We all want to work somewhere where we can share ideas, celebrate success and collaborate well across different departments. But, as Jenni points out, this often becomes tricky when competitive environments, big egos, gossip, passive leadership or low morale are allowed to fester. In this 15-minute episode, she shares five fixes on how to bring people together.
Things that will help you go from chaos to calm:
Influential Internal Communication by Jenni Field
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable by Patrick M. Lencioni
Dare to Lead by Brené Brown
Poles Apart by Alison Goldsworthy, Laura Osborne & Alexandra Chesterfield
Blog: How to avoid team friction – from poles apart to pulling together
The Fearless Organization by Amy C. Edmondson
You can continue the conversation with Jenni on Twitter and LinkedIn
Transcript for this podcast:
Hi, and welcome to this episode of Redefining Comms with me, Jenni Field. Today, I’m going to be talking about team friction, a topic that isn’t always grouped together under this heading, but we all want to work somewhere where we can share our ideas, celebrate success, work well across different departments and all those great things that make working as a team and in different functions and in organisations great. But that’s really difficult when there’s things like competitive environments or big egos or gossip or low morale or passive leadership, and all of this links into a kind of team friction.
Now, I write about team friction in my book where we get to the chapter about applying the Field Model and how to go from chaos to calm when there are things that are really making it difficult for us to work well either as a team or across different teams. So, in this episode, I’m going to share with you the different symptoms that we see when teams aren’t getting along. And then I’m going to share the five things to think about. I’ve got a couple of book quotes to throw in here and some more recent thinking as well about how you can bring people together.
What does it look like when it comes to team friction?
Now, you might have a situation where people aren’t getting along in the same team and that can cause issues for everybody.
You might have two different teams that aren’t working well together and you need them to in order for the organisation to be a success. We might have teams working in shifts and that’s resulting in information being missed between different teams. Or we could have a situation where one person thinks they’re more important than another and that’s causing some friction. So, those are just some examples of what might be happening where it comes to this sort of dysfunctional teamwork that might be going on.
Now, as well as some of these symptoms of teams not working well together, we can also see team friction playing a role in chaos in a broader corporate setting.
Now, some of this has to come back to behaviours and culture and what is acceptable and what isn’t. You know, so often team issues are linked to behaviours and relationships and all of that can be linked to the way organisation handles failure, success and hierarchy.
If we’re allowing behaviours to happen and we are accepting of those behaviours, then there is no consequence for the fact that poor behaviour might be having an impact on others.
Now, if you’re a large organisation and people are competing against each other for sales targets or bonuses, then you’re creating a competitive culture. Now, that’s okay if that’s your intention, but in doing this you are creating some friction. Now, for some this is completely intentional and for others is an unintended consequence when the ambition is success. So, we need to be mindful about how we’re creating processes, structures, bonus structures, rewards, all the different things that come under culture. How are we creating that and is that enabling us to work really well together or is it creating friction across the different teams?
Now, with team friction or team chaos, the diagnostic tools you’d need to look at have to include listening interviews or one-to-one interviews. You know, you can’t solve this with a survey. And the reason is because this is about people and people are complex, and a survey just won’t give you the answer. If we’re talking in corporate terms, this is about humanics, it’s not about the mechanics. There has to be a conversation. A survey will simply allow you to tick a box. It’s not going to solve any problems here. This needs time, it needs conversation, and it needs some really intentional focus on solving the issue.
If we’re looking to go from chaos to calm, what are the six things you need to look at?
1. Team dynamics & relationships
Well, the first is the relationships across the whole team. So, let’s talk about the team dynamics. You know, we can’t look at that in isolation. We have to look at the whole team. We can’t just look at the individual relationship if there’s an issue. It’s got to be everybody together. You might also want to look at whether the relationships outside of the team are also impacting. So, if you’ve got one individual in a team who’s being particularly difficult, is it just the relationships with the team that are impacted or is it spreading out across the whole organisation?
What we’re always looking for when we’re diagnosing the root cause of chaos is we’re looking for patterns. We’re looking for things that are showing a pattern of behaviour or a pattern of a situation that will help us look to explore where that root cause really is.
2. Being clear about your team purpose
The second is whether or not the team are really clear on their purpose. Now, I’ve worked in a team that’s not really a team. It was a group of people chucked together under a director because we didn’t know where to put them. And I think we called it something like business excellence or something like that. And it was a real mishmash of health and safety, communications, audit. Now, all of it did link together, but we weren’t a team in the truest sense of a team.
You know, I always think of a team as where you’ve got lots of different skills coming together for the greater good almost, so the fire service, places like that. We weren’t a team in that sense really. But when you work in communications, I’d argue that you can find yourself in any team and still finding a benefit from it. But what my point is here is that the team has to be clear on their purpose as a team. You’ve got to make sure everybody’s working towards something.
Now, there’s a great book called Five Dysfunctions of a Team. It’s by Patrick Lencioni. Again, links are in the show notes. And I cover it in my book as well. But there’s some great stuff in there around especially leadership teams and the dysfunction that can come there. And it’s really important to have this common goal, this common thing that everybody’s aiming for and not aiming on their own agenda. So, the second point here is about being clear about your team purpose.
