Team Effectiveness
There’s an awful lot of lip service paid to the concept of teamwork and collaboration. Most of us have been part of a strong team at one time or another, and most of us have unfortunately suffered at the other end of the spectrum as well. The plain fact is that when teams aren’t working well together, especially those at the top of the organisation, the impact can be disastrous. This professional services team saw the early signs of dysfunction setting in and asked us to help them do something about it before the organisational acne proved fatal. Of course, setting up a team for success at the outset and then maintaining it, like any valued and valuable asset, means those pimples need never reveal themselves in the first place.
We had been called upon to work with a rapidly growing European-wide professional services organisation whose Management Board members were rubbing along in a far from happy fashion. The one thing they could all agree on was the fact that something needed to be done, and quickly - because their behaviours were becoming very visible to the rest of the organisation. We didn’t know it at the time but in fact the person who had heard about our work, and suggested Omada be brought in to ‘steady the ship’, was one of the individuals credited as the source of some of that tension. So it was with some suspicion that the Chairman and CEO together asked to meet us to talk about our approach to developing effective teams.
We listened to their concerns, heard their pain and talked of the basic disciplines we encourage teams we work with to deploy. Of course the tensions being experienced on the Management Board were perfectly typical of organisations at this stage in their growth cycle and they were surprised at our confidence that the ship could be steadied without casualties. In fact they asked us to spend some of the proposed session explicitly talking to the team about organisational growth cycles and the requirements of leadership at different stages of organisational maturity.
We noticed that their offices were very, very formal, in fact rather stiff, rather cramped and rather vanilla. So we made a deliberate effort to select an offsite venue which could create a very informal, comfortable, sofa filled and spacious environment for the meeting. As one of the Management Board said afterwards, ‘it got us into a state of equilibrium early on and made it very personal.’
In the meantime we scheduled some one-to-one meetings with each of the Management Board members to understand a little more about how those growing pains were manifesting themselves, and asked them to undertake some work in preparation for the session, including a couple of simple individual and team diagnostics.
Three weeks later, and with diaries cleared of other commitments to make space for the meeting, the Management Board gathered for the offsite. As we often do, we kicked off the meeting by establishing some common language around change to give the team a safe framework within which to talk about many of the tensions and misalignments that had gathered momentum over the previous months. And remembering their appeal to us to talk about organisational growth cycles, we used that as a platform to talk about the challenges and tensions typically manifest at their stage of growth, titling it ‘Growing Pains - Dealing with Organisational Acne’ on the agenda; after all, their business was looking a bit like a lanky teenager, with rapid growth spurts, temper tantrums and unexpected changes happening all over the place. They warmed to our somewhat irreverent humour.
The team settled down with their coffee to talk about their individual expectations of the team, and to build a business case for working together effectively. That initially sounded to some of them like a rather strange thing to do.
‘Of course we want to work as a team’ said the CEO at one point, guffawing heavily, but another team member interjected.
‘Not necessarily. We haven’t done so until now.’
Everyone could tell the temperature in the room had gone up a degree or two, but we broke the slightly awkward silence, and encouraged the team member to expand on their comment, congratulating everybody on getting to ‘the tough discussion’ so early on.
Over the course of this day and the one that followed, the team became increasingly confident in laying out some of the obstacles to their success, and some of the causes of the tension that existed among Management Board members. Suddenly those concerns started to look very trivial when they were able to discuss them openly and constructively, and a sense of relief, even a building excitement, crept into proceedings as the team rallied together.
They went on to examine each member’s individual leadership style, to solicit and offer feedback and to agree on safe mechanisms by which to support each other when things got ‘sticky’ again, as they inevitably would from time to time.
Sometimes we work with teams for extended periods of time, and sometimes it just needs a gentle course correction. This time it had been the latter. We kept in touch with many of the team members and took the opportunity a couple of years down the track to ask one member of the Management Board for some reflections on the work we’d done with the team.'
I felt we had a completely customised solution for what we needed. I liked the raw honesty combined with a lightness of touch. Some people are very skilled interpersonally and avoid conflict, others call a spade a spade but could tell you the sky is blue and annoy you. You have the ability to tell a home truth in such an engaging manner that it is not difficult to listen to nor to accept. This is really very rare, and is a very powerful and valuable approach. You can also take an elliptical approach; you come up with solutions which may not address a problem head on, but the outcome is richer for it.'
The business went from strength to strength and recently merged with another professional services organisation. As another member of that Management Board told us, ‘I don’t think we would have been able to hold the business together, nor have been as successful as we were if it hadn’t been for the work you did with us.’ For our part it was rather satisfying to help the team to stop beating up on each other and move beyond those teenage temper tantrums.