How Winning Managers Develop Winning Teams
In my experience, nothing can derail a company more quickly and more completely than the internal group dynamics. However, managing groups is an incredibly challenging undertaking. Groups are complicated. As more people join a group, the number of interrelationships and interactions exponentially increase. A group of ten people can have 45 relationships. Those 45 relationships can have tens of thousands of interactions throughout the year. With more people, the group grows more vulnerable to the risk that one bad interaction will grow into one bad relationship and then spread dysfunction to other relationships. By the time the manager realizes something is wrong, the internal toxicity could have already made its way to customers, delivering a financial blow to the company.
The manager must deal with these group issues before they have a chance to intensify and sabotage the success of the team. These issues do not solve themselves. They do not go away when ignored. They fester and grow over time. These issues reflect a lack of certain group skills. Those group skills do not get developed without deliberate practice. Deliberate practice to develop those skills requires full attention and great effort.
What are you doing to improve your skills in managing group dynamics? What is your manager doing to improve their skills in group dynamics? The manager who believes they do not need to expend great effort every week developing their skills in managing group dynamics is living in delusion. The manager who is not racking their brain each week on how to better manage group dynamics is setting their team up for failure. The manager who is not getting better at managing group dynamics each week is getting worse. In the worst cases, the managers who do not push themselves out of their comfort zone and into their learning zone of managing group dynamics each week end up pulling their teams down the path of dysfunction. Managers must work against competing forces to actively search for the current state of the group’s interrelationships, they must constantly cultivate their skills in facilitating productive group meetings, and they must forever develop the interaction skills of the team. A lot of bad advice floats around these topics, so I am sharing what works with you below.
Probe below the Surface
People can and do hide bad relationships from the manager. With so many interrelationships and so many more interactions among the members of the team, when something dysfunctional happens, it can fester below the manager’s radar for quite some time before it emerges. Sometimes it has time to spread into other relationships, and the true source of the dysfunction can forever remain a mystery. The manager must be on the lookout for red flags that something is amiss within the group.
I used to work at a large financial conglomerate. The company had been formed through many acquisitions over the years. Dysfunctional group dynamics were everywhere. Some acrimonious relationships were decades old and carried on by people who had no idea how the rivalries had originated. Some departments referred to other departments as the enemy. Aggressive behavior and hostile interactions were the norm. Individual relationships were even more challenging to uncover with so many people, relationships, and interactions and because people were good at hiding things from their managers. The senior managers were either oblivious to the dysfunction or unaware of its impact on the performance and results they cared about.
Unless the manager is actively on the lookout for the truth when it comes to group dynamics, they can guarantee that they are oblivious to what is really happening below the surface. Managers suffer from arrogance when they proclaim that everything is well with the team’s interactions. They can never assume this to be the case because the reality is that things change so quickly and most of the truth is hidden from them, no matter how trusted and connected they are to the team.
While Ed Catmull was building Pixar into a successful company, he had to come to terms with the fact that even though he thought he had his finger on the pulse of his team, he was wrong again and again. After being blindsided more than once by exploding issues with the group, he had to learn the hard way that the mere fact that he was the boss meant that people kept things from him, and his job was to forever work to uncover that truth. He had to speak to a lot of people, establish connections with them, and gain their trust so they would be open and honest with him. He had to expend great energy in asking and asking again about how things were going.
This involves real soul searching and can sometimes make management feel more like psychology. When was the last time you asked your team how well they work together? How many times have you asked this same question over and over again? Were you satisfied with the answer, or did you keep asking regularly? How comfortable are people with revealing information to you? When you do make discoveries, do you react in ways that tell people they should not have revealed something? If you react with anger, fear, control, or aggression you send the signal that revealing information to you incurs consequences.
Group Problems Require Group Discussions
Managing one person involves establishing a connection with that individual and developing their skills toward mastery. Managing multiple people is completely different. One of the rookie mistakes that new managers tend to make is that they try to manage a bunch of individuals through one-on-one interactions. However, this neglects the power of assembling teams and groups in the first place. Part of the purpose of assembling individuals into a group is to tap into the uniquely human ability to learn collectively. Collective wisdom translates into a whole that is more than the sum of its parts.
