Please make it OK!

Not every team is high performing. Some are chugging along fine, others need some help. Often managers and team leaders don't know what to do to reduce the defensiveness, stop the irrelevant infighting and competition, increase the trust, clarify the roles etc. Sometimes there is a history of not discussing tough issues, running from tough decisions, and not confronting problems when they are small enough to be dealt with fast. Often they reach for an easy fix - an off-site team building / bonding experience. Let's cook together, let's raft together, let's have a scavenger hunt. While these are fun and they attempt to press the "make everything OK button," these interventions don't have a lasting effect, and they even may cause more harm than good.

We offer solutions that really do make a difference. While working together, teams can do some great research on their work processes and self awareness that can lead to significant break throughs in trust, role clariifcation, decision making and implementation. We call this work Action Research. We have two solutions that can make a big difference in how your team works together. They take time and skilled facilitation, but the results reward the work. We use the Drexler Sibbet Team Peformance System and combine it with Element B. It's a powerful combination that directs team members and team leaders to look inside and outside simulaneously. We create new norms of honest communication and forthright speaking that reduce defensiveness and "positon rigidity" and help team members focus on real results.

Sure you can read Forbes or Fast Company tips and tricks on the "five ways to improve your team performance," or you can push the "make everything OK" button for now. When you get serious about rebooting your team. Give us a ring. Our mission is getting your team to experience high performance.

What Is a Process Intervention and How can I make One?

Look at Yesterday's post on the GSA, suppose you were at the table when someone suggested (perhaps even the leader), "We should take the entire organization to Las Vegas this year and really have a blow out. I mean this is going to be the mother of all team building events!" We could party, celebrate, build bicycles for charity and I even know a mind reader."

Suddenly you get an icky feeling in your gut. You are bothered by what has just been said. As you sit you become aware of another feeling, weaker than the first feeling and more subtle. You recognize this as fear. The fear is about speaking up and telling the others what you are feeling. At the same time enthusiastic team mates are talking and saying that going to Vegas would be just about the coolest thing imaginable. You go back and forth listening to your feelings of discomfort and fear and listening to the building excitement of at least half of the group for the Vegas idea.

Bless yourself and your internal barometer. You have created a choice point for yourself. You can make a process intervention; you can state how you are feeling to the others in the group. This process intervention will surely stop the group process going on about choosing to go to Vegas, particularly if you share all of your feelings (discomfort, disgust, and fear). The other choice you have is to remain silent and go along to get along.

Choosing to state your real feelings means playing the "loyal dissenter", although your enthusiastic team members and even the leader might not see you that way. You could be identified by others as playing "Debbie Downer," or even worse, "not a real team player." You must further assert your position by asking if anyone else feels the same as you. In my experience in small groups I have almost always have one other or some others say they feel the same as I do when I make a process intervention. Once others agree you have succeeded in stopping the process and putting the issue on the table along with your position. The ensuing conversation becomes "here and now" and real. Nothing could be better for this team than what you have just done.

One of Yogi Berra's quotes was, "We made too many bad mistakes." Every team makes mistakes. Not every team makes really bad mistakes. Your process intervention can help the team avoid making a really bad mistake. However, if no one speaks up don't worry, CNN will pick up the story and the team will learn the hard way. It's your choice.  

This is one example of a process intervention - the loyal dissenter. There are many other types of interventions which we will discuss in upcoming posts.

What can we learn from the GSA "Teambuilding" Event?

My field is under assault again from the pseudo teambuilders with yet another bogus Vegas team building experience. How do mind readers, bicyle building, and parties build teams? Let me count the ways. They don't. They sound like great fun and they certainly cost a lot. But in terms of building real teams, they don't add up to any real value.

Real people build real teams by doing real work in real time. That's it. Everyone who has ever been part of a high performing team knows how hard it is to build a real team. Issues like orienting the team to it's vision, building trust among diverse members over time and distance, negotiating role clarification while allowing for individual creativity and goal achievement, deliberating and deciding on priorities all require hard work. All of this happens while the team is actually implementing monitoring and making course corrections. It happens by working, talking, disclosing, and giving feedback.

