Articles

The Solution for Your Slightly Dysfunctional Team

May 28, 2014 (Number 57) I recently spoke with a member of a struggling team and she offered me her view of the problem.  "Most of my peers on the team are either incompetent or marginally competent," she suggested in a semi-helpful tone.  When I interviewed the other team members, they had equally unflattering things to say about her — and about each other.

I couldn't help but wonder how their views of one another were affecting the degree of trust between them.

I've found nearly every team I've encountered to be burdened by at least moderate dysfunction.  Superficially, the problems on such teams typically center on deficits in both communication and collaboration.  In other words, members of suboptimal teams don't openly share information.  And they compete rather than cooperate with each other.

Many team leaders resign themselves to the situation and helplessly watch their team's performance suffer.  Alternatively, they try to treat the symptoms (rather than the disease) by making futile demands for increased team communication and collaboration.

But the disease on teams not reaching their potential is lack of trust.  Specifically, the team members don't feel safe with each other.

If you want to directly remedy this trust problem, consider these points:

• The less a team member understands WHY his teammate is performing her job as she is, the more likely he will make negative assumptions about her conduct and motives.  As this "why" is largely personality-driven, it can be quite helpful for team members to better understand each other via a good, team-wide personality assessment.

• But more is needed.  You and your team members must understand that once the pressures escalate enough, any one of you can slip into a neurologically-determined stress response and, dependent on your personalities, will become hypercompetitive, avoidant, anxious and/or irritable.  It's essential you recognize that these states are temporary and do not define your colleagues.  A more complete picture of this is presented by my Four Levels of Understanding.  Making sense of your team members from the deepest (Fourth) Level optimizes your relational intelligence — and your team's effectiveness.

When you protect the relationships among your team members from toxic perceptions of each other, you ensure much greater trust.  And trust is the essential ingredient for every high-performing team.

Dean Herman, Ph.D.