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BlogTeamTeam Series

Team Elements – Elegance: Role Clarification

by Ron Potter

This will be our last blog post on the Elegance section of TREC: Truth, Respect, Elegance, and Commitment.  We’ll summarize these three elements in our next blog as you begin to see the entire journey to great team development.

This post, a subtopic of Elegance, is about Role Clarification but I want to start with one of those statements that seem to have gone viral in corporate speak.

Stay in your Swim Lane

If you’ve been in the corporate world over the last several years, you’ve probably heard this term.  I’m not sure who started this cliche but it sure wasn’t someone who knew how to build great teams.  This is NOT one of my favorite sayings.  Every time I hear this statement it’s in reference to someone who has:

  • crossed the boundary
  • stepped on someone else’s toes
  • “presumed” to know better than the “expert” how things should or should not be done

Whatever the reason for the irritation, it sends a message that everyone is supposed to do their own job and somehow that will make the team effort successful.  This message reveals a couple of beliefs at the core of team building.

  1. Build the right set of skills, do your job and everything will be just fine.
  2. No one has the skills or experience to question the “expert.”  Questioning the expert questions their competency.

There are some fallacies in those beliefs.

  • Skills and competencies are what will make a team and a corporation successful.  WRONG!
    The reason this belief exists is that most corporations depend on the measurement of skills and competencies as the measure of internal success.  Promotions, pay levels, and other rewards are based on these measurements.  Research and experience points to the fact the good people skills create more success than job skills and competencies.  It’s just that people skills, leadership style, and team engagement are harder to measure.
  • Other research shows that new creative, innovative, breakthrough ideas almost always come not from the expert but from the person who has a different perspective altogether.

Orchestras and Choirs

Teams should function more like an orchestra.  If you want a quick read about what that looks like, try Maestro: A Surprising Story about leading by listening by Roger Nierenberg.

I’ve been a choir member off and on for years.  I just love the harmonizing of the various parts.  When it all comes together in a crescendo, it just sends a chill down your spine and sometimes brings tears to your eyes.  Hearing and being a part of a 12, 50 or 100 member choir as they bring their voices together is a wonderful experience.

Rehearsals

Rehearsals are very different and a great learning experience.

  • The leader expects each section to know their part and perform it well
  • The leader will often stop us to say, “This section is not working, let’s listen to each part then put it all back together again.”
  • Often we’re instructed to tone our section down a bit so that the overall piece can be better understood.  “Basses, tone it down.  The sopranos are carrying the melody at this point and you’re drowning them out.  The audience can’t hear the melody.”
  • “Now basses, pick up the energy and the lead from the sopranos and bring it together with the same enthusiasm.”

The orchestra conductor leads us.  He expects us to know our part and corrects us when we don’t do it well.  But when we do it together it sounds awesome!

Business teams don’t usually function in this manner.  “Stay in your swim lanes” or “Know your job assignment and do it well.”  Seldom do I hear team leaders asking a section to tone it down, work at something other than your optimum rate, blend with the team, pick up on their enthusiasm and build something great together!

Build Team

Knowing our roles is important.  Building a great team means bringing it all together, not just maximizing each part!

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BlogLeadership

Arresting Avoidance

by Ron Potter

The tendency to avoid problems and the emotional suffering inherent in them is the primary basis of all human mental illness.”
—M. Scott Peck

Avoidance-oriented people tend to move away from things that threaten them in order to protect themselves. Why? There are a number of reasons.

Avoidance as Protection

Often it is due to excessive concern about embarrassment. We just don’t want to be embarrassed or, more often, to embarrass someone else. We hold back—we don’t tell the truth—and poor organizational or personal behaviors are perpetuated.

Fear is another culprit. Sometimes it just seems easier to run and hide. Maybe the issue will somehow just go away? That’s classic avoidance—a sign of cowardly leadership.

Another reason for avoiding problems can be oversensitivity to the feelings or opinions of others. We just don’t want to hurt anybody. The other person is so nice; why should she have her parade rained upon? Issues are circumvented, and facts are ignored. We avoid the short-term pain and inflict a longer-term problem within the team and the organization.

And then there is the old standby character quality that causes so many problems: unhealthy pride. Some of the people who are most adept at avoidance are very proud, especially if exploring the gory details of an organizational issue might make them look bad.

Overcoming Avoidance

Leaders who develop a humble heart and a willingness to confront concerns do not allow pride to interfere. They are open to opportunities for self-growth because they are secure in who they are and are not preoccupied with themselves.

Avoidance holds back an organization whereas a commitment to improvement will positively influence your own development as well as the development of interpersonal relationships, teams, and overall company effectiveness.

It takes great courage to change a pattern of avoidance and seek instead to make improvements and overcome the pain or difficulty in making decisions, confronting people, or being overwhelmed by circumstances or self-doubt. It is not easy, but the benefits you will experience from making this change are far greater than the “benefits” of avoidance.

Freedom from avoidance enables leaders to focus attention on determining when a situation needs action and improvement.

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BlogTrust Me

Learning in Chaos

by Ron Potter

As Peter Senge defines it, a learning organization is an organizational structure in which “people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning how to learn together.”

