What should you do when you land in a dysfunctional team?
(Prescription alert.. Feel free to disagree and debate)
What should you do when you land in a dysfunctional team?
(Prescription alert.. Feel free to disagree and debate)
Within a short period of joining a new team, you will definitely get the vibes — wether its an effective or an ineffective team. Patrick Lencioni very aptly captures the traits of both in his book “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” summed up here.
What should you do?
First establish if the problems exist. Simply check these facts —
Does work complete week by week as per the plan?
Is there difficulty in understanding what others are working on, including your boss?
Do deadlines keep moving and everyone is ok with that?
Do people share their weeknesses and strengths freely and willing to talk on improvements.
Is success celebrated regularly uninhibited and everyone truely feels great about it?
Is bad performance addressed without delay even if it means letting go of people(citing clear reasons and enough corrective oppertunity and respectfully) .
Is personal and group(team) accountability respected and is accountability the language between cross cultural/geographic teams?
Do people help each other and respect each other? Do people appreciate others behind their backs?
What can you do to fix these:-
Each of the problems need to be addressed one at a time. Very clearly, you do not need to be the boss to fix things and live a more enriching work-life .. Afterall its your life with limited time -
Start with clearly, fearlessly and openly acknowledging in public(team) your own strengths and weekness and what would be a complimentary strength/weakness.
Clearly acknowledge the ongoing projects, their purpose, milestones and timeline as per your understanding and ask to be corrected.
Clearly acknowledge that things are not moving and what symptoms make you think so.
Separate people from behaviours and call out all the good behaviours that you have observed so far. Call out all the strengths that you have observed in people so far. The affect of this will be that others will start opening up naturally. Once it warms up, call out that we need to speak about weaknesses comfortably in the same way and work on them together.
Call out some interesting facts at suitable points —( Fact ) Like in life, you don’t have to be generic and care for the entire world. You just need to work well with and care for the people around you and enjoy that. Like you don’t compete with your family memebers, your aim is to compete with the world out there and do it together.
Work is a large part of life and cannot/should not be separated.Start the concept of unit accomplishment(s)/day and unit accountability, celebrating every success, and constantly move to a higher level(go for bigger accomplishments). Eg. on day one, everyone accountably commits to a very small accomplishment and keeps the promise. That is celebrated the next day. Again repeat the same next day.. this time a littlle more challanging commitment until an equilibrium is reached. Find another more chalanging commitment soon after.
( Fact )Accountability is the core to team’s culture and has all the power in the world. If you take accountability upfront and passionately, you will become unstoppable. Its your success or your failure. The power transfers to you. Acknowledging failure and learning from it is growth. Faster you take accountability, fail and learn, faster you grow in life, in work. The cycle has to be fast, fearless and passionate. And no-one goes anywhere meaningful, alone. When everyone takes accountability of their stuff, celebrate each others’ and collective success, life becomes literally boundless and abundant, in all respects.
Insist that the team should meet daily and foster the above behaviours every day.
Acknowledge your strengths, weaknesses, learnings, accomplishments, desires, needs, inhbitions, goals, etc. again and again. Receive and give.
There will be disagreements, slips and periods of depleting hope. Its all about building a culture of recovering and reseting accountability, putting efforts to move up the slope until a culture of collective-momentum is established. And then the reaps of the efforts will start showing in such fruitful and gratifying ways, that is hard to imagine in the beginging and are the miracles of human ingenuinity.