Category:

Team

Build Up or Blow Up

by Ron Potter October 11, 2018

Edify or Power

Edify: Build, Construct. Install, Teach, Instruct; Improve.

Power: Greek = Dynamikos – Strength, Control, Mastery, Lordship, Dominion

This word Edify is almost always associated with relationships.

Marriage
Friendship
Acquaintance
Colleagues
Team Mates

When it comes to relationships, you should always be in the “Building Up” mode.

Another closely associated word is power. However, the root word for power is Dynamikos. This is the root word for dynamite. It’s tremendously powerful, but it’s designed to blow up, explode, and tear down.

Edify: build up.

Power: Tear down or blow up.

What’s going on in your team?

Often, while teams are in the room together there seems to be great camaraderie. But what happens outside the room? Do team members begin complaining about colleagues? Do they express doubt about motives or direction of action? Are they concerned members are not aligned with the team goals?

What do you do in that case? Do you continue to blow things up? Or, do you edify?

“No, you’re wrong. That person listened, participated, shared, was vulnerable, was open. They performed very honorably.”

Now that language,

Begins to edify the other person.
Starts changing the attitude within the corporation about that other person.

Agree to Disagree

At one company I was working with the CEO and leadership team down through the VP, Director and manager levels. I began to see what I would describe as an all-out war between two groups of people. It was being very disruptive, very costly, and there seemed to be no effort on either team’s part to reconcile the difference and come to an agreement that was going to advance the needs of the company.

As I began looking for the root of that division, it led upward. Right up to the executive team. It became clear that two members of the executive team totally disagreed on the approach to an issue. As I talked to each of them individually and confidentially, they explained their disagreement with the words “We have simply agreed to disagree.” On the surface, that seems very honorable.

“We’re not going to get into conflict, we’re not going to fight with each other. We know that we have a disagreement on this. We’re just going to calmly and politely agree to disagree.”

The cost of Power versus Edification

The cost of that disagreement would be almost impossible to calculate. It was costing that company a tremendous amount of money, creativity, human health, and focus.

The top team cannot agree to disagree! If you’re a part of the executive team, you’re there to reach agreement. Not just reach agreement on the simple stuff. Reach agreement on the things that are very difficult, that create huge dilemmas. You may have absolutely opposite beliefs and assumptions but it’s still your job to reach that agreement so that the corporation can move forward effectively.

Did those two leaders edify each other? No. They simply said to their organization:

So-and-so doesn’t agree. They think this is the wrong way to go. We’re not going to agree with that. We’re going to do our own thing.

United teams must reach an agreement of difficult issues with edification.

We do have some very different opinions here, but everyone has been honorable, direct, and vulnerable in where they are on this. Despite those different opinions, we have reached an agreement. Everyone is behind this and everyone is contributing their part.

Now we’re getting somewhere. Now we just eliminated huge frictional cost within the organization, simply because we used edification versus power.

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Teamwork is Hard

by Ron Potter October 4, 2018

I’ve shared in the past that the name of my company, Team Leadership Culture, is in that order for a reason. I firmly believe that building great teams is the key to success for any enterprise. I’ve never really had anyone disagree with me on that issue.

Yes, there have been the hard-driving bosses (notice I didn’t refer to them as leaders) who tell me that “The difference between success and failure it’s about getting people to do what they’re told to do.” There’s really nothing I can say or do in those circumstances. I usually just wait and then help pick up the pieces. Believe me, great teams make the difference.

So why is it so hard and requires a continual process to build great teams?

One of the main reasons is that:

It takes everyone to make teams work and be great—build teamwork
It only takes one person to cause team failure—breakdown teamwork

The tricky part is that it’s not always the same person at any given point in time.

Sometimes the team will enter a high-risk situation. One that will require a decision when there are still a lot of moving parts or there is still a great deal of ambiguity. It might be the most risk-averse team member that causes the delay that brings about failure.