In this sense, a learning organization is an organization that is continually expanding its ability to create and re-create the very patterns and structures by which it operates.

At least that is the goal.

Quick-Deciding Creates Chaos, Learning Order

Unfortunately, what I have found in my work is that quick decision making has won. In many cases, leaders have abandoned the learning organization in favor of the quick-deciding organization.

In times of chaos, confusion, and change, peacemaking leaders need to focus attention on making sure their organizations are quick learning rather than quick deciding.

The fast-paced environment of product development, competition, and shareholder expectations has forced many organizations to adopt a quick-deciding mentality. In this model, a team (much like a football team needing to score before time expires in the fourth quarter) is in a hurry-up offense. The goal is to make decisions. But as Tom Peters correctly observes, “As competition around the world boils over as never before, firms caught with bloated staffs and dissipating strengths—from Silicon Valley to the Ruhr Valley in Germany—are looking for quick fixes. There are none.”

Leading Toward Learning

So how would a two-pillar, peacemaking leader respond?

The goal of the quick-learning team is to seek out and develop opinion rather than steamrolling over it or quickly mustering forces against it. Feedback is highly desired rather than feared.

In contrast, feedback is offensive when you are a quick-deciding team. You develop “sides” on all issues. The competition heats up. Winning at all costs is what counts.

Members of a quick-learning team are all on the same side of the fence, looking at an issue with differing opinions, experiences, and ideas.

Meeting Agendas

Meeting agendas are often a surprising enemy. Leaders, staring at an agenda, feel compelled to make decisions within the time allotted. In most cases, true discussion of the issues and everyone’s opinions (the rooting-out process) is bypassed in favor of table talk that centers on implementation.

We suggest a meeting agenda that maps out what the team wants to learn about an issue. Learning should be the goal with good decisions the result. Remember that the goal is learning quickly and then making good decisions, not just deciding quickly.

Patience is Key

“Patience,” said Saint Augustine, “is the companion of wisdom.” Problems and day-to-day crises test our wisdom and our ability to make decisions under pressure. Great leaders are people of patience and constant learning.

It is the leader’s job to pull everything together into a quick-learning rather than a quick-deciding environment. The leader holds the dialogue together and asks questions that are designed to help team members clearly communicate their information and thoughts about the agenda item. In this way, the meeting’s goal is met: quick learning—rather than quick deciding—for the purpose of making good decisions.

The leader needs to develop not only an inclusive mind-set but also one that honors people for who they are and what they bring to the process. Each person brings unique strengths and outlooks to the table.

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BlogTeamTeam Series

Team Elements – Respect: Summary

by Ron Potter

Over the last several blog posts we’ve been working on the framework for great teams.  The four elements in the framework  include:

TREC.  The dictionary defines a TREK as “a movement, especially when involving difficulties and complex organization: an arduous journey.”  I realize that TREC and TREK are slightly different, but I always want to add an element that helps you remember a concept or framework.  Notice that building a team includes difficult and complex organization and is an arduous journey.

Teams don’t just happen.

Just because you gather together a group of people at roughly the same level in an organization, that doesn’t make them a team.  It’s simply a group of people who have some of the same goals and many different goals.  Leadership teams are charged with lining up the goals of all the participants, regardless of their personal or functional goals.  Sometimes those personal and functional goals need to be sacrificed in order to move the team goals forward.  It’s an arduous journey.

There is a fifth element that was not included in the list but needs to be checked and that’s Purpose.  The reason I tend to minimize the Purpose goal is that I assume leadership teams know what their collective goal is or should be.  However, if that’s not the case, this fifth element will jump to the top of the list to be solved first before the TREC can begin.

Truth and Respect

So far we’ve worked through the details of Truth and Respect.  We summarized Truth and I would like to summarize Respect in this post.

We need to look at the individual pieces of Respect as covered in the last three blog posts but there is also an important principle that relates to the combination of both Truth and Respect.

Respect

Individually, Respect can be made up of several elements.

Team Strengths
  •  Humility
    • When someone does not demonstrate humility, it’s hard to believe they have respect for others.
  • Development
    • When leaders believe it’s worth their time to grow and develop people, it demonstrates respect.
  • Compassion
    • People are motivated by being treated as human beings.  Not by what they do or don’t do, but who they are.
  • Patience
    • Stay calm, don’t get annoyed, turn back to Humility, Development, and Compassion
  • Kindness
    • “Giving someone what they need the most, deserve the least at great personal expense.”  Chip Ingram
Team Weaknesses
  •  Envy
    • Envy occurs when someone feels inferior to others.  It’s destructive, first the one who envies, then those around them.  When someone is dealing with envy, help them develop.
  • Anger
    • Anger eruptions are seldom positive.  Helping the team express anger and disappointment in a safe environment helps in dealing with loss and adversity.
  • Grudge
    • Grudges are usually caused by envy and anger but they just keep surfacing.  Deal with the envy and anger constructively to stop the grudges.

