A farmer ploughs a new field. He knows that there are large rocks and tree stumps that are just under the surface but he just wants his crop in the ground. He wants to make money so he doesn’t want to spend time and effort finding and removing them believing he will deliver a great crop anyway. So he sets his blades on the plough just high enough to rip the soil surface and travel over the buried problems. He ploughs his paddock and plants his crop. No one will see.
Are you the farmer and is does your team have hidden matters just under the surface?
Have you a team that is unable to solve their problems causing you to intervene and come up with solutions. Is there blame, and defensiveness within parts or all of your team. Are there team members who are creating a toxic or unhappy environment?
What impact is there on you, your career, and the organisation when your team is not functioning as you expect them to?
I think that all leaders aspire to have a team of people who are honest, trustworthy and treat each other with genuine respect. What would your team look like if they were all committed to a shared cause and willing to question and challenge ideas and suggestions?
What would your job be like if you had a team that operated like a well oiled machine and not the farmer and his plough?
Sometimes people think that a healthy functioning team doesn’t experience conflict or disagreement. That to be a good team member it is better to agree rather than challenge. Some teams and their leaders may prefer people to become virtually invisible like minions and slaves to the norms of the team. On the surface these teams appear to be functioning and delivering, but at what cost?
I believe this mindset of how a team should operate is damaging the fabric of functioning high performance teams. The damage comes from the conversations that need to be had but lay silent. It comes from the people who assume so much but ask so few questions. Collaboration is also suffering from the absence of understanding and dealing only with the surface level.
Innovations and adaptations occur best when ideas are challenged and when people offer and debate different perspectives. When trust exists in a team the members feel safe to disagree and debate without fear of reprisal because the team recognises that this level of discussion is healthy and solution orientated.
In this blog I want to provide you an alternative to the commonplace saying “there’s no “I” in TEAM”. I want to explain why it is important for the “I’s” to be encouraged and promoted in teams and how you can ensure your team “I’s” have a voice.
Why are the “I’s” important.
People have a very strong need to feel included and this can be a powerful driver in the workplace, particularly where teamwork is an integral part of the culture. This need can drive team members to tend to agree to whatever the collective agrees upon in order to maintain their feelings of inclusiveness. They will put their need to belong ahead of rational decision making processes. This happens at the subconscious level of the brain so you are not even aware it is happening. Group think for example is an extreme case of where the need to belong overrides the desire to engage in healthy debate and disagreement.
A strong team culture can create situations where an individual may feel unsafe to question or challenge the ideas of others. They fear the loss of relationships, status, and/or credibility if they did so. As a result the decisions and solutions can lack sufficient consideration of factors and impacts such as costs, risk, and safety. They may lack clarity, responsibility, and/or strategy when there is a lack of debate and inquiry.
Team players who are loud or opinionated may demand that their ideas are listened to, yet have no desire to listen to or consider the ideas of others. This can lead to the decisions and solutions coming from just one or two people in the team. When people feel that they are not being heard they will eventually stop offering up ideas. Their motivation decreases and so do their aspirations.
Do you observe any of these behaviours in your team? What do you think the impact would be if they did exist?
Team engagement is significantly affected when individuals are hamstrung by a strong culture of “we”. To improve team engagement individuals need to feel safe to take a stand, to speak up, and to feel heard. Focusing on the “we” in a team and ignoring the “I” can have harmful effects on team cohesiveness and capability.
We are social animals and we are hardwired to connect. There is a part of our brain within the prefrontal cortex that seeks to form bonds with others. We have survived as a species and evolved to what we are today as a result of forming relationships, groups, and communities.
For example if you were to observe tribal communities you are likely to see that when decisions are to be made the elders in the tribe come together to discuss the issues and agree on a strategy to solve the problem. All the elders are given the chance to speak and be heard. The decisions may take days or weeks because where time is not an important factor, honest consensus is. The decisions made are the result of a collective of minds. It has enabled us to grow and create. I sometimes feel that we have lost our “collective of minds” in our teams.
In today’s workplace we seem to be so focused on the team that we have overlooked the interactions at play at an individual level and the effects this has on team engagement.
We often assume so much about people within the team, transferring team behaviours, expectations and beliefs to all members without ever knowing the truth. This causes silos to exist and it breeds misinformation and miscommunication. This all changes when we operate in a climate where we can trust, share, and engage.
