Your family is your first experience of a team

We learn a lot from our family about how to get along with others. We unconsciously absorb all sorts of assumptions and rules about how groups work. But the teams we meet later in life do not necessarily operate by the same rules.

What do you notice when you look back at your family? Where did authority lie? Who made the decisions? What happened when someone disagreed? How did you celebrate success? What happened when someone wanted something that the “team” wasn’t able or willing to provide? Who looked after whom? What was the prevailing mood (eg optimism, flamboyance, risk-taking, anger, love, safe, dangerous)?

What was your role in the family? Peacemaker? Clown? Rebel? The clever one? The responsible one?

If you’re struggling with your current team, it can be worth reflecting on how the team works and how that compares to your experience growing up.

Are there behaviours you just don’t get? People who don’t behave as you expect them to? How does this compare to your experience with your family? Perhaps you are unconsciously ascribing a role to someone in the team that they are not fulfilling, giving you a sense of disappointment or an inability to get along with them.

For example, you can’t understand why the leader of the team won’t make quick decisions. They insist on consulting everyone, allowing free expression of emotions and opinions, and reaching a consensus about the right way forward. You think the answer’s obvious, most of this discussion is a waste of time, and why is everyone getting so worked up? In your family, perhaps one of your parents took an authoritative stance (perhaps even authoritarian), making decisions on everyone’s behalf, no dissent allowed. You’ve learnt that this is the “right” way to get things done. But that’s not the only way to work with others, and it may be one of the least effective. People in organisations are more engaged, productive and loyal when they feel their views are valued, even if the final decision is not what they wanted. People who are told what to do tend to become submissive, avoid taking risks and swerve responsibility for sorting out problems.

Do you feel disappointed if the leader doesn’t acknowledge your contribution or achievements? Perhaps you received a lot of praise as a child and have come to expect it. Or perhaps a lack of praise from your parents meant you had failed to meet their expectations, so somehow you feel your boss is disappointed in you.

Do you feel you’re not having the impact you expected? If you feel overlooked or underestimated, perhaps you are behaving as the peacemaker or the clown, a role that served you well in your family but is not going down well with your peers or your boss, who feels you’re not taking your work seriously.

None of our ingrained habits are right or wrong. They are simply more or less appropriate in certain contexts. Everyone has a different model, and part of how we learn to be really effective at work is to look for clues to the mental models that other people operate by. Once we start to pay attention to how we behave, how people interact with each other, and what outcomes are produced, then we start to have the power to respond differently and generate different results.

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