Before You Start, End the Discussion.

End of Discussion!

This was our ad moniker for the Honda Accord 2003 model. The huge electronic billboards were just coming of age in my home country at the time. You might be going down the highway and see what appeared to be this gray sleek car coming right off the board at you with the words “End of Discussion.” This phrase had a meaning that we all understood instinctively which was that when the Accord came into a room of cars, the conversation ended because it tended to overshadow or crowd out all other cars.

Bringing this analogy forward to today and the new work environment we find ourselves— time to reflect on team dynamics, group facilitation and the concept of making room for others. If you have worked long enough in any organization that requires you to work with others and have work meetings, you’ve probably encountered a poorly facilitated meeting where you come out feeling worse than before you went in.

In these types of meetings, you may have “End of discussion” personality types who take over the conversation and never let others get a word in. I have come to realize that for these “End of Discussion” folks (some may very well be the ‘team’ leader), silence can be uncomfortable. As such, they feel the urgent need to fill the silence. But this uncomfortable period of silence may be needed by other team members to process new information or ideas being presented.

In Daniel Levi’s book "Group Dynamics for Teams," he makes the distinction between groups and teams. From a psychological point of view, groups are more social in nature with social identification and representation. Teams on the other hand are a special type of group that exist in an organizational sense to carry out a task or solve a defined problem. This concept is seen with the creation of teams for projects with a defined start and end date.

But what happens when the two worlds collide? Where you work with people for so long over time that you inadvertently identify with them as a group even if some social identification markers are absent but the organization sees itself as a progressive one that incorporates a team based approach to work.

This is all well and good but confusion reigns when leaders in these types of organizations do not recognize the latent difference between groups and teams. If one works within an organization, just calling themselves an employee of the organization identifies them as a member of group; Person X who works in Y organization. That identification comes with a recognition that the organization has a culture that one must assimilate in order to belong or to be successful within it.

Within organization Y, there are problems to be solved and processes to accomplish in order to meet organizational goals. Getting people together to accomplish these predefined problems involves team formation. During the course of working, a team can bring in social constructs and ideologies as they work toward cohesion and cooperativity, both essential factors for team success. But, members of a team are not necessarily bound by social identification or representation.

Therefore organizational or team leaders attempting to bridge these two constructs can sometimes be confounded by capable, hardworking individuals who do not seem to be integrating into any presumed team dynamics. However, before faulting these individuals who do the work but do not necessarily feel like they belong to the larger group from which the teams are formed, a better question should be; “have I attempted to create a representative group with an inclusive culture?” This type of conundrum is what this article attempts to address.

For leaders in this nebulous space, bear in mind that no matter your best intentions, [organizational] culture can and does eat strategy for lunch (and spits out the bones). The topic of organizational culture is an expansive one that cannot be fully addressed here. Suffice to say that there are two prevailing cultures in organizational life; a control culture and a commitment culture. This is important to know because organizational norms drive team culture and success. It can be difficult to operate a team in a tightly controlled and hierarchical culture. The good news though is that an organization can work toward facilitating successful teams and by definition successful organizational outcomes.

What are some ways that this can be achieved?

I’ll use a mnemonic here that I call TMR for “Transparent Meeting Room.”

Do you have transparent meeting rooms?

Transparency: Don’t assume everyone is going to go with the strategy just because you say so. It’s okay to tell people that the organization is intending to move in a new direction with a more team oriented approach; more so when this has not been the norm. Employees are not just cogs in wheel— they are an integral part of a guiding coalition that you need to bring together for change management. And as you are working toward this, remind, remind, remind.

Trying to enact change using a one, two and done approach in relation to communicating the change simply doesn't work. This is the "I told them once or twice and they ought to get it" approach. Based on change management expert John Kotter’s article in the Harvard Business Review, change leaders should be over communicating by a factor of 10 if they intend to drive organizational transformation. Always better to over- than under-communicate.

Meetings: If your organization is not yet operationally set up for facilitating team development, please don’t call your meetings ‘team meetings’. Call them what they are; business meetings, status updates, state of the organization meetings, anything but team meetings. A team is a type of, or subset of a group brought together to solve a defined problem within a specified period. Committees are certainly a type of team albeit with more bureaucratic functions. In my opinion, a long standing committee with the same members over time becomes more like a club, not set up for innovation and true problem solving. Although when one thinks about it, clubs are sometimes founded to solve social problems.

There is an art and a science to meetings. Learning how to be in the space in between can be a good thing as it allows a leader to better read the room and pivot where necessary. There’s no time that this has been needed more than in this pandemic season. You can call a business status meeting and still make time on the agenda to identify and empathize with individuals to say "I see you."

Room: There should be room for everyone on the team. This concept of room is intricately tied with the point above as in “Meeting Room”. While the work world is now mostly virtual, the same principles for physical meeting spaces still apply and are even more critical to uphold. Don’t be one, and don’t let someone in the organization be an “End of discussion” person.

As a cultural transplant, there is nowhere that I have seen the effect of socialization and culture play out more than in American meeting rooms. The fact that people are not speaking in a meeting does not mean they have nothing to contribute. Organizations are a melting pot of individuals with different personalities from different social spaces with different cultures.

It’s been said that the American workspace and culture does not really favor introverts and for someone who ranks more on the introverted side of the extraversion scale, I find this more true than not. The same way we say that silence from organizational leaders on issues breeds conspiracy theories, I think introverted people get the short end of the stick where others can make up stories about them to suit their purposes. “They’re not very friendly” is a common story told about introverted people — How about replacing it with curiosity and framing it as a question with possibilities. Consider "Maybe speaking up is hard for them?"

Reframing this story helps you see that team member as a human trying to overcome a problem that is commoner than you think. Someone may also come from a culture where they have to be invited to speak, which may be a hard thing to break out of.

As a leader, being aware of these nuances and creating avenues for organizational members to increase their cultural intelligence quotient and having these conversations in an open and transparent manner without resorting to stereotypes can help create more room.

So No End of Discussions please. There’s always Room for More!

Dr Otito Iwuchukwu Okpor helps high-achieving women tell their organizational and life stories well.