Archive for category: Leadership Teams

Almost every senior leadership team I’ve coached with is avoiding conflict by ducking the same handful of conversations. And lots of them have unconsciously decided that just being ‘almost okay’ as a team is better than risking the wheels coming off by aiming higher.

Here’s the kind of conflicts they work so hard to avoid getting into:

• the way that decisions are really made (not by consent in the meeting, but often elsewhere, in a corridor, in a WhatsApp)
• that one or two members of the team often seem to be pulling in a different direction, with their own agendas
• that the real priorities, the problems that the team should be solving, or the opportunities that they should be grasping, are somehow never properly explored
• that the team’s own functioning is often just okay, and not something to write home about. And definitely not as well-functioning as they’d want other teams in the organisation to be.

And this isn’t just my experience.

Back in 1986 Chris Argyris described senior executives who had become genuinely skilled at avoiding conflict with each other. He called it ‘skilled incompetence’, because the very adeptness is what does the damage.(1)

Why Teams Avoid Those Conversations

What stops those conversations from happening, is that they are genuinely risky to have.

Senior leadership teams are under high-levels of pressure. And the unconscious calculation they seem to make is that ‘nearly okay functioning’, is better than the total dysfunction they fear might happen if someone opened the can of worms.

Here are some of the key reasons for playing it safe that I often uncover in my coaching with leadership teams:

1. Worrying that everybody is already under so much pressure. People ask themselves, “Can I say that my colleague isn’t delivering on one element of something, when they are already carrying so much else; would the wheels come off if I say it?”
2. Believing that they are personally at risk of being called out for something in return. If I say “Hey, we made this decision last month, why are we revisiting it now?”, is someone going to turn around and say something to me like, “Well Nick, if you’d delivered everything that was tasked to you, we wouldn’t have to be looking at it again.”
3. Depending on someone’s goodwill for your own functioning. For example, if I point out that a colleague’s actions don’t really seem to be consistent with the priorities we’ve agreed, will they take their ball home, withdraw co-operation with my department, and so cause my own work to degrade?
4. Looking to the Leader. People naturally defer to the team leader. If the leader isn’t naming an avoided conflict it becomes much harder for anyone else to name it. But leaders are cautious because they’ve been taught never to call someone out in public. Plus they know that naming it in the meeting also risks everybody swerving onto it, giving it too much attention, instead of none at all.

These reasons are part of the dreaded ‘psychological safety’, which has become something of a stick to beat leaders with recently.

But why it seems like a stick and not a solution is that the risks I describe above are not trivial. They genuinely might happen. And, if they do, they are likely to have big and out-of-proportion impacts. Psychological safety as a concept is only useful if we can find a way to be safe – and that can be very elusive.

The Cost

There is a cost to this, and it goes way beyond the leadership team. Allen Amason’s research with top management teams found that the ones who avoid task-focused disagreement, the honest argument about the work itself, make measurably poorer strategic decisions than the ones who have it out. And those are the decisions the whole organisation then has to live with, sometimes for years.(2)

I’ve spent a long time working with teams on how to overcome this. How do you stop avoiding the kind of conflict that might actually help really raise your team’s game?

The Usual Answer

The usual answer is to reach for a process. And there are some well-respected books about having difficult conversations, including Difficult Conversations by Stone, Patton and Heen, and Crucial Conversations by Grenny and colleagues.

These are most useful, in my experience, in beginning a dialogue about the need to not dance around conflict. And less useful for actually addressing it. Because the risks of saying “There’s conflict that we are avoiding” are themselves not always addressed. But if your team hasn’t done much work on this yet, take a look, and draw from them whichever aspects you feel are useful to your team and the situation you are all facing.

How to Sneak Up On it

My own approach is to come at it obliquely, with a rhythm that starts slowly before it builds.

I start by talking generally about what conflict avoidance costs. What it costs organisations, in performance and ROI. And what it costs team members, in their own day-to-day experience and the satisfaction they miss from not being part of a team that is genuinely flying along.

Then I ask people to relate that to their own experience. But not on this team. Elsewhere, in teams they volunteer with, or teams they used to work in. Anything that brings the lived experience into the room without the risks and threats.

And then I really cheat, which is where the rhythm picks up.

First, I cheat with time. I jump ahead. I’ll say, “Of course, all teams face these kind of challenges. I want you to imagine that here, we’ve already solved them. We’ve found the answer.”

