The Best Of Intentions

As leaders, you juggle a lot. Complexity, delivering change, managing the day to day and leading and inspiring your people. We could go on but we’re sure that might give you a sense of overwhelm before we’ve even gone beyond the first paragraph. All this work needs to be prioritised so where do you fit in the team development? The team is a group that is ever evolving as people leave and join, restructures, changing priorities etc which means it will always be changing. Leaders can be guilty about putting off team development until they feel they have the “perfect” time where the team get to connect and focus on the how they work together rather than the what.?

Ask yourself as a leader, what am I waiting for? There will always be something….. What might you be afraid of unearthing? What’s getting in the way? We recently came across a leader who hated team sessions as he was paranoid his team would give him negative feedback. He shared how he would jump in first to say “what was wrong” which obviously set a blame tone for the team, putting them on edge for their annual “telling off”.

Let’s pause. If we compare this to a sports team, the athletes will all have a professional coach to help their mindset but they will spend dedicated time off their field of play exploring how they connect, what they need from each other, giving feedback and ensuring that there is clarity of expectations. Patrik Lencioni in his fabulous book "5 Dysfunctions of a Team" talks about the importance of the team talk. He draws on the sporting comparison to challenge us to think about how, during half time, the team will all be in the room to talk about their performance – what’s going well, what they need to do and therefore what they need from each other. The team know they need one another to be successful and therefore having that collective mindset and focus on performance is crucial if they want to win. In business, we take people to one side and, whilst we are not endorsing dressing downs in public, what we would nudge is the importance of psychological safety within the team for collective success. It’s about being able to talk openly and honestly about what’s helping and what’s getting in the way.

A lot of our teams’ sessions will feature the takeaway action to “spend more time together” but so what? Well, it is one option and a very valuable one at that but it depends on your purpose and outcomes of that time together. Teams will often complain that there isn’t time to think. Its all about the doing. The value of stepping back to reflect on the behaviours and mindsets for individuals within the team can move the team forward significantly. The team shifts when individuals in the team shift. That’s the difference: it’s not what can we collectively do together to be better but what can I do, in this team, to make the team do better?

Given that, it highlights a greater need to do this kind of reflection together. After all, a shift in one place might have an unintended consequence elsewhere. This also helps to encourage feedback, shared learnings and greater collaboration.

But, we all know that this is hard right? A study by the University of California ?where a number of participants were left alone in a room for “thinking periods” with nothing to distract themselves for 15 minutes apart from a button they could push and shock themselves if they wanted to. The results were startling: even though all participants had previously stated that they would pay money to avoid being shocked with electricity,?67% of men and 25% of women chose to inflict it on themselves?rather than just sit there quietly and think. Ouch.

So what can you do? Start to introduce the power of reflection to help create individual shifts that will move the team. There are lots of models to support reflection but one of our favourites is simply:

1.?????? What? Describe the event but think about what you did and your behaviour and mindset

2.?????? So What? How did you feel? What were the effects of what you did do/didn’t do?

3.?????? Now what? What do you do with any insight you’ve got

When you start using this, your focus might be on the action/task but shift it to behaviour and mindset. Spending time in the “so what?”? is where insight and learning can take place.

Finally, keep the question in mind: what’s the individual shift I need to make that will move the team? Prioritise the time to reflect together as a team and start to role model it using the above.

If you’d like to chat to us about how we can support your team with this then please reach out.?