THE VALUE OF TENSION IN A TEAM
The received wisdom is that an effective team, whether on the sports field, as a family unit, or at work, is one which works in harmony and “all sings from the same hymn sheet”. My perspective is a little different. When growing a business, any business, there are always more things to do than there is resource to complete them. This leaves two choices; either you try and do everything to a limited extent, thinly spreading the resource you do have across many areas, or you accept that some things take priority over others and allocate your resource accordingly. What does this have to do with a tense team? Read on and let me explain…
Let’s start by considering what happens to you as the leader of an organisation if you place too much emphasis on an absolutely harmonious, completely in-sync team. When a team is designed to work only in peace and harmony, all of those competing priorities and calls for resource land squarely on one desk - yours. Different parts of the business each have their own “critically urgent” priorities, and colleagues in each area all work effectively together to bring difficult decisions to the highest authority for resolution. I’ve worked like this in the past, and it isn’t fun, or effective. Like in the image above, the leader of the organisation spends all of their time being pulled hither and thither by colleagues because the team culture is so focussed on “working well together” that there is no appropriate means of peers working out whose needs take precedence without “the boss” making the decision.
When I’m building teams I look to make appointments which will facilitate a level of healthy, professional, and productive tension. My colleagues know that I expect them to take personal responsibility for their area of work, and as a result they will put up a spirited fight for their department’s interests. Let me give you an example from a recent discussion at That Nursery Life. With very limited resource available to complete technical upgrades to our digital platform, there was a question of whether to put that time into upgrading the way our Content Team write and publish content, or to upgrade the job listing part of our offering. The longer we left the recruitment listings without improving core features, the harder it would be for our business development team to grow revenue here, but our writers were spending upwards of an hour each time a piece of content needed to be published, significantly reducing the scale of our output.
In other businesses that decision might have been one that I would have been expected to make as CEO, but not so for our team. Instead, I and the rest of the Exec Team discussed the question frankly and directly, with each of my colleagues feeling confident in their right to assert their team’s interests vociferously. After a while of debating the best way forward, we reached a consensus and cracked on with the work at hand.
Are conversations like this tense? Sometimes. Are they unpleasant? Not at all. The final piece of the puzzle is what makes all of this come together successfully - personal relationships. As much as I put people into roles with a mandate to stick up for their area of work, I also work to develop a company culture of friendship, kindness, and good humour. Whilst we might butt heads from time to time on specific decisions, our team is built on a foundation of caring about one another, and enjoying each other’s company on a personal level.
We are able to use the cruciable of healthy tension to help make the right decisions about where to deploy our tightly limited resources, and then our firm foundations of friendship to move on from a decision well-made in a great mood.
For more of my thoughts on entrepreneurship, the environment, and life in general, take a look at my personal blog.