On Team Formation, Episode 3: "Servant Leadership and Healthy Conflict"

Have you arrived?? Do you have everyone pointed in the right direction, supporting each other, 'disagreeing well', and delivering consistent value to your organization? In this, the last of a three-part series?(go back and look at Episode 1 on the "Prophet" and Episode 2 on "Who's Driving This Thing?" to see some of the starting points your organization may be coming from)?I'll take a look at what I've found to be the highest evolution of a team formation. No good work is ever truly complete but if I find myself in a team that aims for what I describe below each day, then I'm confident that it will be a place that I'd love to start and end my workday at each day.

I'd love to hear what may be missing from this target framework and experiences you've had along the spectrum.

My wife repeatedly tells me that Michael Scott is not a leader to model myself after (that is literally 'what she said'), but I've always had a soft spot for the results (maybe not the process) of his leadership. As I mentioned in the first article of this series (check back here if you don't believe me), I love a good metaphor almost as much as I love a good gif. The classic episode of The Office 'Local Ad' really epitomizes the journey of team formation and evolution to a great final product. The path starts with a top-down vision cast by Michael, aka 'The Prophet' to the people holding the purse strings without generating any coalition of support from them or from his team.

After ignoring their obvious rejection of his proposal, he proceeds to give a bad brief to a team that has no idea of the 'why' or investment in the end result. Without a clear vision, his talented team of creators (Creed Bratton of real-world musical excellence in the band The Grass Roots; Darryl Philbin a multi-talented leader of people, warehouses, and rhythm keyboards; Andy 'the nard dog' Bernard of near Ivy-league acapella fame; and Kelly and Kevin for some reason...) cobbles together their best individual work without having the support of their leader to form and refine their work towards the bigger goal. From that you get the hit "People Person's Paper People". No one is happy after Michael frustratedly refuses to take it forward for funding from corporate. A classic example of the cobbled vision not being able to get breakthrough support as seen in 'Who's Driving This Thing?'.

Once the team finally found two formations that didn't work, they pulled together and created the gem that aired at the end of the episode. For the purpose of making a point, I'll ignore the fact that the Corporate Office picked the bland and boring cut that was made by the outside producers (Dunder Mifflin was acquired just two seasons later by Sabre, so their judgement is suspect regardless). When the teams finally aligned on their common vision, leveraged their individual talents, ironed out their differences, and got to work, they made something beautiful that they could all take pride in.

Without further gif-driven delay, let's take a look at the third and final formation, "Servant Leadership and Healthy Conflict". This formation can be distinguished by a higher quantity of bi-directional communication, temporary conflict and enduring alignment, and a self-sustaining energy.

Role of the Leader

• Ask the right questions and leave space for answers that are not your own.
• Break down walls, inside and outside the team. Confidence that your vision has been refined and tested with the intelligent and honest people you've surrounded yourself with will allow you to confidently persuade the minds that matter.
• Stay out of the way but be close to the fray. Apply pressure where needed to get people through creator's block.
• Brag on your team’s accomplishments and put them in the spotlight. They are the reason that you succeed, you are not the reason that they succeed.
• Force disagreements and division into the open, mold grows in the dark. If you're operating in this formation, you have a group of intelligent and capable people, and their differing opinions are your sign that there is something better behind the idea that is in question.
• Don't be a diva, and don't tolerate divas. Have humility to surrender your pre-conceived notion of what the 'right' answer was to a problem. Let other's feedback improve your ideas, and let your feedback improve other's ideas.

Role of the Team

• Challenge each other and your leaders. Respectful dissent is a fantastic chisel that will turn pieces of stone into works of art.
• Know your subject matter comprehensively and know your team members' almost as well. Having context and empathy for their problem set, and challenges will allow resourcing discussions to be far more productive and allow you to work in different roles on your team, making progression to leadership roles much easier.
• Ask for support from your leaders and from your teammates. This team formation should never feel lonely.
• Don't be a diva, and don't tolerate divas. Have humility to surrender your pre-conceived notion of what the 'right' answer was to a problem. Let other's feedback improve your ideas, and let your feedback improve other's ideas. Yes, this is meant to be in both the leader's role and the team's role

Success Conditions

• A team that is low ego and understands the role that their team can play in the larger organization's success.
• A healthy conflict language exists or can be formed. If remote, cameras ON! We had a distributed team perform at an incredibly high level because we could see on someone's face immediately if they didn't believe in what was being said, without a word. Those are points to probe, not to dictate, but you need to have all of the senses available to discern those wrinkles easily.
• This formation needs time to be outside of the productive day to day work. This can be done through an off-site, an intentional block of time, or whatever is needed to draft, disagree, and eventually align on the broader team vision and prioritization. After the initial work of doing this, less work is required in the recentering of the group and integration of new faces but requires intention to do well.

Risk Factors

• The group dynamic takes precedence over the individual of remarkable talent. This can lead to hard decisions to remove a talented individual because of an inability to add to the larger story.
• An organization that looks for individual output as a determinant of success may overlook a leader of a team like this because the facilitation of the structure does not look like 'work' and the pruning and prioritization under the surface is only seen by those on the team.
• A healthy conflict language will vary wildly from one team to another, but a shared lexicon is critical so that when people use words, the other person knows what they mean. Some teams curse freely and yell, and that may be healthy for them, while another team may use very highly nuanced words to communicate a clear disagreement. If you are composing a team with resources from those two, very different, backgrounds, they will both be frustrated. Some of these biases can be culturally driven, but in absence of something external, I recommend identifying and codifying in writing (in your team's slack channel description, a charter, or wherever) some simple (and entirely unoriginal) principles such as:

- Criticize the idea, not the person.

- Be a chisel, not a sledgehammer.

- Treat others as you would have them treat you.

Key Attributes

• Constructive conflict that forces disagreements into the open
• Team members with space to grow and to fail.
• A vision that will survive the departure of any one person, either leader or team member.
• Resource allocation and alignment is a periodic and spirited discussion that comes to a hard-fought resolution, not a continuous and grinding debate.
• Buy-in to this type of model will require dedicated effort and intent, and many times external energy to do properly.
• No divas (or at least less divas).
• Hard conversations become the norm, but they hurt less because the shared goal remains.
• Challenge and constructive dissent is encouraged, requiring a humility from the team and leaders, knowing that their idea always has the potential to be improved by anyone else in the discussion.

How to Avoid or Escape This Formation?

Why would you want to? ??

But