One of the most significant themes in my practice is the leader whose team of direct reports are experiencing difficulties working together. Most of my clients are CEOs, and they face this challenge with their company's senior leadership team, but it's a dilemma that can occur at every level of an organization. And while the leader isn't solely responsible for their team's culture, they typically have the greatest ability to influence it--for better and for worse.
By highlighting the tools at the leader's disposal, I'm not suggesting that the other members have no role to play in the process--they absolutely do, and an effective leader will make team culture a shared responsibility. But the leader's position often affords them a number of advantages that make it easier for them to initiate action and to invite others to follow their example. So if you're a leader in this situation, what can you do? What tools are available to you?
The list below is by no means exhaustive, but it's a starting point for considering your options. Don't think of them as a series of steps that must be taken in sequence or as a set of mutually exclusive alternatives. You'll probably need to intervene in several ways to make a meaningful difference in your team's culture--but don't try to do everything at once, and don't try to do it alone. If you fail to actively involve your team in the process, you might exact their compliance, but you won't win their commitment, and the latter is necessary for lasting and sustainable change.
1. Logistics
This encompasses all the factors related to the cadence, timing, setting, and purpose of your team's interactions. Some factors will be more difficult to change, of course, but others may be relatively easy. That said, this is where it's particularly important to involve your team in the process. If you simply enact changes by fiat, you won't necessarily reap the expected benefits, not only because your colleagues may not share your assumptions about how to improve team culture, but also because logistical changes can make a sub-optimal team perform worse if they're made in isolation without considering the other factors below.
So give some thought to whether you should be meeting more (or less) frequently, for longer (or shorter) periods, with more (or fewer) in-person (or virtual) events, and with more (or less) emphasis on tactical issues (or relationship-building). But discuss these issues with your team so you can surface any resistance. This doesn't mean that proposed changes must be put to a vote, or that anyone resisting change has a veto. But resistance is data, and it can usually tell you something valuable about the nature of your team's concerns.
Assuming you do encounter resistance (and you probably will, if people are willing to be candid), frame any proposals as experiments. Formulate the hypothesis you're seeking to test, set a timeline, and assess the costs and benefits at the end of that period.
What can you do?
- Assess your use of in-person, virtual and hybrid work.
- Communicate via the most effective channels, not just the most convenient.
- Begin meetings with a check-in.
2. One-on-Ones
I assume you're already holding regular one-on-ones with the members of your team--and if you're not, I think you should be. One-on-ones not only provide a venue for you and each employee to discuss your respective responsibilities and working relationship, but they also offer a safe setting in which you can address issues related to your respective contributions to team culture and your mutual behavior in team interactions--with one caveat.
The key is normalizing feedback, which entails not only providing feedback to your employee on their behavior, but also eliciting feedback from them about your own. One purpose of obtaining feedback is to compensate for your inevitable blind spots as a leader, but another is to model a non-defensive response, even (and especially) when the feedback stings. This is why it's not enough to ask for feedback--employees will often assume it's a pro forma request, and you don't really want to hear what they have to say.
But here's the caveat: In many cases a one-on-one discussion with an employee about team issues will threaten to become a discussion about another employee. The employee you're meeting with may want to provide context for their behavior, but they may also be seeking to shirk responsibility by blaming the other person, which is really just a means of managing distress. This is one reason why normalizing feedback is so important--when we get feedback on a regular basis, it's less stressful. In any event, keep the focus on yourself and the employee you're meeting with--if you need to address a conflict between employees, bring them together for a separate discussion.
What can you do?
- Make feedback normal.
- Get better at delivering (and receiving) critical feedback.
- Manage conflicts between team members in a separate setting.
3. Group Facilitation
We often think of a "facilitator" as an external figure who temporarily joins a group in order to play a special role, and in some situations an outside facilitator can be a highly valuable addition to your team. But facilitation is merely a mode of operating that can be adopted by any member of a group at any time, and the most effective teams cultivate the ability to facilitate themselves (which doesn't preclude the use of an outside facilitator when necessary.)
Facilitation begins with an emphasis on process, as opposed to content. This is one reason why outside facilitators can be useful--they have specialized process expertise, and they're not personally invested in the outcome of any issues under consideration by the team. There's nothing preventing you and your colleagues from adopting a similar stance, but you need to step back from the what--What's on the agenda? What are my goals? What outcomes do I prefer?--and consider the how--How are we operating as a group? How do we approach problem-solving? How will we make necessary decisions?