Celebrations, and rewards are important components to any team but they need to be sequenced properly. They come after real work and real achievements. These can help cement the bonds created from working together. They should not be confused with the process of building a real team.

Bonding experineces and simulations belong in the category of team training. They can be helpful when people want to have a taste of working together, appreciating differences, or taking a light approach to topics like innovation.

Real innovation like building real teams requires significant focus, risky trial and error, high trust, and a safety net provided by opening up feedback and disclosure among team members. Simple to say but hard to do.

It's important to admit that we, being human can make egregious mistakes. The GSA's mistake is a terrible embarassment for sure. Sometimes a boondoggle is only a boondoggle. My plea is to get serious about building real teams. The world could be a better place a lot faster if we did.

Team Development - A Fresh Approach!

I have been experimenting lately with a new form of team development combining three successful and time tested methodologies:

• Action Research
• Story Editing / Story Prompting
• The Drexler Sibbet Model

Here’s the technique in a nutshell:

• The team and the team leader contracts with me to create an experiment to improve their team performance significantly
• We all agree to use an Action Research Design and to jointly design and conduct the research and the intervention.
• We make use of the Drexler Sibbet Team Performance Inventory to collect and publish the “current reality” for the team. This inventory reports how well the team has resolved the critical issues relative to developing a high performance culture. It also significant insights into current group dynamics that may be helping or hindering team performance. Finally it helps to create a positive and safe atmosphere where tough discussion topics can be aired and resolved. This work typically takes one day.
• The second day we frame up where we are and where we want to go. To get there we use several powerful story-editing techniques that we have developed over years of practice. These exercises, performed in small groups, create a reframing experience for the team, based on positive norms developed in small groups. Our experience has been that the norms created in the small groups carry over to the large group. The story-editing sets in motion a series of positive actions based on  strengths that enables the team to redirect itself and create highly positive outcomes. The team acts together to bring the new story into being. The whole process is fueled by discovery combined with creation. Its differs dramatically from the old problem solving / team building approaches.

The entire process takes two days. We do all the data collection and story editing around the real work the team must do. We are seeing extraordinary results.

Larger Teams Require Different Methods

As teams get larger team leaders need to organize their team around optimized sub-teams. Teams are increasing their members these days. It’s not uncommon to find that there are 12-20 members on teams. These numbers make team meetings difficult to facilitate in that “air time” becomes difficult for team discussions. Two little known rules for team development apply in these cases, and I will even throw in one of my own. 

The first rule is that the norms that get established in small groups, get carried over to the large group. As much as possible organize your meetings into small groups that can work and feed their information to the large group. There is no need to break out to do this. Table groups work fine. In fact I call these “break-in” sessions where we assign the tasks to the small groups. 

The second rule is to optimize the real working sub-teams. Every large team has sub-teams, members that have to work closely together to achieve the results. These teams are the key to producing outstanding results. Map the sub-teams and have them do real work at the meeting. In many cases these teams also have to combine and re-combine in all the ways necessary to get the work done. Map this as well. Nowadays team members need to work face-to-face, virtually, alone, in pairs, and in different combinations. Aim for small. Less is more. Make sure only the actual people that are responsible to accomplish the work are on the sub-team. As a facilitator, work with the leader to set all of this up, and then get out of their way. It is critical that these teams find their own way. 

The third rule I call the rule of Twos and Threes. I got this rule from Yogi Berra, who reportedly once said, “Pair up in threes.”  This rule, maximizes air time and is useful for break-in sessions. Use threes as much as you can and when the numbers don’t work out, break out the remaining members in pairs. Small groups of threes are powerful. As two talk, the one can observe, give feedback, play devil’s advocate etc. Pairs are not at helpful. Paring can lead to distraction and flight from the work. It’s common in groups for pairs to collude, complain, retreat as the two support each other. 

Keep these rules in mind as you lead and facilitate larger teams.