Truth and Respect

There is also a powerful force when a team is both very truthful and yet maintains great respect for every individual.  Amy Edmondson is may be the best-known author to identify the concept that when both Truth and Respect are present, a team experiences “psychological safety.”  Amy and others have shown through research that when psychological safety is present, teams perform the best.

Truth and Respect are necessary individually but when combined they help teams perform at a level that is much higher than expected.

Respect, Often the Missing Element

After spending nearly 30 years working with leadership teams, my experience has been that respect is often the missing element holding teams back.

Truth: Overt

“Truth” tends to be overt.  People say it.  Or more accurately, people blurt it out.  The problems happen when someone believes they have the truth and everyone else simply has a perspective.  I’ll write more about perspective in an upcoming blog about modern-day philosophers.  Billy Joel says in one of his songs “the only people I fear are those who never have doubts.”  If you have no doubts about your “truth”, you’re probably wrong.

The other thing I’ve seen happen on teams as they deteriorate, the truth turns sarcastic.  Yes, it is the truth but it certainly doesn’t get expressed with any respect.

Respect (lack of): Covert

I find a lack of respect to be covert.  Nothing is really said out loud or face-to-face but outside the room, there are comments made about a person or a position that is not very respectful.  Issues that remain covert are the most difficult to handle.  I know that people seem to think it’s kinder to remain silent and they’ll avoid the expected conflict created by being overt.  But anything that remains covert is always more difficult to work out.

Truth and Respect.  These are the first two steps in our TREC to great teams.

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BlogTrust Me

Managing Conflict

by Ron Potter

In his book The Fellowship of the Ring, the first book in the series The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien describes the camaraderie of a diverse group banded together by a common cause. Called “the fellowship of the ring,” their quest is to destroy the power of the Dark Lord by destroying the ring in which that power resides. Though they differ in nearly every way—racially, physically, temperamentally—the fellowship is united in its opposition of the Dark Lord.

In a section omitted in the movie, a heated conflict breaks out among the crusaders. Axes are drawn. Bows are bent. Harsh words are spoken. Disaster nearly strikes the small band. When peace finally prevails, a wise counselor observes, “Indeed in nothing is the power of the Dark Lord more clearly shown than in the estrangement that divides all those who still oppose him.”

Conflict causes estrangement within teams, even the best teams. Therefore, managing conflict is at the heart of the dilemma of the leader who has good relations with individual team members but cannot get the group to work together.

Rivalry causes division. Debate causes hurt feelings or a sense of not being heard or understood. How does a leader keep an aggressive person and a person who easily withdraws engaged?

Kenneth W. Thomas and Ralph H. Kilmann created the Conflict Mode Instrument, which is “designed to assess an individual’s behavior in conflict situations.” It measures people’s behavior along two basic dimensions: “(1) assertiveness—the extent to which an individual attempts to satisfy his or her concerns, and (2) cooperativeness—the extent to which an individual attempts to satisfy the other person’s concerns. These two dimensions of behavior can be used to identify five specific methods of dealing with conflicts.” The methods are described as follows:

  1. Avoiding—Low assertiveness and low cooperativeness. The goal is to delay.
  2. Competing—High assertiveness and low cooperativeness. The goal is to win.
  3. Accommodating—Low assertiveness and high cooperativeness. The goal is to yield.
  4. Compromising—Moderate assertiveness and moderate cooperativeness. The goal is to find a middle ground.
  5. Collaborating—High assertiveness and high cooperativeness. The goal is to find a win-win situation.8

Leaders need to use the peacemaking qualities defined by the two pillars of humility and endurance to bring conflict to the highest level of resolution: collaboration. The cooperative environment means “I need to be humble.” The assertive environment means “I need to endure.” The two pillars, taken together, cause people to listen, yet hold firm in solving conflict through collaboration. When collaborating, individuals seek to work with others to find a solution that satisfies all parties. It involves digging into hidden concerns, learning, and listening but not competing.

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BlogTeamTeam Series

Team Elements – Respect: Envy, Anger, Grudges

by Ron Potter

We’re continuing our series on building great teams.  Great teams happen when we have

We’re still working our way through the Respect series with the final set of circumstances of Envy, Anger, and Grudges.  No, great teams don’t possess these attributes, great teams avoid these attributes. Envy, Anger, and Grudges are team weaknesses that can be lethal to your team’s well-being.

Envy

Envy is the first of the team weaknesses we’ll discuss. Great teams snuff out envy whenever it rears its ugly head.  Here are some attributes of Envy:

  • Discontented or resentful by someone else’s possessions, qualities, luck, or accomplishments, style or attribute.
  • An emotion which occurs when a person lacks another’s superior quality or achievement.
  • Desires to deprive another of what they have.
  • Delights in degrading those who are more deserving.

Envy occurs when someone feels inferior to others and will do what they can to undermine or chop down those who possess more or achieve more than themselves.

At its roots, this is a comparison issue.  Always comparing yourself to others is a losing battle.  Jordan Peterson in his book 12 Rules of Life: An antidote to chaos states in rule number 4 “Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.”  Comparing yourself to who you were yesterday puts you on the path of growth.

