Three signs your team is struggling.
One of the most powerful things you can offer as a leader is observation. With the benefit of a broad view, you have the opportunity to detect shifts in organizational behavior and changing trends in team sentiment.
An obvious sign something isn’t working are poor results — missed timelines, trailing performance, poor morale, or attrition. But long before the data is in, less quantifiable signals can be detected. If you see the early signs, you can intervene and redirect negative trajectory before it impacts the numbers.
What are you looking for? When teams are functioning, it’s easy to assume they are fully functional. Like the car that turns over when you start the engine and manages to get you where you want to go — you assume all is good and may overlook the rattles and clinks that ultimately leave you stranded on the side of the road. Teams can still produce even when the wheels are about to fall off.
So rather than focus on results, take a look at how the team functions …or dysfunctions. Is the team responding in different or unexpected ways? Are they less engaged, as in less involved, less present, less interested? Are they more argumentative, with an increase in “turf wars”, obstructionism, or passive-aggressive behavior? Contrary to how it may sound, you don’t need a sophisticated understanding of human psychology. Just as you can detect the tension between an unhappy couple sitting across the restaurant, the human layman is fully capable of picking up on dysfunction.
When the team environment is not safe and people feel threatened, it is difficult for them to balance personal and collective interests. This causes a break from one or the other and retreat to behavior that, albeit not necessarily healthy, makes them feel safe. So pay attention if you notice a pattern of migration to one of four quadrants, where individuals are disconnected — withdrawn and apathetic or inflexible and dominant — or overly engaged — yielding and accommodating or waffling and indecisive — because these are tell-tale signs the team is challenged. If you have a hard time detecting this movement, look for a lack of authenticity, alignment, and cooperation across the team as a whole.
What do you do? Teams are made up of humans (we covered that above) and whenever a human is involved a relationship exists. Imagine the best possible relationship, perhaps grandparents, siblings, best friends. They likely have many characteristics that make them great, and some may have certain characteristics others do not. But you can be sure every resilient relationship shares three foundational elements: trust, communication, and purpose. Conversely, when a relationship is struggling you will undoubtedly find cracks in one or more of the three pillars.
This foundation is as critical in a team as it is in a marriage. Whether two individuals or a group of individuals, human relationships function at their optimum when all three elements are present. When teams struggle, you can be sure work is needed on trust, communication, and/or purpose. The upside is any work you do in one area will accrue to the other two. For example, better communication can help solidify a shared purpose across the team, and efforts to build trust enhance the effectiveness of communication, and so forth. In this way, teams benefit regardless of where leaders dedicate effort. But let any one element fail, and all three will be lost — which will ultimately bring down the entire team.
How do you know where to focus? What if you don’t want to waste time working on trust when the real issue may be lack of shared purpose? It is possible to detect signs indicative of issues with trust, communication, and purpose, individually. That is, if you catch the symptoms before they become systemic. Because of the interplay between trust communication and purpose, the longer problems go unaddressed the harder it will be to discern one from the other.
Here are a few things to look for:
Trust: cynicism. It may show up in employee surveys, on Blind, or the tone of questions asked during AMAs. If you’re in a start-up, you may hear comparisons to Theranos. Cynicism begins as an expression of disappointment — often in the decision-making, style, or character leadership. You might notice an increase in deadpan faces during team meetings, or an unexplained increase in HR complaints, absenteeism, or key talent departures. Disappointment can quickly evolve into distrust of the entire organization.
Don’t blame it on a few negative influences on the team. The worst thing you can do is write it off as an anomaly or symptom unrelated to leadership. If things aren’t going quite right, the first place a leader should look is at themselves. Ask yourself what behaviors may have jeopardized trust or threatened the team’s sense of safety; and ask whether you are doing everything you can to generate credibility and accountability. If you are spending any time figuring out the best way to “spin” a leadership decision, you are jeopardizing trust. Don’t underestimate the intelligence of your audience.