Here's where you have a unique responsibility as leader. Team members typically defer to the leader's preferences when it comes to group processes--and in the absence of a commitment to facilitation on your part it's unlikely that anyone else will intervene to propose it. This doesn't mean that you should become the team's de facto facilitator on an ongoing basis, but you will likely have to take the first step.
What can you do?
- Assess your collective approach to problem-solving.
- Determine how you will make a decision in advance.
- Clarify who's facilitating a given discussion--and what facilitation practices can be implemented by any member.
4. Group Observation
Groups don't normally operate with a heightened awareness of their culture, primarily because most group members are focused on their individual experience in the group, not the group as a whole. It's also mentally taxing to actively participate in a group while simultaneously observing the group dynamic. Further, it takes care and skill to translate those observations into actionable language that won't provoke a defensive response.
For these reasons groups often rely on an outside facilitator to observe, assess and comment upon their culture, and, as I note above, there are circumstances when external facilitation is useful. But relying solely on an outside facilitator to do this work is a missed opportunity in several ways. First, outside facilitators can't always be present--if they could, they'd be group members. Also, the presence of an outside facilitator inevitably changes the group dynamic. And when a group relies exclusively on an outside facilitator to do this work, the group members fail to develop their own capabilities.
So while I endorse the use of outside facilitators, I also encourage you to consider how your team could begin to observe itself and to make those observations explicit. This is work that you will almost certainly have to initiate--it's very rare for a group member to share such observations without an invitation from the leader. Note some key challenges you'll face in the process: You aren't merely an observer of this group--you're also the person most responsible for its existing culture, and you undoubtedly have blind spots. And any observations coming from you as the leader will probably trigger some defensiveness--this is to be expected.
What can you do?
- Assess your team's levels of safety, trust and intimacy.
- Consider your existing team norms and revise as needed.
- More specifically, assess your norms related to emotion expression and regulation.
5. Group Composition
This refers to the definition and membership of your team. Who qualifies, and who doesn't? Are the right people involved? Is anyone present who doesn't add value? Is anyone missing who might add value? In an ideal world, everyone who reports to you is a member of the team, and every member of the team reports to you--but organizational life isn't always so neat and tidy.
A challenge that my clients occasionally face is that one of their direct reports doesn't have much to contribute to certain team discussions, or, conversely, someone who does have something to contribute is a skip-level employee who doesn't report directly to my client. At times this has to be addressed in an ad hoc manner by convening a subset of direct reports for a specific purpose, or by inviting a skip-level employee to sit in on a team meeting. But these provisional solutions come with a cost--not only the added logistical burden of calling a special meeting or creating a special group, but also disruptions in continuity and a diminished sense of mutual trust and group identity.
A related but distinct problem is when one of my client's direct reports fails to keep pace with the company's growth or complexity. They're not a toxic or dysfunctional employee, but they're no longer contributing at the same level as their peers. In many cases this occurs when my client has begun to attract and retain more capable talent, and the performance of earlier-stage employees suffers by comparison. Some members of the latter group will accelerate their growth and development in response, but not all will make the leap, leading to gaps in the team's effectiveness as a whole.
What can you do?
- Restructure your org chart to reconstitute your team.
- Level employees who remain assets to the company.
- Exit employees who are under-performing.
For Further Reading
1. Logistics
2. One-on-Ones
3. Group Facilitation
- Hammering Eggs (Leadership and Problem-Solving)
- Leadership, Decision-Making and Emotion Management
- Role Clarity and Role Confusion
4. Group Observation
- Safety, Trust, Intimacy
- Rules Aren't Norms (On Better Meeting Hygiene)
- Group Dynamics: Norms and Emotion
5. Group Composition
- The Judicious Imposition of Structure
- The Fine Art of Levelling
- Merciful Exits (On Under-Performing Executives)
Related Topics
- How Leaders Create Safety (and Danger)
- Safety Is a Resource, Not a Destination
- How We Connect (and Why We Might Not)
- Freud on Startups (Conditions for Group Effectiveness)
- Startups as Human Systems
- Symptoms of Group Strength