And then I use a number of techniques to have people imagine, to feel, to see, what it might be like when they are really performing as team. If the things underneath that conflict, the decisions that kept getting circled back, the accountability that slips all the time, when they are gone, what will it be like around here?

That first cheat is a way to open the doors to safely consider a different, better way of operating. But it’s a simple cheat compared to the next one.

Bypass the Risks and Fears Altogether

Here’s one really powerful way to stop mucking about, stop tiptoeing around potential conflict, and stop leaving the important work and benefits on the table.

I want to say first that I don’t think this is the only way to do it. That’s partly because I’m a ‘never say never’ kind of person, and partly because I haven’t tried all the other ways yet.

My experience has been that if you really want to stop avoiding the kind of conflict that contains the seeds of truly great team performance, an exceptionally powerful way to do that is to work on who you are as a team and what mission you are on together.

Crew on a Mission

I have seen teams come alive like never before when they rehearse why they exist and explore who they serve. And I’ve heard a whole team gasp out loud in delight when I asked them to consider the legacy they wanted to leave behind.

When you start to believe in yourselves as a crew on a mission, something happens to those reasons for avoiding conflict. They don’t disappear. You still need your colleague’s co-operation next week. They can still call you out for the thing youdidn’t deliver.

But what changes is that none of it matters so much anymore. When you feel like a tight crew, and there’s something you’re all genuinely for, it changes things. The mission and who you are as a crew in pursuit of it becomes more valuable than any one of your individual positions. When you positively challenge a colleague, it reads as service to that crew on a mission, rather than as an attack on that person. And being challenged yourself costs you far less, because your own standing and your own ego isn’t really what’s at stake – it’s the tightness of the crew and the mission itself.

I grew up watching Star Trek, and part of that never left me. That crew on the bridge of the Enterprise never avoided conflict with each other. They had something they jointly stood for, their famous ‘five year mission’, and it was bigger than any one of them so they had to be a team.

Star Trek is fiction, of course. But it makes such a difference when senior teams seriously ask what they are jointly for. Not what each of them is accountable for. What they are for, and who they are together. When you’re ready to explore that question, then you can start really flying boldly.

Further Reading

(1). Skilled Incompetence by Chris Argyris

https://hbr.org/1986/09/skilled-incompetence

(2). Distinguishing the Effects of Functional and Dysfunctional Conflict on Strategic Decision Making: Resolving a Paradox for Top Management Teams. Allen C. Amason

https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/256633

More Support and Resources

I’m Nick Robinson. I coach leadership teams who sense they’re not yet working well enough together. My flagship programme The Shift is a development experience that helps leadership teams strengthen trust, alignment and how they function together. The result for the organisation is clearer decisions, stronger collective leadership, and better performance.

You’re not imagining it, and you’re not doing it wrong. It really is lonely at the top. It’s such a cliché, but all clichés start with some truth. And there’s quite a bit of research to suggest that:

1. it is actually lonely at the top; and
2. it isn’t a failure of the person in that seat, or the people around them.

So why is it lonely at the top?

Barry Oshry* studied how people behave in organisational systems, and found that leaders at the top behave in remarkably similar ways whoever they are. Just because of where they sit.

He calls it the burden:

Those people carry the whole weight of the system’s complexity, and that pulls them away from the very people they lead.

So the loneliness isn’t a failing, or something that other people cause. It is baked into the senior leadership job.

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*Reference: Seeing Systems (Berrett-Koehler) – https://amzn.eu/d/0hJKz4Pq

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A few loneliness warning signs to look out for:

• You’re carrying decisions you can’t fully talk about.
• You try to look more certain than you feel.
• People who used to be peers now sit on the other side of a line that would get messy if you crossed it too much.

What to do

If the research is right, then we can’t ever fully get rid of feeling lonely at the top. We have to learn to live with it.

You chose this job. You may not have known that loneliness would come with it, but there it is. I believe that leaders who do well need a great sense of defiant-celebration about them. They’re John McClane at the top of the Nakatomi Tower, cracking jokes and getting on with it.

So say it out loud, to your team and to your peers. If they’re feeling the loneliness at the top too, it’s the job, not them. Yippee-ki-yay!

How people are, the range of how they see things, the sheer breathtaking depth of what makes them tick – is wondrous!