I had a manager who as her team grew from one to five people, her team grew progressively more dysfunctional. She inadvertently created dysfunction within her team by having discussions in separate one-on-one meetings with individuals about the others. Then she would tell the others what someone else had said about them in a genuine attempt to try to resolve the issues. However, her approach backfired, and this created a sense of paranoia among the team as people started wondering who said something bad about them to the manager. In a more extreme example, another manager I knew had a team of over 40 people, and she did the same thing. Looking back, I realized that this one-on-one approach was a major contributing factor to the revolt that team eventually made against her.
One of my professors gave some words of wisdom that he had learned the hard way through experience. Every once in a while, you need to bring the team together and ask the simple question, “How well are we working together as a group?” The first time this question is asked, people are understandably uncomfortable and hesitant to speak openly and honestly about each other while in front of each other. But the discomfort does not mean it is wrong. It just means that people are not used to having candid group discussions. Having these discussions is a skill, and facilitating these discussions is a skill. Cultivating these skills is critical to achieving productive group dynamics.
As the manager, your job is to get people to speak openly, honestly, and respectfully. This means facilitating group discussions. I have rarely seen managers who are experts at facilitating group discussions. This is unfortunate because major opportunities are missed. The facilitator engages the group to draw upon the full knowledge of the group, asks open-ended questions, and focuses the team on specific topics. Sometimes the manager must withhold their perspective from the group, so that people feel more comfortable expressing their opinions.
I knew a manager who had grown accustomed to solving the problems of the group himself. After coaching him through the process of group problem solving, he tried presenting the team with a current problem and asked them what they should do. He was surprised by the insightful responses of the team. They came up with and agreed upon a solution that was beyond anything he could have come up with on his own.
Cultivate the Interaction Skills of the Team
One of the red flags for a manager that something is wrong with the interpersonal communication of the team is when the members of the team tend to speak to the manager rather than to each other. This tendency toward centralized communication means that the manager and the group risk losing valuable feedback on ideas proposed by members of the team.
When JFK dealt with the Bay of Pigs, his team tended to speak to him as opposed to each other, so he was unaware of how much people disagreed with what others were saying. As a result, they moved forward with a plan that many people did not support. Afterwards, JFK consulted with former President Eisenhower and by the time the Cuban Missile Crisis began, he began asking the members of his inner circle for opinions on proposed courses of action that others had suggested. He also asked open-ended questions and was able to generate debate among the team to more fully explore the various options available.
The night before the Challenger space shuttle was launching on January 28, 1986, in colder-than-normal conditions, some of the engineers on the team knew the o-rings would fail at that temperatures, yet some held back from fully expressing the certainty and impact of the failure. The management team had some inkling of concern, but failed to explore the concerns enough to cancel the launch. The very sad outcome illustrates what can happen when groups experience interpersonal relationship and communication issues. The shuttle blew apart 73 seconds into the flight, and all of the crew died.
We would hope that NASA learned from the incident, so it would not be repeated, but almost two decades later the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated and killed all seven astronauts. Upon review, someone knew what would happen ahead of time, but the communication failed. The engineers and managers involved in the Challenger incident did not seem to learn from the incident either. Decades later, they were interviewed for various documentaries, and they all continued to blame and complain.
Fortunately, somebody did learn from the experience. Stuart Diamond was one of the journalists who wrote about the incident, and won a Nobel Prize. Diamond spent the next few decades putting together a process for negotiations, which he shared in his book Getting More. I recommend Diamond’s book to everyone on my team. He lays out an approach to negotiations based upon empathy and respect for others. Preparation starts by writing a list assessing the problem, situation, options, and actions. People then role playing in advance to practice for the negotiation. People then use role reversal to play the other person in the negotiation, which gives further insights.
Role playing and role reversal are so uncomfortable that people will shy away from the exercise. However, these are some of the most powerful negotiation tools. Almost any interaction with another person can be considered a negotiation, and improving negotiation skills improves interaction skills, so groups with better negotiation skills are better equipped to work together. Working effectively with others is an employee skill. Getting others to work well together is a management skill.
The manager must connect to the team, facilitate group discussions, and cultivate the team’s skills in healthy interrelationships, interconnections, and interactions to enhance team performance. Winners can be cherry picked, but winning teams must be developed by managers who design and implement specific, detailed learning plans that include the skill of getting others to work effectively together. The manager's key asset is the ability to increase the speed of the team learning how to learn together and building the team’s skill in translating individual learning into organizational learning. This is how winning managers develop winning teams.
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