I once had a pastor who was fond of talking about the little boy pushing his wagon up a hill.  As soon as he sat down in the wagon to rest, he found himself at the bottom of the hill.  Never stop growing!  Never stop learning!  As soon as you give up on your own growth and development, envy creeps in.   You begin to be resentful of what others have or what others have become.

Envy is destructive.  Its first target is yourself.  Its second target is those around you.  As Jordan Peterson says, an antidote to chaos is to continue growing.

Anger

As the second of the team weaknesses, Anger that is directed at circumstances or failures can be healthy if it is channeled properly.  Eruptions of anger are seldom positive.  Expressing anger and disappointment in a safe environment can help everyone deal with the loss and adversity.

I’ve often run exercises with teams that have experienced great loss and disappointment.  Working in small groups I allow each person to express their emotions by writing them on flip charts.  No holds barred.  Get it all out.  Once the teams have exhausted the extent of their anger, we take the flip charts that were created, post them on the wall, share them with each other and then hand every chart out to members of the team.  They are then instructed to tear the flip charts into as many pieces as possible, throw the pieces into the middle of the floor (expressing as much anger as they can while doing so) and then we all jump on the pile of pieces and stomp on them as viciously as possible.  By the time the stomping has slowed to a stop I always witness a moment of somber quiet.  But then someone breaks out in a big grin.  Another joins them.  It soon turns to laughter and people start expressing how cathartic the exercise was.  In one form or another people shout out “Wow, I haven’t felt this good in a long time!”  The anger dissipates.  Calm heads return.  And a new determination emerges in the room to move on, work hard, figure out how to overcome and get better.

All too often the anger remains covert.  People assume they must hold their head up high, don’t complain and keep going.  When things remain covert it’s almost impossible to deal with them.  Once we brought out the anger in an overt but healthy way, new energy emerges from the team and it makes it possible to move forward.

Grudges

The third and most subtle of the team weaknesses, Grudges can be caused be either envy or anger but they just keep resurfacing over time.  It’s probably because it remains overt until that moment when it erupts once again.

One of my teams referred to the practices as “replaying old tapes.”  Something would happen on the team that didn’t seem to make sense to me and finally, someone else would explain, “Oh, they’re just replaying old tapes from what happened a few years ago.”  A few years ago?  Are you kidding me?  People are still holding and expressing grudges after a few years and no one has dealt with it yet?  Amazing.

Leaders and teams must call out grudges and put a stop to them.  Maybe it will take a team exercise like the anger one described above.  Maybe it will take some one-on-one discussions with the leader or a coach.  Maybe a leader needs to decide to help a team member move on if they can’t get past old issues.  Grudges can be like deep infections.  They continue to resurface.  Sometimes a mild antibiotic will heal an infection.  I dealt with one of those antibiotic-resistant infections a few years ago.  It took a direct injection of the most powerful antibiotic every three hours for six weeks.

Infections can be tough to deal with.  Grudges can be just as tough because they pop to the surface periodically.  You must get to the root of them and deal with them to have healthy teams.

In this post, we’ve talked about the team weaknesses you should avoid to build great teams.  In the previous post, we talked about the positive things that need to be present to develop great Respect within teams.  We’ll wrap up Respect with our next post to pull it all together with focus.

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BlogTrust Me

Working Together, Not Against

by Ron Potter

Leaders at all levels grapple with the challenge of getting people to pool their talents and work with, not against, one another.

Often frustrating to leaders is a team that consists entirely of “stars” who can’t or won’t play together as a team to “win the championship.” In an era of knowledge workers, leaders find themselves with nonfunctioning teams of all-stars who can easily undermine them. (Peter Drucker defines knowledge workers as those who “know more about their job than their boss does and in fact know more about their job than anybody else in the organization.”)

Chuck Daly, the first coach of America’s Dream Team, found himself needing to take basketball players like Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, and Larry Bird and build a team of champions, not just a group of incredible superstars. Coach Daly used all his coaching experience, leadership ability, and basketball knowledge to mold this group of all-stars into a team.

The team dominated headlines as well as the competition. Everywhere they went, the media followed. And the animated, trash-talking practices were sometimes bigger news than the games. In their first Olympic game together, the Dream Team trounced Angola 116-48 and never looked back, going 8-0 en route to the gold.

They were the only undefeated team in the tournament, averaging an Olympic record of 117.3 points a game. They won their games by an average of 43.8 points, and the closest any opponent could come was 32 points (Croatia in the gold-medal final).

“You will see a team of professionals in the Olympics again,” said Daly. “But I don’t think you’ll see another team quite like this. This was a majestic team.”

Coach Daly could not mold these incredibly talented basketball stars into the successful team they became by keeping the focus on himself. On the other hand, he could not surrender the basic basketball concepts he knew would help the team win a gold medal. He was a builder and a success at developing teams.

Teamwork doesn’t just happen. A winning team is not formed by a miracle of nature. You cannot just throw people together (even knowledge workers or pro basketball stars) and expect them to function as a high-performance team. It takes work. And at the core of team building is the desire to develop people and create a calm environment in which productive growth and seasoning can occur.

