Root team building issues are
unconscious defensive interactions.
There can be many potential team building
issues for ineffective teams. So we need a
team
performance model to diagnose issues
related to context, team structure and
team
processes. Business teams with a large
degree of autonomy, like management teams and
project teams, have the power to addrees many
of these team building issues but they often
fail because they miss the root causes in
the team performance model: defensive
interactions.
A common pattern of defensive interactions
leading to poor team performance is illustrated
in figure 1. A high number of defensive
interactions lead to no/low mutual learning,
then to insufficient alignment on team
decisions, then to low level of engagement and
poor/late team results.
This creates a whole set of new and difficult
problems for the team and leads to even more defensive interactions…
So companies experience not only ineffective meetings, but
also issues in process improvement,
mergers and
acquisitions, allocation of scarce resources
... This vicious circle is illustrated in this
story: my
experience of planning scarce
resources.
To understand more deeply defensive
interactions, we must spend some time with
the team members and listen to their stories
about their team building issues: see figure 2.
The absence of mutual learning in
interactions and the poor alignment on
decisions lead to mutual
mistrust .
Subsequently mistrust leads to
“un-discussable” subjects like poor
team performance, low level of trust, lack of
alignment and engagement… In turn the
“un-discussability” leads to the
perception by team members that the current
discussion on a complex issue can lead to
threatening or embarrassing results for them.
These perceptions are obviously not tested
(Argyris
1991) . This, combined with the growing of
complex problems, leads to defensive
interactions which account for low mutual
learning. Then the poor business performance
loop and the low mutual trust loop are
reinforcing each other into a very stable
system. Why do carefully designed and highly
skilled teams get stuck in the above two
vicious circles, often called "storming" stage
? A crucial part of this system is often
happening below the awareness level of most
team members: see figure 3.
We know that the team is not effective in
handling its problems / opportunities. We feel
the mistrust and
the delegation
issues. We can often see other team
members using defensive
interactions like excessive control, avoiding embarrassing
issues, holding useless time-wasting arguments... We
experience ineffective
meetings.
But most of the
time we are not aware of our own perception of
potential threat and we sincerely believe that
our interactions are effective. We just do not
“see” nor understand the part of
the system under the cloud in figure 3: we are
unconscious of
our interactions . And we
then blame other people – inside or
outside the team – and/or the company
“culture” and/or our ineffective meetings
process. This is illustrated in
this team issue story: when I became
dangerously disconnected from senior
management.
So when we look at a team building workshop or technique,
we should ask:
-
does it create first enough awareness of
the system to trigger a commitment to learn
constructive interactions over a realistic
period ?
-
does it then provide an effective
learning mechanisms for root team building
issues, interactions, including metrics for
progress ?
-
does it give simple tools to improve
conversations and decision
making while still in learning mode
for effective interactions ?
Return from
root team building issues to
team building results
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