I want to peel back the lid on this a little and show how it relates to the coaching work I’m driven to do and what it means for a leadership team at work.

Mind You Don’t Kill It

There’s a danger to peeling back the lid. Because if you start peering around inside people with a focus that’s too sharp, you can kill the wonder of the whole.

Here’s how it works for me, when I do manage to keep the wonder but also manage to get under the lid of what makes people tick. It starts with a curiosity: What organises them? What are they making meaning from? What are they orienting by, often without knowing it themselves?

Importantly, this is not a technique, not something I switch on at the useful moment. It’s just where my attention naturally lives. The wonder of how people actually work is the most interesting thing in any room to me, and I have never found the bottom of it.

Wonder is a quiet, deliberate, almost zen-like state, even when it does take your breath away. It’s a quality of attention you choose to bring, and then stay inside. You hold people in genuine curiosity – and this is what goes beyond curiosity – you also hold the possibility that they will amaze you. And you keep holding it.

Attending to people this way opens them rather than reducing them. A lot of our working culture assumes the reverse, that to understand someone is to file them, to type them, to have them sorted and therefore done with. A kind of dissection. In my experience this is mostly not useful.

So what should you look for, if you want to discover some of that wonder in what makes people and teams tick, and peel back the lid on it a bit? And do that in a way that helps them?

Start with Aliveness

Aliveness is the first thing I look for. How alive does someone seem, right now. And what brings them more to life. And what puts out that light.

People might ask you, “Oh what are the tells, the little twitches that show how alive someone is?” And that is absolutely the wrong kind of question, because the moment you are hunting for aliveness in those details is the moment you have stopped really looking. Stay in the wonder, the curiosity and the possibility of being amazed, and you will see it.

Once you get a feel for what impacts someone’s aliveness, you begin to get a flavour of what they are filtering for, what they notice and reach toward, even when they don’t know they are doing it. This is at the very heart of what makes people tick.

And you don’t even have to guess at it from the outside. You can simply ask them. “I noticed you came alive when we talked about X. What’s important to you about that?” Even if you have to ask a few times, going deeper each time, they will tell you. It’s like people are just wating to hand over the keys to who they are, to be properly seen and held in wonder.

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A small practical example:

A senior team I worked with had a member everyone had quietly decided was disengaged. Sat back, said little. But when I observed him, I didn’t think his aliveness was flat. It was more like a beehive, buzzing away inside, but you could only hear it up close. I caught it when a colleague turned and asked what he thought. He became alive. So I followed it up, and what mattered to him was being genuinely asked, his judgement actively wanted. The disengagement everyone had seen was nothing of the sort. He was waiting to be asked, in a room where being asked had real meaning for him.

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There is more beyond that, and I won’t lay all of it out here. What’s necessary first, before they can feel alive at work. What that leads to, or makes possible. Those are straying into techniques and part of a job like mine is to be unconsciously-competent enough with them that they show the wonder, not kill it.

What an Artist Sees in a Masterpiece

A friend of mine is going to an event with the artist Lachlan Goudie in conversation with the historian Simon Schama, on what makes a masterpiece. The premise has stayed with me, because it holds a similar risk.

The risk is that learning to read a great painting might cost you the wonder of it. That once you can name the composition, place the period and explain the technique, you have turned a living thing into a problem you have solved, and you stop seeing it.

Goudie’s approach answers that. The first question he asks of a painting is not why it was made but how. For him the struggle between the artist and their materials is not incidental to the work. It is the work. Going that deep leaves him more in awe of the painting, not less. Schama calls the result an epic of what humanity is capable of.

That is what I am claiming for people. Read someone all the way down, their aliveness, what they filter for, what they value, the evidence of it, and if you do it in wonder rather than to have them sorted, you come out as Goudie does in front of the painting. More in wonder that something as intricate as a person can be revealed at all.

Teams are People Too – Really

Another thing that really helps is to think of the team itself as a person, who you might also find wondrous. A collective being that is the sum of them and somehow also its own thing.

I first met this idea on an ORSC course, where it is called the Third Entity. That methodology tends to read the collective as a system. And whilst I love systems thinking, I also don’t want to reduce a room of wondrous people to a mere system. So I see that team as a person, living and breathing. That is synergy in action.