Sometimes it happens in times of great success when one person feels they didn’t get enough credit for the success or their contributions were not appreciated. This can create a smoldering resentment that will cause failure in the near future.

Successful teams are constantly “sharpening the saw.” You might recognize that statement as number seven of Steven Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. His point is that even though you build in the other 6 habits, you need to constantly sharpen the saw. You need to constantly review your effectiveness then learn, grow, and get better. Teams need to do the same.

Truth

Teams need to speak the truth to each other. This attribute falls away quickly by the error of omission. Not saying something when something needs saying.

Respect

Teams need to hold each other in high regard. This disappears almost instantly when someone feels slighted or under-appreciated.

Elegance

Teams need to constantly work the friction out of the systems. As soon as the lack of clarity or ambiguity creeps into the system, friction is created.

Commitment

Teams need to reach unity and reinforce commitment. Without either you haven’t really accomplished team!

Teamwork is hard, but teams are the most important aspect of success. Work hard and constantly on building team.

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I Wouldn’t Have

by Ron Potter September 20, 2018

“I wouldn’t have done it that way!” These are very easy words to express but what do they really mean? Most people who use these words, or some such sentiment, will tell you:

They’re only trying to help
They’re helping the person learn
They want the other person to see things from a different perspective.

Those are all great reasons, but, do the words “I wouldn’t have done it that way” express those positive intentions? I don’t think so.

To me those words:

Assign blame
Shift accountability
Feed the ego and superiority attitudes

Using these words could also be considered a cheap shot or a cowardly statement.

Lots of factors need to be considered when decisions are made. When a person is not present and engaged in the decision-making process they:

Don’t know the circumstances
Aren’t aware of the dilemma’s the decision maker faced
Are looking at the decision from the perspective of hindsight

The more impactful decisions are very difficult to make. If you weren’t there as part of the decision-making process, don’t second guess.
What if your intention is to truly help? Help the person think through their decision-making process. Help them learn. Don’t second guess.

You may want to try things like:

What has changed since the decision was made?
Were there other perspectives that might have been useful at the time?
Was input received from relevant sources?
Was there pressure to make any decision at the time?

The answer to these and other questions may lead to a better decision-making process in the future. Or, the conclusion may be that the best decision was made at the time. Use these learning efforts to reinforce the decision maker. Support them. Help them grow.

Don’t second guess. It’s not useful.

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Dream Team

by Ron Potter July 19, 2018

Do you love the dream or do you love the team?

There’s a very famous quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a survivor of the Holocaust. His quote says,

He who loves the dream of what he wants his group to be more than he loves the members destroys the group.

That may take a while to sink in, but the power of that quote is incredible to me. As I work with leadership teams, there’s always a great vision, a great desire, tremendous amounts of energy, a willingness to go above and beyond the call of duty, to achieve the dream. The dream is always out there.

It doesn’t make any difference which industry I’m working in. It can be the food industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the automotive industry, the transportation industry. But it’s this image of the dream of what we’re going to do together that continues to propel the leadership team.

However, often the people on the team are ignored, not given credit, not listened to, and in some cases, even sacrificed to the altar of the dream. Bonhoeffer tells us that he who loves the dream of what he wants his group to be, more than he loves the members, destroys the group.

If we don’t build strong respectful, may I use the word “loving”, relationships on our leadership team, we love the dream more than we love the members.

The dream always seems to be the focus. It’s couched in words like:

Strategy
Vision
Next quarter’s goals
Initiatives for this year

but it’s always the task in front of them.

When I’m working with a team I’ll say to them “We’ll talk about your dreams (or any one of those words that describe it) later, but first, we’re going talk about the people. We’re going to talk about

who we are
what we contribute
what our individual dreams are
where we’re going together
how we’re going get there together.

Without fail, when we get to the strategy/vision/task/dream portion of the session, it always goes much better when we’ve spent the time to build the fabric of the team.

Do you love the dream of what you want the team to be more than the people on the team? You’re going to be disappointed.

