Our Insights
The Art of Representation: Preparing teams to speak and act for each other
There are situations in the life of every team when their work and views need to be represented by sending a team member to an external meeting. This may be a hierarchical situation where the team leader is required, or a matter of specialism where a subject matter expert needs to represent their colleagues. Either way it's imperative that the team trusts that their representative will effectively demonstrate the work and professionalism of the team. Equally it's important that the representative themself is given the message that the team trusts them in the role. The meeting may well happen away from the team, behind closed doors, so there can be no in-the-moment reinforcement of this trust relationship. It's something that is best developed in the safety of an experiential setting - but what's the best tool to address the issues of psychological safety involved? At the simpler, shorter end of a range of possible interventions is Team Fusion . Importantly this rotates the representative role around the team so everybody experiences relying on that representative, and also being the one who is being relied upon, several times during the activity. There is a strong emphasis on making good decisions on behalf of the team, communicating these decisions and resultant actions, and basing these decisions on the learning derived from preceding colleagues. It's a very easy activity to administer, and the transfer of learning from activity, to debrief, to workplace implementation is direct and impactful. This makes it a great starting place for a facilitator taking early steps in using experiential tools, or line managers introducing something useful and engaging to team meetings. At the other end of the range is T-trade which is one of the most powerful tools I know for looking at how different parts of an organisation need to operate in a co-ordinated manner when they are under severe operational pressure. In these situations each function needs to trust the others to make and communicate decisions that might have short-term negative impacts across the organisation e.g. if sales unexpectedly open up a new market it will require manufacturing to change what they are doing, or conversely, a shortage of components may need sales to rapidly shift their targets. In each of these cases the result may be uncomfortable, but positive outcomes will only be achieved if there is a bond of trust and common purpose across the functions. In both of these activities the underlying requirement is for every individual to be working towards relationship building - within and beyond team boundaries. Trust will only flourish in the psychological safety of good relationships, and this is not something that can be achieved through familiarity alone. It's far better to allow teams to explore and hopefully extend the limitations of their mutual trust, especially when they are relying on the quality of represention they receive from colleagues.
Read more
How to develop and maintain trust in teams
Teamwork is built on a bedrock of mutual trust, and can only be truly effective when each and every team member works within the climate that this trust engenders. This may be a simple statement, but the diversity of human nature and personality often mitigates against the establishment of the necessary trust. Regularly introducing an effective intervention to establish and maintain trust is something I'd always advocate, no matter how long a team has been together. That regularity needs a selection of tools around which to build the intervention, here are two that would be in my toolkit. Counter Intelligence is an activity that sets up a complicated working environment, complicated rather than complex. There are a lot of regulations involved, and individuals are required to represent these requirements, despite many of them appearing pointless and irrelevant in achieving the goal. It's this dynamic that makes it very easy for the team, or individuals, to dismiss or ignore information they have been given, and this may ultimately result in a failure to complete the task. Success depends on each team member being vocal in steering team process whilst trusting that each colleague will do the same. Without discipline this may result in chaos, but with a strong element of mutual trust the team operates in a discernably businesslike way. Trust is a key teamwork value, and Counter Intelligence inevitably leads to discussions about the need for teams to operate within a framework of shared values. If I want to address how we can create open and respectful working environments that can be built on the platform of demonstrating trust in the contribution of others, I might choose to use Reversal as a significant experiential tool. It's important to me that team members recognise that trusting the contribution of others isn't a recipe for unquestioning acceptance, so I need them to have the tools they need for goal-directed evaluation and respectful challenge. Reversal is a great activity to develop and coach these skills. The kind of questions that arise every time I use Reversal are: "What do I do if my contribution seems to contradict what a colleague has offered?" "How do I handle the situation where my contribution seems to suggest a change in direction for the team?" "How do we achieve a team process that allows for individual differences? These are big questions, and I would suggest that they are far better explored and resolved within the safety of an experiential activity rather than jeopardising team performance in the workplace.
