I rather give complements than critique
But’s thats not how to grow a team
I know, everybody works in a different setting. But there are huge parallels as well. Let’s try something. Close your eyes and think at your work. Think about the group of coworkers you see most often. Think about how you work together. Be honest now. How does the collaboration feel? Are you a team? Or more like a group of people?
Like most people you don’t feel part of a team. And that’s not good for you, not for your company and as Gartner found out not for your customer either.
Teams don’t start as teams. They have to grow to become one. And to let them grow it helps to understand why teams do or do not work. Lencioni describes the 5 dysfunctions of teams. Which are: (1) lack of trust, (2) fear of conflict, (3) lack of commitment, (4) avoidance of accountability and (5) inattention to results.
Lencioni’s 5 dysfunctions of teams
Lencioni pictures this as a pyramid. Teams have to climb the pyramid and can get stuck on every level. The bottom layer is the foundation and you need to fulfil any layer before you can optimise a higher layer.
In this article I describe these 5 dysfunctions which is a great starting point to work with your team. As an Agile Coach I usually have a session where I question and challenge the team to be super honest on their level. In my experience this helps to drill down to the core problems. If you do this yourself, take a similar stance. Be honest and take a moment to really understand where your team is.
Lack of trust
Trust is essential for a good cooperation in a team. Trust means people feel save and are allowed to fail. Everybody feels free to express themselves, and improvements can be discussed. Team members don’t judge each other and dare to ask others for help.
An emotional connection is key to trust. As a manager or team lead you can help your team in this phase to get to know each other. This can be done simple by asking everyone to talk about what they love to do in their spare time. You can also guide this a bit more by a introduction game. There are many out there. I found some good examples on tastycupcakes.org
Fear of conflict
I rather give complements than critique. Like most of us. But productive conflicts are essential for improving. To be productive, conflicts should focus on content, and never on persons. Issues arise. When you leave them unsolved they’ll stay in between the team. To have full, inclusive, commitment in the team you need to be able to discuss the different point of views. The openness needed to do this is the second layer in the pyramid. Essential for this layer to work is the first layer, the layer of trust.
As a team lead you need to let the team do this, and don’t interfere. If you want to contribute, the best you can do is letting the team know that different points of view are allowed and are needed and useful for team growth.
Lack of commitment
The third layer of the pyramid is about commitment. Decisions should be inclusive. If there’s no discussion about where you are going, the team won’t support these plans. Not really, as in fully committed. And they’ll probably jump out of the pan when things get hot. When the direction and priorities are discussed and clear, a team is able to work towards them. Even if a team chooses a different approach than a single member would have done.
As a team lead, you can help by clearly expressing your goals and wishes. As well as the bounds for the team to play. Communicate those clearly and let your team do the work. The team should be able to work with this, and they need freedom.
Help your team by providing a structure where there is transparency about actions and direction, to avoid unclarity.
Avoidance of accountability
When you agree on taking certain actions as a team and a member doesn’t live up to the agreement, it gets annoying. And if you do not solve this, it causes tension. Which results in a lower quality product or service. So, in a team it is essential for everyone to live up to their responsibilities. And if some members don’t, the team should discuss this. There might be a very good reason why someone didn’t follow up on something. But only through conversation you can find out.
The team lead stimulates the team to talk and discuss issues in the team. This discussion should take place on a team level and it is for the team to solve. Clarity and transparency is something that helps in this layer of the pyramid. Agile teams agree every sprint (usually 2 weeks) on the outcome of the coming period and during the daily standup they track progress and check for possible impediments. This is very effective.
Inattention to results
Good news, summit’s in sight. The top of the pyramid is about the inattention to results, specifically team results. Teams that got through the previous frustrations face the last frustration here. This is were someone’s personal or their department goals are thought of as more important than the team goals. Clearly it kills ultimate team effectiveness. Effective teams agreed on results they’re aiming for and work towards them.
The team manager can set an example with his or her own behaviour. Team goals shouldn’t be interfered with and the team manager shouldn’t put his or her own priorities above the team priorities. It helps when there’s transparency on team goals, and especially how they work together with the personal targets from appraisal rounds. Many employees still suffer from these -but thats another topic altogether.
The teams working through all dysfunctions?
A well functioning team that maximises their results, happy employees and happy customers. Sounds good, doesn’t it?
