A few weeks ago, I was chatting with an exec at a finance company, Susan. “My team just doesn’t engage,” she told me. “We like each other. We joke around. But we’re too… polite? I’m not sure of the right word.
“Whenever anything challenging comes up—like why a new product we rolled out isn’t getting as much traction as we thought—people seem to fade away. I think they don’t want to hurt each other’s feelings, but what happens is that no one contributes, and we don’t get anywhere.”
Contrast Susan’s team with John and his direct reports.
John is an engineering manager I worked with recently. “Our meetings are terrible. People show up and care about the work. But we often devolve into deeply technical conversations about machine learning. They’re important conversations but not when we’re trying to get everybody to think about the bigger picture of how to deliver new features to our [internal] customers.”
He went on, “I have two senior engineers—deeply skilled and technical guys—who dominate the conversation. They make our meetings feel more like academic seminars than work meetings. In one, they even spent about 10 minutes reading from dueling academic papers about which method was better.”
Susan and John were frustrated. But there was good news: they both wanted to improve and were open to exploring their own role in their respective team’s performance.
I started with the idea that each team’s behavior had value (otherwise they wouldn’t be doing it). Their dynamics were adaptive. They helped them do something better, though not necessarily the work that Susan and John wanted to get done.
In fact, we can see each team’s behavior at different ends of the same spectrum. We could see this spectrum through different lenses, like polite vs. argumentative, disengaged vs. engaged, or careful vs. pushy.
And we can see the benefit in each way of being. The goal, then, isn’t to stop being polite (or argumentative), it’s to grow the range of behaviors that each team can inhabit.
This is a learning that I’ve come to through my work and training in gestalt, a school of development rooted in the ability to see the whole system (and the value in what is happening right now). I draw on this perspective when I coach teams like Susan’s and John’s, when I coach individual leaders, and even when I work with larger organizational systems. I also use this approach to guide my own development—seeing the behaviors that come easily to me, the benefits of those, and the costs.
Inherent in gestalt is the belief that growth comes from awareness.
So, when I’m coaching a team, my role isn’t to weigh in on the technical details of a product rollout or the nuances of machine learning. It’s to help the team increase its awareness, see its own behaviors, and get curious about how things could be different. To expand its range rather than get rid of the way things are now.
Here’s the catch: it’s hard to see the behaviors of your own team. It’s like trying to read the label from inside the bottle. If you’re interested in exploring this kind of work with me, the best way would be to schedule a short strategy session. Click here to book a free 15-minute call with me. If it’s not the right time for that, the good news is that there are concrete things you can do now.
As a leader, you can use a set of simple behaviors to run better meetings. And, as a team member, you can notice how easily you do (or deviate from) these behaviors.
They’re not hard-and-fast rules, of course; rather, they’re a useful way to get a quick check of the health of your meetings:
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Scan the entire group at regular intervals, so that you’re aware of people’s individual experience. Are they engaged? Are they frustrated? Are they happy?
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In meetings, speak approximately 1/N times, where N = the number of people present.
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Ask at least one question of another person, using their name. Listen for an answer, and notice if you get one.
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Respond when a question is asked of you.
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In speaking, segue from what has been said just before you speak.
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“Pull out” of the energy of the group once or twice to take in the big picture.
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Be willing to influence and be influenced.
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Be aware of the available time and help summarize an ending.
Keeping these rules in mind helps us “bootstrap” our awareness, giving us something to connect to so that we can more easily see what’s present with our teams and see the direction we might want to move. And that awareness—that’s the first step to growth.
If you’re interested in digging deeper, these rules come from some pioneers in the field of team dynamics: Edwin C. Nevis, Joseph Melnick, and Sonia M. Nevis. Their paper “Organizational Change through Powerful Micro-Level Interventions” is a great overview of the form that this work can take (pdf). This approach has also guided some of my earlier writings on change.
If you lead a team and are interested in exploring how you might grow your team’s range, book a 15-minute call with me today.
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