What Are We Agreeing to Without Realising It?

Recently, one of the leaders I work with told me a story that has stayed with me.

She found herself in a group of strangers brought together for an important civic duty, a high stakes situation where every voice matters.

She noticed some patterns forming early. A few voices naturally dominated. Some people found it harder to get their perspective heard.

So, drawing on what we had worked on together, she introduced a simple idea: communication agreements. It was not a formal workshop, simply a shared conversation about how they wanted to work together.

The response was positive. More people began contributing. There was a shared awareness of how they were communicating and something to return to if participation began to feel uneven.

It was such a clear reminder that whenever people come together, patterns form.

Those patterns can begin to act like unspoken agreements. Nobody necessarily decides that two people will dominate the conversation. Nobody formally agrees that disagreement will be avoided. Yet patterns develop and, over time, they can shape whose voice is heard, what gets discussed and what becomes possible within the group.

So the question becomes: if we have not consciously agreed how we want to communicate together, what might we be inadvertently agreeing to?

And why does this matter?

Because communication shapes the capacity we can access in a room.

As social human beings, we are continually reading the relational environment around us. We look for cues about belonging, safety and whether our contribution matters. When people experience the conditions to contribute, ask questions, challenge thinking and offer a different perspective, we gain access to more of the individual and collective capacity in the room.

When people hold back, there is a cost. Ideas remain unspoken. Concerns surface later. Decisions can take longer. Difficult conversations are postponed. Leaders spend time mediating issues that could have been addressed earlier. Relationships can become strained and, ultimately, all of this can affect performance and the bottom line.

Think about a team that gets on really well. There is warmth, connection and plenty of goodwill. Then something difficult happens. How do people disagree with someone they genuinely like? How do they raise a concern without damaging the relationship? And whose perspective might remain unheard because keeping the harmony feels safer than challenging the conversation?

Or consider a small business or board of directors who have come together with energy, friendship and a shared vision. Everything is going well, so there has been little reason to talk about how they will communicate when they disagree. Then the inevitable difficult conversation arrives. Money, performance, priorities, accountability or a decision that matters deeply. Have they already created the conversational conditions that will help them navigate it?

Then there are the moments when pressure rises. Deadlines tighten, workloads increase and decisions need to be made. Familiar communication patterns can become amplified. Some people speak more. Others step back. Curiosity can narrow at exactly the moment the team needs access to its widest range of thinking.

This is where communication agreements become powerful.

They help us intentionally create the conditions for how we want to work, think, challenge, listen and communicate together. They can help teams access more of their collective capacity while strengthening trust and relationships.

The concept itself can feel surprisingly simple. I often hear people say, “Why have we never done this before?”

The depth of the work sits in knowing how to create the agreements together, how to facilitate the conversation so there is genuine shared ownership, and how to bring them into everyday practice.

Communication agreements are living and organic. Teams use them, revisit them, reality test them and adapt them as their relationships, work and circumstances evolve.

This is part of the work I do with leaders. I help them understand the science that sits behind our conversations and build the skills to create and facilitate communication agreements that become part of how people actually work together.

Perhaps there is a useful question to take back to your own team, leadership group, board or business partners:

What agreements are already shaping the way we communicate, and did we consciously choose them?

How we communicate shapes how we lead.

If you are curious about what communication agreements could look like in your organisation, I would love to have a conversation about what is happening in your context and what could support your people.