Love the people of the team. Build the fabric of the team. Many of my clients refer to this as team building. I don’t believe it’s team building. I believe it’s building team! You’ll be happier and more productive in the end.

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Focus Together: An Exercise to Build Individual and Team Strength

by Ron Potter July 9, 2018

Looking to determine the passions and pitfalls of your team? Here is a team exercise I have used to help teams establish their focus and improve communication.

The Core Qualities Team Exercise

The following chart, developed by Daniel Ofman, and the corresponding exercise have been very successful in helping leaders identify core qualities (such as passion) and work through the pitfalls, challenges, and reactions to those core qualities. This team exercise is an effective way to help leaders examine themselves and then better understand how to maximize their core qualities. I have found that the exercise works best when done with a team.

Image courtesy of toolshero.com

Step 1: Core Quality

Identify all the aspects of a specific core quality. For example, if passion is one of your core qualities, you may describe it as exciting, adds energy, fires everyone up, contagious, overcomes obstacles, sees how things could be, and so on. Select no more than one or two core qualities to examine. This step seeks to focus on your best core qualities.

Step 2: Pitfalls

What happens when you get too much of a good thing? As is true for almost everyone, your strengths can become your Achilles heel. For example, what happens if you have too much passion? You could be driven, have tunnel vision, avoid reality, not accept failure or shortcomings, shy away from challenges, and so on. Therefore, we list all the pitfalls of passion in this step.

Step 3: Challenges

What are some positive opposites of the pitfalls of your core quality? What are some positive actions you can take
to avoid these pitfalls? For example, to address some of the pitfalls we listed above, you could ask a person or a team to function as a sounding board for you, setting specified times to check the reality of your situation. You could ask for and be open to challenges, or you could have another person or the whole team help you place your passion in the big picture of the organization. Look for positive opposites—ways to challenge and avoid the pitfalls and help yourself stay focused.

Step 4: Reaction

What happens when you carry efforts to challenge your pitfalls too far? You may become discouraged and back away from your core quality. One reaction might be to not share your passion or to share it only with those who will not pose any challenges. Defensiveness or withdrawal are other reactions. This step will help you recognize your reactions and work to overcome your natural tendency to recoil under pressure.

A middle manager I know recently shared her concern with her supervisor about a program he wanted but that she believed might negatively impact the organization financially. She is a good manager and personally takes budgets and sales quotas to heart; it is her passion to hit the numbers every month. She also takes her job seriously and does not hesitate to speak up. In response to her criticism, the CEO pulled her aside and led her to believe that she was wrong in what she was saying. Her reaction to this confrontation was to say, “I’ll just keep my mouth shut from now on!” Finding her passion threatened, she became discouraged by the CEO’s remarks and wanted to avoid future confrontation. This woman’s manager needs help finding some positive opposites to her reaction that will lead her back to her core quality.

The goal of this exercise is to help all team members stay in their positive balance, bouncing between their core qualities and their challenges rather than falling into the negative pattern of bouncing between their pitfalls and their reactions.

You can see from the arrows how this can happen. When played out in real-life situations, this chart is not a circle, but rather we move from corner to corner, either bouncing between our core qualities and challenges or bouncing between our pitfalls and reactions.

Finally, we draw your attention to the arrows between the boxes labeled “Too Much of a Good Thing.” Notice that too much of the core quality leads to pitfalls, and too much working on the challenges leads to reactions. In either case, being out of balance leads to wrong behavior. Too much of anything leads us to a point of concern.

I hope this team exercise is an effective way to help leaders on your staff examine themselves and better understand how to maximize their core qualities as well as the qualities of their teams.

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The Power of Nutmeg

by Ron Potter July 5, 2018

Because my wife is of Dutch heritage, we have spent time exploring her ancestry back to the Netherlands. Her family was a part of New Amsterdam which eventually became Manhattan. A distant family member suggested I read a book titled The Island at the Center of the World. Fascinating.