When leaders tolerate poor teams or even promote them through their own leadership style, organizations find themselves misaligned. Employees use this out-of-plumb structure just like children who play off each quibbling parent to get their own way. Leaders need to stop this behavior and get teams realigned. Leaders sometimes empower direct-reports to perform tasks or projects that are actually opposed to each other.

When team members come to us, they also have questions. Typically the questions team members ask are about themselves: “How do I deal with difficult team members?” or “How do I get heard?” These are self-directed questions. The team members are concerned about themselves—getting heard, getting ahead, getting along, and getting their jobs done.

In most cases the leader has not developed the team to the point of understanding the full value of synergy. The team members do not understand that the sum of their collective output will be greater than the work they could do individually.

Worse, many executive teams are not convinced that synergy can happen at the leadership level. “Authors Robert Lefton and V. R. Buzzotta, long-time counselors to top management, systematically examined 26 top-level teams, ranging in size from six to 20 people (usually a CEO or president and vice presidents); 20 of the firms are in the Fortune 500 club. In a nutshell, the authors found little teamwork, virtually no ‘synergy’ from these collections of wise heads, and a lot of wasted time and childish behavior.”

It falls on leaders to get teams excited about working together—about creating synergy. Many of the team members’ questions and wants can be overcome when they feel the power of working together and achieving the goals of the team.

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BlogTeamTeam Series

Team Elements – Respect: Psychological Safety

by Ron Potter

Resect

We continue our series on teams and the elements that make up great ones. Teams are at the heart of great performance, greatest happiness, and the best memories. These blog posts are built on the 4 Levels of Happiness by Aristotle. In his framework, Aristotle says that the highest level of happiness will be achieved at Level 4. In describing Level 4 Happiness, Aristotle used five words:

  • Truth
  • Love
  • Purpose
  • Beauty
  • Unity

In this series of posts, I’ve concentrated on the four words of Truth, Love, Beauty, and Unity. Purpose is the word right in the middle of all five. I don’t spend a lot of time concentrating on Purpose because it is so essential and obvious. Without a purpose, there is no team.

I also try to use words that more directly apply to the business environment. Words like love and beauty are words you don’t often hear in corporate meetings. Using words that essentially mean the same thing as the original words and yet seem appropriate in the corporate world, I’ve modified the last three words to make them immediately identifiable and to help you remember them. The four words I’ve used are:

  • Truth
  • Respect
  • Elegance
  • Commitment

The Greeks had several words that all get translated into the English word Love. The Greek word for Love that Aristotle used had nothing to do with emotions or the feeling of love that we have for another person. This word referred to treating the other person with respect. As human beings, we seem to have an innate sense that someone respects us or not. Great teams require great respect (love) for each other.

In unpacking the concept of Respect (or Love), we will look at:

  • At least three elements of building Trust: Humility, Development, Compassion
  • Patience
  • Kindness
  • Lack of Envy
  • Anger directed at issues or situations, not people
  • No grudges

Psychological Safety

If we look at these first two (Truth – Respect) together, a very powerful concept of psychological safety begins to emerge. Psychological Safety is present every time a team achieves greatness and can even become a predictor of greatness.

Google thought it would look at many of their teams around the company and see if they could figure out what made a high performing team. I believe they looked at 340 teams and in the end, could not find any pattern that predicted high achievement. Or more accurately, they found too many patterns to reach any conclusion until they found the concept of psychological safety.

Amy Edmondson at Harvard is one of the more visible proponents of psychological safety. Once Google built in a psychological safety measurement into their team assessment, there was a correlation between high performing teams and psychological safety.

Psychological Safety on Teams

Having psychological safety on a team means that the truth is spoken, not holding back anything and at the same time, there is so much respect for each person, people feel safe in stating or hearing the truth. These are the first two elements of the highest level of happiness. Teams that can speak the truth with complete respect not only perform at a high level, but they are also a joy to be a part of.

I think that one reason holding teams back in accomplishing complete psychological safety is that people assume truth and respect are at the opposite ends of the same spectrum. I can either speak the total truth, even if it means that I hold people accountable for their failures or shortcoming (one end of the spectrum) or I can show total respect to someone, therefore I must hold back the complete truth (opposite end of the spectrum). But this is a false understanding. We need to think of these two elements as two different dimensions on a chart.

For instance:

  • The vertical dimension may be labeled “Truth” with complete truth at the top and lack of truth at the bottom.
  • The horizontal dimension may be labeled “Respect” with total respect to the right (at the end) and lack of respect to the left.

This leaves us with a two x two grid (which consultants love).

  • Lower Left – Low Truth and Low Respect = Insensitive and Manipulative
  • Upper Left – High Truth but Low Respect = Aggressive and Obnoxious
  • Lower Right – Low Truth but High Respect = Empathy but no accountability
  • Upper Right – High Truth and High Respect = Psychological Safety

Great teams express great truth and have total respect for team members.

