I rise by lifting others

What’s my dream team? What’s your dream team? My dream team is not a team of stars. What do you do to build your dream team?

A team of all stars does not deliver an all-stars performance, unless there is a high level of trust, a clear view on dynamics and an open communication.

When I speak to people around me it seems that all their teams are highly dysfunctional, with a variable dose of toxic behaviors and many untold truths. Am I the only one who sees it, or do I have lousy friends? And a lousy team?

Well, I investigated over the last months by asking friends, acquaintances and colleagues. I used a quick diagnosis tool developed by Lencioni - an eminent author of business management books in relation to team management-.

1. Do your team members openly and readily disclose their opinions?
2. Are your team meetings compelling and productive?
3. Does your team come to decisions quickly and avoid getting bogged down by consensus?
4. Do your team members confront one another about their shortcomings?
5. Do your team members sacrifice their own interests for the good of the team?

 Give it a try. Answer these questions about your team. Be honest. If you don’t like the answers, keep reading no matter how hard it gets!

To understand the root cause of the issue, there are a lot of factors that come into play, such as the hierarchy, the team’s size, the type of work, etc. I did not conduct an empirical study to control for all these variables. Neither am I intending to reproduce Lencioni’s work in this post. Yet, the facts and insights I gathered gave me a good perspective, which I’m convinced is relatable to most of you.

Trust or lack thereof

Every leadership course will teach you about how trust is fundamental in building a team. Yet, we all struggle with giving, gaining it and losing it. We’re tense and uncomfortable dealing with it. Why the drama? A lot of reasons. Undoubtedly, it’s the symptom of dysfunctional team. To make this blog digest, I chose to leave trust out of it, as I’m convinced it deserves a separate article on its own (stay tuned – it’ll come soon).

Complacency vs. despair

I came across two extremes of the same spectrum. In a dysfunctional team you often see people who are complacent and others who a desperate.

Complacent team members are well into their comfort zone, don’t want to make the effort to further grow, or are lazy to do so. I also saw cases where they perceived that they were behind the steering wheel because the thought they were irreplaceable, thus felt no pressure to strive.

Opposite to that, desperate team members are too accepting of the reality of things in a creepily convinced way. They deeply believe that things are this way and cannot be improved or changed. They have accepted the fact that they are doomed and that life is a fatality. So their fatality is to go through life and stay below the radar at all times.

Now imagine complacent Jane and desperate Joe sit together at the same bench. Jane’s perception of her knows-it-all attitude is reinforced, and similarly is Joe’s despair. I let you draw on the different scenarios on how this relationship might further evolve. I can’t think of a positive scenario without the intervention of skilled mediator, be it a colleague, a boss or a coach.

Sense of meaning

When was the last time you asked one of your team members about their purpose? It seems philosophical. It’s not. In my view, understanding the system of values that drives the people around me enables me to speak their language and become fluent at it. It becomes simple for me to accurately pinpoint their pain points and swiftly intervene to support. When people in my team start to see their role as dull or purposeless, and live by the idea that they are sets of arms and legs, I see trouble coming in our way.

Plato and Socrates figured this out 3,000 years before me. To lead a happy life, we ought to have a sense of meaning. In Socrates’ words, “The unexamined life is not worth living”. More pragmatic schools of thoughts followed with Ford, Maslow, Herzberg.

This is relevant if not extremely important. We can’t afford to go on with our lives as so-called leaders and assume that our teams will be perpetually intrinsically motivated.

Sense of belonging

So let’s assume that you worked out the toxic behaviors, learned about the values of your team members and achieved a great sense of purpose. Would that be enough? There’s another layer of complexity (and no it’s not yet remuneration) which comes in too. A sense of belonging stemming from our human nature as social animals. We crave a sense of community with shared values, purpose and rituals. It’s just like the tribal rites translated into a modern, western, sophisticated and professional setting. In that way, we openly share painful moments and celebrate victories. A feeling of belonging does not require a daily interaction or intense meetings outside of working hours. What makes a difference, is the quality of interactions and relationships with your people.

Sincerely yours,

Hind