Here is a description from Goodreads that will give you a small understanding of the scope of the book and Impact of New Amsterdam on New York and America of today.

When the British wrested New Amsterdam from the Dutch in 1664, the truth about its thriving, polyglot society began to disappear into myths about an island purchased for 24 dollars and a cartoonish peg-legged governor. But the story of the Dutch colony of New Netherland was merely lost, not destroyed: 12,000 pages of its records–recently declared a national treasure–are now being translated. Drawing on this remarkable archive, Russell Shorto has created a gripping narrative–a story of global sweep centered on a wilderness called Manhattan–that transforms our understanding of early America.

The Dutch colony pre-dated the “original” thirteen colonies, yet it seems strikingly familiar. Its capital was cosmopolitan and multi-ethnic, and its citizens valued free trade, individual rights, and religious freedom. Their champion was a progressive, young lawyer named Adriaen van der Donck, who emerges in these pages as a forgotten American patriot and whose political vision brought him into conflict with Peter Stuyvesant, the autocratic director of the Dutch colony. The struggle between these two strong-willed men laid the foundation for New York City and helped shape American culture. The Island at the Center of the World uncovers a lost world and offers a surprising new perspective on our own.

Upon reading this book you begin to realize that many of the concepts that America is built upon came from the early Dutch colony, not completely from the English colonies that came later.

But, knowing what New York and America are worth today or back in the mid-1660’s a very powerful question begins to emerge “Why did the Dutch give up Manhattan without firing a shot?”

The answer to that question is Nutmeg!

The most expensive spice in the world at the time was nutmeg. It cost more per ounce than gold. The Dutch wanted the nutmeg trade and were willing to give New Netherland including New Amsterdam to the English in trade for the small Polynesian Island of Run.

Today that trade looks absolutely nuts. The wealth of America could have been a foundation for the Dutch and we would be closer to the Netherlands today than England. You’ll have trouble finding the Island of Run without Google help.

The point is that at the time, this was a good trade. We didn’t quite see the total future and value of the new world, but the value of Nutmeg was well established. It was a good deal. The world economy and shipping was driven mainly by spices in the 1600 and 1700’s. Filling one ship with Nutmeg at over thirteen dollars per ounce was a tremendous economic driver. Manhattan for the Island of Run was a very good deal.

Lesson learned? Don’t judge decisions made in the past by the conditions that exist today. You will falsely accuse the decision makers of making bad, wrong or stupid decisions. Nothing may have been farther from the truth.

One of the reasons many teams and corporations aren’t good at decision making today is caused by the second-guessing of decisions made in the past. Learn form the past, don’t second guess the past.

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Are you just a Big Splash?

by Ron Potter June 14, 2018

As an engineer, I learned about laminar flow. Let’s take the example of water for a minute. A lot of engineering science goes into what’s called laminar flow, which means aligning all the molecules of water in the same direction. We know from our science work in high school that water is made up of H2O, two hydrogens, and one oxygen molecule. When the engineers start filtering and aligning and pushing each one of these molecules in precisely the same direction, that’s known as laminar flow. Water in laminar flow is incredibly powerful. It can cut through solid steel. If it doesn’t quite achieve laminar flow, all it does is splash off the surface because there’s no alignment of the molecules. Is your team able to cut through the toughest issues or does it just splash and get everyone wet?

Once again I recently heard a CEO say,

Well, that’s not true, but that’s their perception.”

Implied in that statement is that he, and maybe he alone, knows the truth. Those other poor, well-meaning souls only have their perception. Unfortunately, many people believe their perception is the truth. Every day, more brain research is showing us that what we see and hear is processed through multiple brain centers dealing with memories, beliefs, emotions, and others before the image, or the audio file is stored in our memory. That means from the time we observe something through sight or sound, it’s completely processed in our brain based on who we are before the memory is stored in our brain.