Elements of Respect

We’ve pointed out the value of both Truth and Respect here in this blog. In the next few blogs, we’ll explore the elements of great respect including:

  • Humility, Development, and Compassion
  • Patience
  • Kindness
  • The benefit of the Doubt
  • No Envy, Anger or Grudges

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BlogTeamTeam Series

Team Elements – Respect

by Ron Potter

We started this blog series about teams in early January of this year. Teams are at the heart of great performance, greatest happiness, and the best memories. These blog posts are built on the 4 Levels of Happiness by Aristotle. In his framework, Aristotle says that the highest level of happiness will be achieved at Level 4. In describing Level 4 Happiness, Aristotle used five words:

  • Truth
  • Love
  • Purpose
  • Beauty
  • Unity

In this series of posts, I’ve concentrated on the four words of Truth, Love, Beauty, and Unity. Purpose is the word right in the middle of all five. I don’t spend a lot of time concentrating on Purpose because it is so essential and obvious. Without a purpose, there is no team.

I also try to use words that more directly apply to the business environment. Words like love and beauty are words you don’t often hear in corporate meetings. Using words that essentially mean the same thing as the original words and yet seem appropriate in the corporate world, I’ve modified the last three words to make them immediately identifiable and to help you remember them. The four words I’ve used are:

  • Truth
  • Respect
  • Elegance
  • Commitment

The Greeks had several words that all get translated into the English word Love. The Greek word for Love that Aristotle used had nothing to do with emotions or the feeling of love that we have for another person. This word referred to treating the other person with respect. As human beings, we seem to have an innate sense that someone respects us or not. Great teams require great respect (love) for each other.

In unpacking the concept of Respect (or Love), we will look at:

  • At least three elements of building Trust: Humility, Development, Compassion
  • Patience
  • Kindness
  • Lack of Envy
  • Anger directed at issues or situations, not people
  • No grudges

Psychological Safety

If we look at these first two (Truth – Respect) together, a very powerful concept of psychological safety begins to emerge. Psychological Safety is present every time a team achieves greatness and can even become a predictor of greatness.

Google thought it would look at many of their teams around the company and see if they could figure out what made a high performing team. I believe they looked at 340 teams and in the end, could not find any pattern that predicted high achievement. Or more accurately, they found too many patterns to reach any conclusion until they found the concept of psychological safety. Amy Edmondson at Harvard is one of the more visible proponents of psychological safety. Once Google built in a psychological safety measurement into their team assessment, there was a correlation between high performing teams and psychological safety.

Psychological Safety

Having psychological safety on a team means that the truth is spoken, not holding back anything and at the same time, there is so much respect for each person, people feel safe in stating or hearing the truth. These are the first two elements of the highest level of happiness. Teams that can speak the truth with complete respect not only perform at a high level, but they are also a joy to be a part of.

I think that one reason holding teams back in accomplishing complete psychological safety is that people assume truth and respect are at the opposite ends of the same spectrum. I can either speak the total truth, even if it means that I hold people accountable for their failures or shortcoming (one end of the spectrum) or I can show total respect to someone. Therefore I must hold back the complete truth (opposite end of the spectrum). But this is a false understanding. We need to think of these two elements as two different dimensions on a chart.

For instance:

  • The vertical dimension may be labeled “Truth” with complete truth at the top and lack of truth at the bottom.
  • The horizontal dimension may be labeled “Respect” with total respect to the right (at the end) and lack of respect to the left.

This leaves us with a two x two grid (which consultants love).

  • Lower Left – Low Truth and Low Respect = Insensitive and Manipulative
  • Upper Left – High Truth but Low Respect = Aggressive and Obnoxious
  • Lower Right – Low Truth but High Respect = Empathy but no accountability
  • Upper Right – High Truth and High Respect = Psychological Safety

Great teams express great truth and have total respect for team members.

Elements of Respect

We’ve pointed out the value of both Truth and Respect here in this blog. In the next few blogs, we’ll explore the elements of great respect including:

  • Humility, Development, and Compassion
  • Patience
  • Kindness
  • The benefit of the Doubt
  • No Envy, Anger or Grudges

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BlogTeamTeam Series

Team Elements – Truth: Perspective and Memory

by Ron Potter

We’ve been introducing and preparing ourselves to walk through the elements that make great teams. The first of these is Truth. Great teams can tell each other the truth. But truth needs some special understanding.

Memory

How well do you remember that event? Is it seared into your memory? If so, brain science tells us that it’s very likely wrong. The more intensely we remember something, the more the memory has been modified by our brain to align with our beliefs and assumptions and therefore the “surer” we are of its accuracy.

The day after the shuttle Challenger blew up, a professor in Florida asked his class to write down everything they remembered about the moment and following hours of the Challenger explosion. The accident had happened only 24 hours before the class. The professor gave them some guidelines to write about:

  • What were their emotions at the moment they saw or heard about the explosion?
  • Who were they with? How did the other people react?
  • Where were they at the moment of the explosion and for the rest of the evening?
  • How did their emotions shift over that time? What was the focus of the conversations they had with others?

The students spent a couple of hours of class writing about these questions and other thoughts.

A few years later, the professor tracked down as many members of that class that he could find. In each case, they were handed their hand-written papers and asked how it fit with the memory they have of the explosion.