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Another small example:

I remember asking a team to consider what they were leaving behind for the people who would follow them. The room gave a kind of collective gasp, a single breath taken all at once. That was the team-person, showing itself. Briefly heard in something that brought them alive.

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Teams of course have their own collective way of doing things, their behavioural ‘strategy’. How they run their meetings, how they delegate, how they hold one another to account. And if a team can see clearly the things that increase its collective aliveness, it can make different choices about the elements of that strategy, or simply be more willing to put its shoulders to the one it already has.

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I have been doing this work a long time. And even when you can get under the lid with quite a degree of experience and insight, there is still no bottom to it. People and teams will still amaze you. They will still leave you in awe of them. This is the test of whether you are reading them in the right spirit. Not how accurate the reading is, but whether the curiosity, and the openness to being amazed, leave you with more wonder about how people tick. And on the good days, that is what I find.

This is the best bang-for-buck leadership tool I know – and most people shy away from using it, because it means sticking your neck out.

It starts with a question: at work,

How do you regard the people and teams around you?

Are they good; are they smart; are they trying their best?

Or are they careless, lazy, unthinking, unfeeling?

One huge lesson I discovered really early in my leadership career was that:

• You can make an intentional choice about how you regard the people around you at work; and
• That choice pre-determines what you actually get!

This is one of the most important choices I know for leaders to make and as we’ll see, it matters even more for whole teams, especially the one at the top.

If you think the people around you are lazy and unthinking, well, what a surprise, that is how they will be.

If you choose to see the people around you as amazing, full of innate ability, trying to do good, that is absolutely what you will get back.

And not only that, it’s a self-fulfilling, self-perpetuating dynamic, especially if you’re the kind of person who holds themselves to a high standard. Because that gives you the kind of impact that makes other people (often unconsciously) say to themselves:

‘Hey, you know what, Nick clearly thinks I am an awesome person. And if he thinks it, well, it must be partly true at least. I am going to try my best to live up to that. It makes me feel good. I’m going to raise my game with other people too, and show them how awesome I think they are.’

Okay, so I know what you’re thinking at this point (26 years of coaching does give me some Jedi powers), there’s always that one exception.

I say, ‘Hey think of people at work as awesome, and they’ll be awesome’, and you’re thinking of Bill. Bill is the guy who always seems to do less than he could, to take advantage. We all know a Bill.

The risk for you, if you start trying to think of Bill as amazing, is that he betrays that gift. This is a real risk. Do not use that as an excuse to tamp down on how you regard everyone else at work, though. Add Bill to your innate belief in the potential of others. And then if he doesn’t live up to it, decide whether there’s more work to be done with him. If you don’t do this, you will never hit your own full potential as a leader.

And there is an even bigger payoff waiting for you if you want it.

I have seen from so many coaching assignments that this mindset matters even more with teams. And the more senior the team is, the bigger the impact.

We know from Hackman and Wageman’s research that the senior team’s functioning is truly decisive. The whole organisation’s fate can hang on it.

So if you’re a member of a senior team, or even the CEO, how you regard your colleagues matters much more than you think. Whether you see them as amazing people with huge potential, or as lazy, unthinking and obstructive – it won’t just stay in that senior team. It reaches out from your boardroom to every corner of the organisation.

So you have to decide. Do you want a senior team that sees each other as less than amazing?

Or do you want to take a risk, and be the role-models for inspiring everyone’s potential?

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About me

I’m Nick Robinson. I coach leadership teams who sense they’re not yet working well enough together.

My flagship programme The Shift is a development experience that helps leadership teams strengthen trust, alignment and how they function together. The result for the organisation: clearer decisions, stronger collective leadership and better performance.

If you would like to learn more about that work, please get in touch. https://www.nickrobinson.org/the-shift-leadership-team-development

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LinkedIn Newsletter

Convictions: Leadership Teams is my monthly LinkedIn newsletter: longer, more personal pieces setting out what I’ve come to believe about leadership teams and the work of developing them. You’ll find it here:

https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/convictions-leadership-teams-7437896226198450177/

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Further reading

Senior Leadership Teams: What It Takes to Make Them Great – Ruth Wageman, Debra A. Nunes, James A. Burruss, and J. Richard Hackman (Harvard Business Review Press, 2008)

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Senior-Leadership-Teams-Takes-Common/dp/1422103366