Unfortunately, we think of our memory as if it were a computer hard drive. It’s a poor analogy. With a hard drive, we can go back several years later and retrieve the data that was placed on the hard drive, and it’s exactly the same data that was initially stored. But when we retrieve data from our brain, it has been constantly modified before placing in memory. We have further learned that even after a memory has been placed in our brain, it is continually being modified with every new experience from the moment it was initially stored. We don’t have reality in our brain. We only have our perception, and even that is being continually modified.

When we get into high levels of trust and respect for our teammates, we begin to realize that we each have valid perceptions, and our jobs as members of the leadership team are to form our collective reality from the multiple perceptions. We do this, so we can align and move forward together. We have different perspectives. But, we need to build a valid ‘reality’ of our perceptions so that we can move forward together. Without it, we will continue to move in different directions, diluting, diffusing our energy and trust, and creating nothing more than a big splash. When we line up all the “molecules” of our perceptions we begin to generate some real power.

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How to Focus on Your Passion

by Ron Potter April 30, 2018

Staying focused is virtually impossible without passion. So how do you identify and capitalize on your passion in the leadership setting?

Passion is a craving deep within us, that yearning for something we feel we just must have. It surfaces in a multitude of ways. For example, consider the story of Patrick (Pádraic) Henry Pearse.

Headmaster at St. Edna’s, a small private college south of Dublin, Pearse’s passion was Ireland’s heritage, something he feared was being destroyed by the domination of the English.

Pearse was by nature a gentle man who could never harm even the smallest creature. He had spent his life helping his students understand and pursue their own big dreams. Pearse certainly was not considered a militant or a revolutionary. Yet he was driven by his passion for Ireland.

No longer able to watch the nation’s language, culture, and history eroding, he felt it was time “to pursue his own great goals that, in his words, ‘were dreamed in the heart and that only the heart could hold.’ ”

He embraced the cause to reclaim Ireland and within a year was a leader of the Easter Rising, the Irish rebellion of 1916. After days of intense fighting, the British army defeated the revolutionaries, and on May 3, 1916, Pearse and others were executed in a jail in Dublin. The British leaders mistakenly thought this would put an end to the rebellion. But they did not understand the power of a person’s passion, as people across Ireland embraced Pearse’s ideas for saving Ireland and dreaming big dreams.

In 1921, Ireland declared freedom from England, and Pearse’s passion and dreams for the Irish culture came to fruition. Pádraic Henry Pearse’s passion ultimately forced a nation to find itself.

Finding our passion includes dreaming big. Ask yourself some questions:

What is my burning passion?
What work do I find absorbing, involving, engrossing?
What mission in life absolutely absorbs me?
What is my distinctive skill?

Answers to questions like these will point you to your passion.

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Are you headed back to the office?

by Ron Potter September 7, 2017

Years ago, I named my company Team Leadership Culture. To me, that described exactly what needs to happen in corporations to get things humming.

Building great teams is the foundation to success
Developing Leaders to grow and direct the teams and create more great leaders
Both lead to a culture that will sustain the success over the ups and downs of daily business

Without the trust and respect that it takes to build teams, you never develop great leaders and have no hope of creating a positive culture.

Decades ago, Alvin Toffler wrote an amazing book titled Future Shock. Wikipedia describes the context of the book like this. “He believed the accelerated rate of technological and social change left people disconnected and suffering from “shattering stress and disorientation”—future shocked.

I’m not technology averse. In fact, quite the opposite. My grandson was laughing at me the other day as I explained how I carried my 35 pound Osborne portable computer through airports in the 80’s. I purchased my first Blackberry “smartphone” three months after they hit the market in 1999. I’ve been riding the wave of technology advancement since the day Toffler published his book.

But, with this advancement of connected technology, I’ve also seen the deterioration of teams.

Every year teams seem to become more remote and global. Without the technology available to them today they couldn’t function at all. But, the one sentence that remains stuck in my head from Toffler’s book is “High Tech. High Touch.” His point was that as technology took over, it would require even greater human connection to make it all work.