In all of the cases, their memories were different from what they had written that day. In some cases, the students rejected what they had written and told the “truth” about what happened that day. Their memories had been modified over time and solidified about the “story” they would tell of the events they “had experienced” on that fatal day.

Because computer hard drives and “memories” have been around for over four decades now, we have this belief that just like computer hard drives, we put things in our memory and then when we retrieve them, they are exactly what was put into our memory the moment the memory was created. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Our memory is modified from the moment it is created by events and experiences along the way. We are constantly modifying our memory.

Perspective

Perspective changes everything, even the things we’re observing at the moment. Again, brain science has shed a great deal of light on how we observe the world around us and “remember” events.

I’ve written other blogs on this topic, but the essence of the matter is that we assume what we are observing is the “truth” while everyone who has a different conclusion is simply expressing their “perspective.”

Science tells us the once an image enters our eye, the image itself is broken into at least 127 million bits of information and run through several processing centers of our brain. These centers include (but are not limited to) values, emotions, goals, ideas, memories, stress, pain, experiences, etc.

It’s easy to understand that each of us has different values, emotions, goals, ideas, memories, stress, pain, experiences. It should then be easy to understand the each of us will have a different view of what the “truth” is, based on what we just observed.

Realize that your perspective may be one of many. Each perspective is valid based on the persons processing centers.

Truth

Being part of a team means that we respect each other’s perspective of a given situation and work hard at reaching a collective perspective that will help us move forward and stay united and committed to an action plan.

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BlogTeamTeam Series

Team Elements – Truth: Truth with Half a Brain

by Ron Potter

Do you use half or all of your brain to understand the truth?

We’ve been introducing and preparing ourselves to walk through the elements that make great teams. The first of these is Truth. Great teams can tell each other the truth. But truth needs some special understanding.

“Any one with half a brain…”

“Anyone with half a brain can see the truth.” That’s an old saying that expresses some derision toward someone who doesn’t see the truth as you see it. The implication is that if you used even half your brain, you would see the truth.

Have you noticed that people (sometimes yourself) “know” the truth? But if you point out to them that someone else sees things differently, their reaction is the other person has a perspective, but you have the truth.

Separating the brain

Years ago, it was discovered that the cure for people who have extreme epilepsy is to sever their brain halves. Each half of the brain is still fully functional; it’s just that the two halves don’t communicate with each other anymore.

For people who went through this procedure, their epilepsy issues were cured. One patient said “You don’t notice that your brain halves are not working together. You just adapt to it. You don’t feel any different than you did before.” However, the researchers did notice a difference.

To further clarify this difference they created an experiment with some of the earliest patients. These first experiments were conducted in the days before the personal computer, so they used the technology available to them at the moment, a View-Finder. With a View-Finder, each eye sees a slightly different image. The intended purpose was to give a sense of 3-D depth perception. The researchers modified this technology slightly and gave the patient entirely different photos in each eye. In the right eye, they showed the patient a picture of a women. In the left eye, there was a picture of a man.

Before placing the View-Finder to the patient’s eyes, they asked the patient to describe what they saw in the View-Finder. After a few seconds of observing, the patient described the women (in her right eye) in complete detail. When asked if she saw anything else the answer was “No, I described the woman as completely as I could.”

Then the patient was asked to repeat the experiment, but this time instead of describing what she saw, she was to pick out the image of what she saw from a group of images. After viewing the View-Finder for a few seconds, the patient pointed to the picture of the man that appeared in the left eye. In both cases, the pictures of the man and the woman appeared in the same eye. However, the patient was “manipulated” to either verbalize what she saw or point to a point at what she saw. In other words, the researchers could control which image the person saw and remembered by setting them up ahead of time. Verbal description caused the person to describe the image in the right eye. Muscle and physical control caused the person to describe the image in the left eye. Their “truth” was dictated simply by prepping them for how they would answer the question.

A similar experiment conducted with another patient years later with the use of a personal computer provided the same results. This time the patient was asked to concentrate on a dot right in the middle of their computer monitor, and then two images were flashed on the screen: one image to the right of the dot, the other image to the left of the dot.

When the patient was asked to describe what they saw, they described the hammer that appeared to the right of center. When asked to draw what they saw, they drew the screwdriver that appeared to the left of center. When asked to describe what they had drawn, the answer was a screwdriver. When asked why they drew a screwdriver when they originally described a hammer the answer was “I don’t know.”

So, what was truth to that person? The man or the woman? The hammer or screwdriver? The answer is both answers were true. But the brain used some pre-determined criteria to be aware of and record for memory the “truth.”

Current day brain science has taken us a step further. Because of the functional MRI, brain scientist can track an image as it enters through our eyes all the way to being implanted in our memory. What they have found is that the image doesn’t go directly to memory. They’ve been able to determine that once our eye perceives the image, it is parsed into about 127 million bits of information, sent through at least 12 (they think as many as 24) processing centers in the brain, then processed through the older centers of the brain for object recognition and motion detection before being reassembled in our memory.

