Bonding: how tight teams can come with fine lines

During my time as a Chief Learning Officer, it was probably the number one request that came to me or my organisational development team from other leaders in relation to their teams. Whether in relation to a restructure that saw new teams pulled together, or to address fracturing and performance issues with an existing team. How can we get more team bonding happening?

Bonding is actually an important form of horizontal workplace social capital in teams and can play critical role in establishing overall team identity, resilience and sense of inclusion.

In the short measure of workplace social capital I've shared with you earlier in this newsletter, a sense of 'bonding' social capital is captured in the first three items:

1. People keep each other informed about work-related issues in this team
2. We have a ‘we are together’ attitude in this team
3. People feel understood and accepted by each other in this team

The average score across these three questions (creating a discrete 'bonding social capital' rating)?across my combined database of of 70,932 participants in 5,911 teams is?3.58?(Likert 1-5) or?71.6%. If you're surveying your own team, something for you to compare your result to.

If your team is landing low on one or more of these measures, the bonding social capital component could be in need of strengthening.

In general, all three of the items are usually addressed in most good contemporary guides to establishing, running, growing and challenging great teams - and I have a list here of some top recommendations from all of Deborah Ancona , Henrik Bresman , George Karseras , Amy Edmondson and Lynda Gratton .

More specifically, item 1 can benefit from things like the Team Canvas approach, an excellent creative commons resource dedicated to getting teams 'on the same page.'

To rethink and improve things in relation to item 2, I highly recommend Owen Eastwood 's brilliantly written Belonging: The Ancient Code of Togetherness as a rich narrative experience to reset the belonging landscape in your own mind.

Items 2 and in particular 3 are well addressed by Lily Zheng 's outstanding (and pleasingly hard-hitting) DEI Deconstructed: Your No-Nonsense Guide to Doing the Work and Doing It Right and Helen May has built a really helpful guide with Everyone Included: How to improve belonging, diversity and inclusion in your team as well.

But just before you go dashing off to find and apply great ideas in relation to building a stronger sense of bonding in your team, bear in mind that it comes with some slight risks if not approached carefully. Like anything taken to an extreme, it can go from being a strength to a liability.

The first hint of this is in the word itself and its etymological background. 'Bonding' comes from the notion of 'binding', becoming 'bound' - in a positive sense it relates to tightening and strengthening, but it can also mean finding and forging shackles or fetters. This is where some fine lines can emerge when it comes to team bonding.

Bonding to 'get by' can create outstanding team resilience, which can then eventually land as resistance to anything remotely seen as 'not in the internal team's best interests right now.' That can include change, taking on new challenges, innovation or accepting new priorities or leadership.

We almost always bond most rapidly and easily with those already most like ourselves - based on shared demographic backgrounds and commonalities - like race, nationality, language, culture, education and upbringing, even appearance. It's not hard to see how an inclusive approach to bonding can actually start out or end up as being quite exclusive.

Joining a team with an already high level of bonding can be one of the most welcoming experiences of your professional life. It can also be one of the most unwelcoming, intimidating, alienating, frustrating or depressing.

It's for these and other reasons that bonding social capital is sometimes called out for being the potential 'dark side' of social capital. The tightening to get by as a team or group can - carried to an extreme - result in an incapacity to bridge within and beyond itself, and therefore get or go ahead.

As an example of this, I have seen in some workplace settings that some teams with sky high bonding social capital scores (4.5 / 90% or above) can be racially, socially or professionally highly homogenous, and/or rate other teams outside their own radically lower on a range of other measures - for example organisational purpose or values. Less diplomatic commentators than myself have identified such groups as cliques that completely overrate themselves in relation to other groups in the organisation, and sometimes major contributors to toxic workplace cultures.

So by all means bond. Just beware.

The natural antidote to too much of the wrong kind of bonding, or (alternatively and preferably) the perfect accompaniment to very healthy and genuinely inclusive bonding within teams, is bridging social capital. Luckily our short measure of workplace social capital has that one covered as well, and we'll tackle it next.

This is a?Leader TWIG?- the concept of (a)?growing something new?(a new awareness, skill or 'branch' to what you currently already know) but also (b) becoming equipped to 'catch on', realising or suddenly understanding something that is in fact right in front of you in the performative leadership moment (from the Gaelic 'tuig').

Access the?LeadRede self-coaching learning journey?attached to this TWIG.