From a very practical standpoint, I have observed remote and global teams that get together face-to-face at least twice a year to talk about the human side of their team work seem to advance faster and farther than any other team.

Some teams try for more times a year and few of them make it but scheduling often makes that difficult.

Other teams either commit to twice a year and don’t make it or are so deceived by the need to accomplish “real” work while they’re together that they give insufficient time to building team. These teams never advance and often deteriorate.

A recent Wall Street Journal article really caught my attention because of this experience. “IBM, a Pioneer of Remote work, Calls Workers back to the Office.” Even though IBM has been a leader in remote work throughout this century, workers were given 30 days to decide. Move to a company-maintained office or seek employment elsewhere.

Why would the leader of remote work decide to lay down such a stark edict? High Tech. High Touch.

They had accomplished the High Tech portion of the formula. They even marketed their services as “the anytime, anywhere workforce.” But they missed the High Touch portion.

Teams simply don’t work if there is low trust. Trust makes it all work. You can’t develop trust electronically. You need to:

Look people in the eye
Shake their hand
Put an arm around their shoulder
Laugh some
Cry some

Without High Touch, it just doesn’t work.

Are you going back to the office? IBM workers are. You should be also. At least on a regular enough basis to build Trust. It’s the foundation for all collaborative efforts.

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What Would Jack Welch Do?

by Ron Potter June 9, 2016

Rich Hill is a friend, colleague and mentor of mine. Along with being a great consultant and coach to many recognizable companies, Rich was also the Executive Director of the Dow Leadership Center at Hillsdale College and the Director of Human Resources for General Electric Plastics when Jack Welch took over the division. In essence, he was one of Jack’s first HR directors.

Rich dropped me this note the other day:

I really like the post on Mentally Ill Teams. How many times have I seen these dynamics exist in my many years of work with organizations? The point of “The attempt to avoid the suffering simply causes more and deeper suffering” is so true.

Rich goes on to talk about a process he titled “Contracting for Change”. Notice a couple of elements of the process as he explains it:

One of the key elements in the process was putting charts up on the wall for each team player with three columns:

Things I should do more of/or better

Things I should do less of

Things I do well and should not change.

Each chart had additional columns to assess the Priority of each response relative to Top Priority or secondary Priority. Each of the other team players were given tags to write on for each of the three elements. Feedback!

Once all the feedback tags were up on each person’s chart the entire team moves to a given chart and the owner of that chart first suggests what the comment means to him or her and then asks for individual clarification of the statements – such as

Can you give me a specific example?

Where have you seen this characteristic in play?

We used these clarification statements especially if the owner’s interpretation didn’t quite square with the person who put the tag point up. This approach assures better mutual understanding by all members of the team.

Rich goes on to explain the next step of prioritization on the Do More Of and Do Less Of columns only done by all other team members, not the person’s own chart.

But I think the next step was the most powerful:

The next step deals with negotiating the key items on given charts to enhance both individual and team effectiveness (emphasis mine). If successful, the final understanding is put into a written contract between the parties. 90 days out we reconvene the teams and go over contracts to see how much progress was made. I used it with several organizations and always got good results.
As you can imagine there was some suffering as a result of the clarity of issues between people, but it often led to good results.

I don’t really know what Jack Welch would do in this case, but I do know what one of his first HR directors would do. Working with executives at the level where Rich worked probably made the statement “some suffering” a bit of an understatement. But the power of feedback and dealing with the direct pain and suffering cannot be denied or overlooked as a powerful tool for leadership and team improvement.

Thanks Rich, I really appreciate the time you took to send some feedback.

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Mentally Ill Teams

by Ron Potter May 27, 2016

“Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult – once we truly understand and accept it – then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.”

These are the opening lines in M. Scott Peck’s book “The Road Less Traveled.”

Dr. Peck essentially spends the rest of his book explaining that:

“The attempt to avoid legitimate suffering lies at the root of all emotional illness.”