I will give you an example
Imagine that you are a project manager and have brought together a project team consisting of project engineer, as well as representatives from finance, supply, operations, OHS and quality.
As the project manager what is your intention for the project? Your response might be “deliver the project on time & on budget”. The finance person may say the same thing and, so too the supply and quality people. In fact everyone on the team agrees that the intention is to deliver the project on time and on budget. On the surface it appears that you have great team engagement.
During the project however tension arises between quality and finance over costs, and between supply and operations over delivery. OHS feels ignored and their audits show several breaches of policy. The team members start to form alliances and blame one another for problems and errors. The project falls into disfunction. What has happened?
Let’s go back and look at it in more detail to show how you can improve team engagement through encouraging trust and openness.
- Intention
Intentions will always have underlying needs attached to them. Whilst everyone on the team can agree to the same stated intention “deliver on time and on budget”, the needs underneath this statement can vary for each person. For example the engineer may feel the need to boost their status in order to be considered for promotion, the finance person could have a need to demonstrate their recently implemented project costing software, whilst the supply people may feel the need to prove the benefits of their one stop shop supply process.
So while each of project team agree to the project intention they all have very different needs. It is the needs and not the intention that cause conflict and tension. If the needs of each of the stakeholder is assumed rather than shared, the team is setting themselves up for failure.
To overcome this problem identify the key words that will commonly be used as part of the project language and ask each member share what the terms mean to them and to do so without judgement. For example people will have very different meanings to words like collaboration, success, on budget, costs. Do not assume everyone on the team will have the same meaning. Once you have everyone’s own definitions create shared meanings for each of the terms and have these documented in the project scope.
- Set the rules of team engagement
Talk to the team about how they see the project operating. You want to move people into their creative mindset to get the best out of this session. Run activities that encourage sharing and opening up such as talking about their vision for the project and what they see as potential barriers. Use questions such as “what is possible”. These are great questions because no one will have the answer but by sharing and listening you will come up with a collective vision that is strong and enduring.
Create a shared set of rules that the team commits to follow covering off how to resolve a dispute, what are acceptable and non acceptable behaviours, how and when to catch up, and what to do if something falls off schedule. Follow this up with each member reflecting on and sharing what they will need to do differently in order to uphold these rules.
These types of activities will significantly increase team engagement by giving each member the permission to feel safe to speak up. You also remove the risks of assumptions leading to misunderstanding and miscommunication.
- Generating trust
A fully functioning team can only operate when there is genuine trust between each other. Without trust people will say only what they feel safe saying. They may decide not to speak up because they fear the consequences of doing so (real or perceived). When there is distrust people start blaming each other rather than seeking to solve the problem and move forward. Conversations to address issues become the elephants in the room not daring to be made visible.
You will need to take on a leadership role here and ensure that the team complies with their rules throughout the project life. Any actions, however small, that you condone will have a ripple effect on the success of the project. You need to be vigilant that the conversations that team members are having are about finding solutions and moving the project forward. You need to encourage the use of questions such as “what are our options?, or “what do you need to do next” that trigger the creative parts of our brain to think about how to move forward.
Finally, have a look at the way you run your meetings. Is the intention of the meeting just to confirm what everyone already knows (ie via reports, other meetings etc) or could they be used to explore questions that they haven’t yet an answer for? Some examples include “what should we do now? what are our options? what are your next steps? Questions like these are inclusive and encourage discovery and critical thinking that helps maintain team engagement.
What questions can you use to increase participation in your team?
Everyone who is part of a team needs to have a voice. When you silence the individual for the sake of the team you smother creativity, critical thinking and change. Don’t assume everyone in your team is satisfied and feels heard. As a leader you need to ensure the culture gives them permission to be authentic, to speak up and to have their say.
For the next three weeks I would like you to experiment with a different approach to your team meeting. I would like you to only ask questions and really listen without judging. I would love to hear your feedback on how your experiment went. Please send me an email at believeachievecoach@nullgmail.com
I am running a free workshop on how to improve team engagement one conversation at a time. I will present an understanding of how conversations trigger the brain to be either open or defensive and give you some tips on how to improve your conversations to build great team environments.
The webinar will be held at 10am WST on Tuesday 31 January. To register please click here. I look forward to you joining us.