These early discovered centers include:

  • Values
  • Emotions
  • Goals
  • Beliefs
  • Ideas
  • Happy/Sad
  • Memories
  • Pain
  • Stress

This clears up the old question, do you believe what you see or see what you believe. You see what you believe.

Team Perspective

Courtroom judges will tell you that if two eyewitnesses tell the court exactly the same version of what happened, they know they’ve colluded. Judges know that no two people see the same event in exactly the same way.

So, if our goal is to speak the truth with each other or to get at the truth as a team, we need to start with the premise that we each have our perspective. Great teams value and understand each of those unique perspectives and then work hard to develop a collective team “truth.” What will be the team perspective based on all of our individual perspectives? What will be the truth that solutions will based on so that the team can move forward with unity and commitment?

By sharing beliefs and assumptions plus perspective of the situation, great teams begin to build an understanding of what they face and how to move forward.

Use your whole brain plus have the respect (next series of blog posts) to allow for the diverse points of view held by all team members. You’ll have a better chance of succeeding and be happier doing it.

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Team Elements – Truth: Truth Depends on Beliefs

by Ron Potter

We’ve been introducing and preparing ourselves to walk through the elements that make great teams. The first of these is Truth. Great teams can tell each other the truth. But Truth needs some special understanding.

To create a truthful and dynamic atmosphere, teams must:

  • Develop and maintain Trust
  • Be able to share their Beliefs and Assumptions openly and without recrimination
  • Believe that every member of the team has a Valid Perception of the issue.

In the last post, we talked about building the trust required to share the truth. In this post, we’ll talk about how our beliefs and assumptions shape our truth.

Beliefs and Assumptions

Years ago, Peter Senge wrote a book titled The Fifth Discipline that was a deep book but had a profound effect on the corporate world. This book about systems thinking was based on work by Gregory Bateson and extended by Chris Argyris and Peter Senge. It known as Systems Thinking or Learning Organizations. I had never seen a concept penetrate the halls of corporations as much as these ideas.

It seemed that I couldn’t walk into any of my client companies without them wanting to show me how they were adapting system thinking or becoming a learning organization or both. It was an amazing tidal wave.

But much of this impact was related with the second loop of what Senge and company referred to as triple loop learning. In brief, let me describe the three loops.

The first loop says that you do some work, you observe the results. If you’re not satisfied, you put in a fix, and you do the work again. I’ve seen this first loop referred to as “Following the Rules” or “Are we doing the right thing.” I started to think of it as a “do loop” from my early computer days. We would talk about a computer program that was hung up as being in a “do loop.” That meant the program was running in circles and couldn’t get out. The first loop of triple loop learning is much like that do loop. Do some work, check the results, put in a fix, do some work, check the results, put in a fix, etc.

Senge and team began to talk about the second loop as a longer, more sustainable loop. In this loop that wanted you to think about an issue as not needing a fix but as part of an entire system. Check your policies, procedures, systems, and processes to see what is directing the work. If you put the proper system in place that guides the work you’ll get better, more sustainable results. But it required system redesigns and re-engineering. These are the words that my clients were using. They wanted to show me their re-engineering work and their systems redesign and the improved results. And indeed, they were getting improved results. But maybe not the best results possible. The third loop of triple-loop learning was required. Unfortunately, I didn’t see many of my clients looking at the third loop. Why?

The third loop examines the team’s Beliefs and Assumptions about an issue before the redesign or re-engineering takes place. If your personal beliefs don’t agree with the redesigned system, beliefs will override or ignore the system. If the system was redesigned based on an issue or observation that doesn’t match your assumptions, there is no true belief that the new system will produce the desired results. Beliefs and Assumptions rule the day!

Senge and company believed that by fully sharing and understanding Beliefs and Assumptions you would improve the quality of thinking and interactions and in doing so would experience more sustainable improvements. They also believed this would not be a one-time fix but would result in continued improvement of thinking, interactions, and results. Now you would become a Learning Organization.

Working Out Beliefs

Sharing of Beliefs and Assumptions is the second part of building a high-quality team that provides the highest level of happiness for the team members. But, this is a muscle or discipline that develops through training just like going to the gym to improve any part of your body.

I’m assuming here that you’ve successfully created an atmosphere of trust that will allow for the sharing of Beliefs and Assumptions. But, the first time you engage a new muscle group the results are painful. And the rest of the body must adapt to the higher performing muscle group before all of the pain and awkwardness ceases.

The first time teams practice sharing Beliefs and Assumptions there is hesitancy, holding back, embarrassing moments and even shock and disbelief from others on the team as you get used to sharing at this deep level. But even with this first awkward attempt, teams find that the solution they reach as a team is often better than most past experiences. And, as teams get better at this level of sharing at the beginning of problem-solving, it becomes almost addictive. If you’ve become comfortable with starting the process by sharing Beliefs and Assumptions, and then you walk into a team that has not developed this same muscle, you can hardly stand to face the amateur approach to problem-solving. That becomes painful.

Develop the Beliefs and Assumptions muscle. You’ll become a much more Truthful team, and you’ll become a powerful problem-solving team. And that will make you happy.

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