Read more
Are you developing teams beyond a culture of blame?
Even a cursory browse through the huge volume of literature about great teams will reveal that there's an understandable interest in how they just seem to 'get it right'. There often follows a prescription to help other teams follow that path to success. We read about aligning individual contribution, solution-focused communication, building a team-climate that encourages risk-taking, etc, etc. There's an overwhelming focus on developing the positive actions and attributes that facilitate the evolution of good teams into high performance teams. However, there's an observation I want to make at this point - I've worked in a teambuilding role for many years, and most of my engagements have required me to work with the negative attributes of a client team - any approach that simply reinforces the positives doesn't cut it when you're looking to make a team great. Over my career I’ve worked with a lot of great teams, across a broad range of sectors and geographies, and I want to suggest a further, little-recognised, attribute of a great team - how they deal, individually and collectively, with getting it wrong. It’s a bit of a cliche, but great teams really do view mistakes as opportunities to get better. Not in some overly demonstrative way that advertises what an unusual occurrence this is, but in a way that efficiently deals with the mistake, then moves quickly to a positive focus on the learning that has become available through the mistake. It’s that rapid shift from focusing on the mistake to focusing on the learning that is so impressive in how a great team operates. Here’s the sequence that they accelerate through when one or more team members detects a mistake: Recognise the mistake (early) Own the mistake (collectively) Alert everybody who will be affected (pre-emptively) Do what is possible towards recovery (proportionately) Learn from the mistake (positively) There's a growing pressure, driven by both social and mainstream media, to 'name names' and 'find culprits'; we are led to believe that having somebody or something to blame offers a degree of closure. This is very often deflection, shifting our attention away from what's really happening, or away from possible (but difficult) solutions. In the workplace this inevitably has negative implications and moves a team further away from any greatness they might achieve. Take a look at this sequence again. The highly inefficient and destructive phase of “attributing blame” doesn’t appear anywhere. Even during the last phase of ‘Learning from the mistake (positively)’ the word positively tells you what you need to know - there’s no room for the regressive steps involved in determining whose fault it is. That’s not to say that the source of the mistake isn’t identified; in order to learn we need to understand the causes of what went wrong, and if that’s about an individual’s actions then that needs to be recognised. However, the focus is on the future (i.e. the available learning) rather than the past (i.e. the attribution of blame.) The blame-game is endemic in organisations, so one of the things that impresses me most about great teams is the way that they have broken free of its negativity. So how have they done it? A large part of it is about leadership, and we read a lot about leaders having the courage to encourage risk-taking in their teams. However, achieving a team culture which truly embraces this risk-taking depends on every one of the team-members accepting this as their team norm. If even one of those members still wants to play the blame-game, it restricts the rest of the team from making the leap towards learning. Clearly, we need a way to demonstrate the benefits of focusing on the learning instead of the mistake, and to practice the post-mistake sequence of actions set out above. The transition to reframing mistakes as learning opportunities is about rehearsal. Experiential learning tools offer a way of exploring mistakes, both individual and collective, and rehearsing a way of rapidly shifting to a positive learning-focus. In the RSVP Design portfolio Simmetrics has been a go-to exercise through which groups can be encouraged to explore their customary behaviours in mistake situations. In this fast-paced activity mistakes are inevitable, so we facilitate with a view to identifying both the behavioural responses, and also the quantitative pay-back of having a structured and rehearsed response to those mistakes. A further tool that can be used to explore this area of learning, Matrix builds on the learning developed in Simmetrics by giving participants a greater range of tactics they can deploy to respond to perceived mistakes, and also to respond to the chance factors introduced by other people working towards their own goals and objectives. Escaping the blame-game isn’t easy, but neither is developing great teams. Finding the time and space to rehearse the skills and attitudes we need to become a great team is a good place to start on that journey.
Read more