openly. That’s what we are really all aiming for. That is what’s going to drive high-performing teams.

I know people are saying, “You are saying this.” It sounds easy. I am not saying start with the hardest conversation. It is like exercising. You have to build muscle. We built the muscle of avoidance. Now we need to start training and start building the muscle of participation, the muscle of conversations.

Your book is out. I look forward to seeing how the book launch goes and how it does. I wish you the best with everything. Thanks for being on the show with me.

Thank you for hosting me, and thank you for the conversation.

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Takeaways from the conversation just now with Gustavos. First, the biggest risk in teams is conflict. It is actually silence. Teams do not underperform because people disagree. They do so because people stop speaking up. Often it is not fear. It is the belief, even a deep-rooted cynicism, which I said was kind of dark, that saying something will not actually change anything, which is not where you want your team to be.

The second thing is that unspoken issues do not disappear. They compound. This is what Gustavo called conversational debt, and it builds over time, just like interest would on a loan that you owe. Each conversation adds to misalignment, adds to frustration, and eventually these things turn into major failures that will feel sudden, but they really were not, and they were completely predictable. Third, alignment is often an illusion.

Just because everybody nods does not mean everybody really agrees, and getting real alignment is both a shared understanding and a genuine commitment. Even when people initially agree, as Gustavus said, agreement happens in the room, and alignment happens afterwards. There is a big difference between the two. Finally, better conversations require courage, not just frameworks. The exercise he suggested, I think, is a great one in terms of looking at highs and lows and how everybody views that.

At the end of the day, for teams to really work together, there has to be the courage to speak up. That means everybody has to have that sense of owning their part, being willing to express unpopular opinions, to engage and challenge honestly, even when it is uncomfortable. Culture does not really change until behavior does, and that requires everybody owning their part. I invite you to subscribe to Career Sessions on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube. If you found this discussion enlightening, and I hope you did, please sign up for my membership community, which is called PathWise, and my newsletter, PathWisdom. Thank you.

Important Links

• Gustavo Razzetti on LinkedIn
• Forward Talk: The Bold New Method For Getting Teams Unstuck
• Team of Teams
• PathWise on LinkedIn
• PathWise on Facebook
• PathWise on YouTube
• PathWise on Instagram
• PathWise on TikTok
• PathWise on Twitter
• Career Sessions on Apple Podcasts
• Career Sessions on Spotify
• Career Sessions on YouTube

About Gustavo Razzetti

Gustavo Razzetti is the bestselling author of Remote, Not Distant, Stretch for Change, and his forthcoming book, Forward Talk. Gustavo is a culture strategist, workshop facilitator, and keynote speaker with over 25 years of experience—first as a marketing and advertising executive, now as CEO of Fearless Culture, a culture design consultancy. He’s facilitated more than 1,500 workshops with leadership teams at Mars, Microsoft, Merck, the Inter-American Development Bank, and hundreds of organizations across the world.

Razzetti is the creator of the Culture Design Canvas, now used by over 500,000 practitioners worldwide, and the Forward Talk framework. He helps teams surface issues early, challenge groupthink, and turn avoided conversations into decisions that stick. His work has been featured in The New York Times, BBC, Forbes, and Fortune. He’s a regular contributor to Psychology Today. His most recent book, Forward Talk: The Bold New Method For Getting Teams Unstuck, was released on May 5, 2026.