3. Establishing leadership
The third is that we have to look at the leader of the team. Now, alongside that, we have to look at whether they are the true leader of the team. You know, leader by hierarchy or by job title doesn’t necessarily mean they are leading. You know, there could be a leader in the team on paper who’s sending out information, but everyone’s going to someone else in the team to verify that’s true. So, we need to be aware of influencers and the people around us that might be leading without that being necessarily written down.
We need to ask what are the skills of the leader? You know, what are the relationships like across the team? Is there any need for leadership development? Has that ever been done?
It’s very common for us to promote people because they are subject matter experts, not because they are good people leaders. And by doing this, it can cause issues not only in the team they lead, but actually the wider team they might be part of. If we don’t deal with some of those issues around leadership skills, then it’s going to cause problems across, you know, sort of broader than the organisation. A bit like a ripple effect almost from the immediate team and then out to broader teams.
4. Communication within shift work
The fourth thing to think about is if we’re looking at issues in team friction where we’ve got shift work. So, where there’s shift work, the things that we have to look at is where that communication is breaking down. And if it’s breaking down because of the shift patterns. Now, there’s an assumption here that it is, but we need to get to the root cause of that to determine if that is the issue. You know, are there things in place to allow information to be handed over? Is there a shift book where notes are added between shifts? Is there a physical handover? Is it clear what things need to be handed over?
And I think that’s the bit that’s important here: is when you are doing handovers or sharing responsibility, clarity and time are the two big factors here. You know, we have to make the time to handover and we have to be clear on what that content is that’s being shared.
There might just be three, five, two, eight things that need to be discussed. It could be people, you know, changes. There could be, you know, lots of variety on that list. But being clear about what’s on that list and running through it will make it efficient, will make it quick, will make sure nothing is missed.
The other thing I’d say here is that once you allow that handover, that moment, that page in a book to be missed, then you’re allowing that to happen. And once something is missed, it can always be missed. I always use the example when I was cycling from Brussels to London and there was a coach at the back that you could get on if you couldn’t get up a hill or you couldn’t do something. And I always felt that once I’ve got in that coach or got in that truck, I’ve always allowed myself to do that.
That’s always my way out. I’ve done it once, I can do it again. And that’s always stayed with me. So this is where I think once you allow something to be stopped or you don’t hold each other to account, that thing can always happen. And once that starts it’s very hard to break that cycle.
5. Don’t be afraid of showing vulnerability
The fifth and final point really is around vulnerability and courage. Now, I can never go too long on a podcast without mentioning Brene Brown, and her work on vulnerability and courage in this area is still leading the field in our understanding. You know, we all have egos at play. We all have things that we have to contend with around what we’re trying to achieve. But sometimes that can play out, you know, in lack of respect. It can play out in people not getting along or people thinking they’re more important than others.
And that’s where we have to have some courage. We have to explore that. We have to get a bit vulnerable, we have to go a bit deeper, and we have to explore what’s driving some of those actions. Quite often, where people are feeling like they are more important than someone else. That’s being driven by something else entirely. And it’s only through coaching and conversations that we can get to the bottom of some of those.
How do you deal with conflict within groups?
So, these five things are all really important. But I can’t finish this episode without drawing on some more recent work that I’ve read. And this is really around conflict between groups. Now, I read the book called Poles Apart, and it’s by Alison Goldsworthy, Laura Osborne, and Alexandra Chesterfield. And I read it towards the end of 2021. And it’s a really great read to understand why people turn against each other, and how to bring them together.
It’s a very recent book. It shares several examples, including recent events at the Capital in the USA. But there’s a particular quote that stands out for me in this book, and it’s this: we have to allow ourselves to be prepared to be convinced by opposing arguments. We must revisit conclusions as we receive new and relevant information, actively looking for reasons why we might be wrong, and focus on understanding rather than winning.
Now, that’s an important quote for me, because it’s sort of part of the thread that runs through the book. But when it comes to looking at reducing team friction, we have to focus on helping people understand, not win. And this is a big shift, especially as it’s a big part of what makes us human. You know, we’re here to survive, we’re here to, you know, be safe and predict what’s coming.
There’s an element of winning in a lot of what we do, not only as human behaviour, but also, I’d argue some of the societal stuff that’s going on to make us feel that we’ve got to be winning and constantly pressurised and got to be busy and all the things that come with that. So, if we have to focus on understanding rather than winning as a core part of being able to bring people together, that’s an important element to look at when it comes to bringing teams together and helping people work better together.
I’d also recommend another book called The Fearless Organization by Amy Edmondson, which talks more about psychological safety, which I’ve not touched on in detail here. But it’s a great book to delve into the detail around how to create organisations where there isn’t really that fear of standing up and there’s that ability to share failure and learn from it and grow from it.
And there’s some great content in there. All of these are linked in the show notes as well. So I’ve popped all the links to everything below.
Thank you for listening!
Now, in my next episode, I’m going to be talking about mergers and acquisitions. At the end of season one, I talked about fixing rapid growth. And it seems to be the case that in 2022 and beyond, mergers and acquisitions is a topic for many leaders and communicators. So that’s what we’re going to be looking at in the next episode.
Thank you for listening. As always, I’d love to continue this conversation on Twitter or LinkedIn. So do connect, ask questions, share your thinking with me and details are in the show notes on how to stay in touch.