Trust is a multi-layered cake, but its core ingredients are honesty, transparency, and consistency. Start there. And it’s not simply your words, it’s your words and your actions and the extent to which the two match — every day and over time. Hand-waves may satiate for a short time, but the negative fallout is inevitable if trust is not rebuilt.
Communication: quiet. When it’s too quiet you can be sure more than one person feels like they are in the dark. And they probably are. It could be the leadership. Quiet is a sign of poor communication.
Quiet shows up in many ways: fewer comments or questions during meetings, less chatter on communication channels, silence in the lunch room, an absence of passionate emails challenging strategy or advocating a new idea. Quiet can result from a lack of transparency (and meaningful communication) from leaders; but it can also result from a lack of reception (and meaningful response).
Quiet doesn’t necessarily mean no one is communicating. It could mean communication is more exclusive than inclusive. Both on the part of leaders and members of the team. People are talking, but behind closed doors, via confidential channels, or in small factions (aka echo chambers).
The most effective remedy for quiet is open, bi-directional communication. A leader can (almost) never overcommunicate. Don’t be afraid to share more information with more people on the team. If you find yourself hesitating, perhaps it has more to do with your confidence in the viability of what you are about to share than concerns about the voracity of your audience.
The next step is to be more receptive. This means not simply enabling communication channels, but committing to thoughtfully consider feedback and respond. Be brave. You have to be willing to hear difficult messages and get comfortable with giving honest answers. The best practice is to broadly share leadership responses to questions, suggestions, or concerns received. When appropriate, follow up should be tracked and reported back to the team when complete. This practice enhances inclusion, generates trust, encourages team engagement, and enlightens leadership in unique and helpful ways.
Purpose: confusion. Everyone has something to do. People are busy. But they don’t understand how their work relates to work being done by others; and they can’t connect the dots to what the team (or company) is trying to achieve. Even worse, some people see their work as not serving, but directly contradicting the stated mission. Confusion suggests the lack of shared purpose.
In many cases this results because leadership hasn’t done the hard work (and it is hard work) to develop and communicate a clear purpose. Equally common is the failure to organize the team around achieving it. Ideally, from the most senior leader to the most junior team member, individual objectives ladder up to a shared goal. In other cases, the stated purpose is aspirational and inspiring, but ultimately unrealistic and unachievable, or worse, an illusory tale used to draw in and retain talent.
A shared purpose is important because it naturally fosters concerted effort. Palpable business benefits include productivity, efficiency, and collaboration — that equates to better products and overall results. There are a number of ways to accomplish common goals, but the important thing to remember is it all starts with leadership. Explicit purpose with accountability by leaders creates the mirror image within the team.
Commit to your vision and put it out there. This takes a big bite of vulnerability but even if you ultimately amend the goal or completely change direction, your team will benefit from the clarity of purpose. In fact, change comes easier when the team is already well-practiced at working together toward a shared goal — the boat may steer to different coordinates but everyone on board knows their roles and continue to execute in rhythm.
Don’t stop at sharing the topline mission, objectives, and metrics. Illustrate how the efforts of everyone on the team will help get you there. There are several ways to do this: CAD (commitments, actions, deliverables), OKRs (objectives, key results), MC-OPS (mission, cause, objectives, priorities, stats), and many others. CAD and OKRs don’t specifically articulate a mission but define objectives and measurements that should be connected to an uber purpose. MC-OPS (“emcee ops”), explained in more detail here, ensures every group, team, and individual can directly associate their contributions to one or more cause in service of the overall mission. Methods like this have the benefit of sustaining continuity of objectives over time.
If you are a leader, consider taking time to observe your team and take heed when you get the sense, as you might imagine with personal relationships, something doesn’t feel quite right. Then consider whether trust, communication, and purpose are all on solid ground. It could be the first sign it’s time to do some hard relationship work in your team.