How many teams have you worked with a team that seems to exhibit emotional illness? No one ever quite speaks the whole truth. Taboo topics never seem to come out in the open except in those moments of complete frustration when someone just can’t take it anymore. No decisions seem to get made or if they do they certainly don’t seem to stick. One voice is always (or seems to think) they are the smartest voice in the room. Another is so conflict averse that even the hint of disagreement will be taken “off line” to be fixed behind closed doors.

These are all signs of emotional illness and they are just as real in teams (maybe more so) than in individuals. Note that Dr. Peck identifies the root cause as the attempt to avoid legitimate suffering. Pay attention to the word attempt. The effort really never does avoid the pain and suffering, it just attempts to avoid it. And in fact by doing so it actually makes things worse because the suffering is never dealt with openly or cleanly and simply leads to more misunderstanding, conflict and hurt feelings. The attempt to avoid the suffering simply causes more and deeper suffering.

Also note that he describes it as legitimate suffering. As the opening sentence of his book says, “Life is difficult.” Life is difficult. People are difficult. Teams are difficult. Organizations are difficult. The market place is difficult. Customers and clients are difficult.

Yes, it’s all difficult. Decisions are going to result in suffering. It’s a dilemma. It means a choice between equally unfavorable alternatives. You’ve heard of being on the ‘horns of a dilemma.’ It refers to the two horns on a bull. Both unfavorable alternatives. You must choose one horn or the other but you’re going to get gored either way. Life is difficult. Most tough corporate and team decisions are dilemma’s. Either alternative is equally unfavorable but you have to choose one and you’re going to get gored either way.

Trying to avoid the legitimate suffering from facing dilemma’s simply leads to emotional illness. Don’t avoid it, face it, be open about it and deal with it. Then take your medicine. You and your team will be much healthier.

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Conflict: Having A Good Fight

by Ron Potter March 31, 2016

Source: MartialArtsNomad.com, Creative Commons

I recently started working with a new leadership team and I was interviewing each member to get a feel for the current conditions on the team. While they all spoke of how nice it was to work for this company and with this team, several of them said something to the effect that “we just haven’t been able to have a good fight yet.” I don’t think anyone was itching for a fight but they were longing for the tough debates about either controversial issues or issues where there seemed to be lack of alignment. Soon after that interview an interesting article popped up on LinkedIn written by Dr. Travis Bradberry, author of Emotional Intelligence 2.0. Dr. Bradberry starts his article with “When you’re a nice person, conflict can be a real challenge.” What really made me smile was his next line, “Not that mean people are any better at conflict, they just enjoy it more.” I like working with nice people but I really enjoy working with nice people who are really good at conflict.

Conflict is a needed ingredient

On high performance teams, conflict is a needed ingredient. I’m talking about conflict of ideas, experiences, assumptions, outlooks, beliefs, etc. It’s the richness of diversity of thought that is necessary for teams to become high performance teams. But diversity without well managed conflict will only lead to the splintering of teams into different camps.
Many of Dr. Bradberry’s suggestions are useful:

Consider the repercussions of silence

Often it just seems easier to be quiet and not bring up your objections or different point of view. However, not bringing them up is a decision in itself. You’ve just traded off the cost of dealing with it now vs the cost that will come with the ramifications down the road. The later costs are always higher than the present ones.

Don’t speak in absolutes

I’ve seen this one escalate arguments quickly. “You always” or “You Never” seem to trigger primal reactions in us that will lead to and grow a fight quicker than almost any other response.

Ask good questions until you get the heart of the matter

One of the books that recently went up on my reading list is “The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More and Change the Way you Lead Forever”. Using good questions is the best way to lead and deal with conflict. Stay curious my friend.
Dr. Bradberry includes several other suggestions that you may want to dig into. But I’ll close this blog with a thought from Dr. Scott Peck in his book “The Road Less Traveled.” His belief is that at the root of mental illness is the avoidance of pain and suffering. You may avoid the pain and suffering in the moment but if you can’t have that good fight, it will lead to a highly dysfunctional team rather than a high performance team.

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