I am asked to evaluate teams, departments, and managers quite often. This work is sometimes done in the form of focus groups, interviews, or team training sessions. People ask me for my opinion about what needs to change to reduce dysfunction or improve team engagement or performance. The answer is never as simple as they hope.
But this is no surprise to you, right? Although not a complete list, here are a few of the elements that often impact how a team is doing. When these are out of balance, the team suffers, rebels, or fractures.
1. Increased work complexity and the need for greater accountability.
Improving workplace efficiencies, quality, safety, and increasing accountability is critical. All of my clients are trying to increase accountability and this is not a bad or wrong thing to do. Even so, increasing accountability can increase job-related stress, resistance, and counter-productive habits. Long-term employees tend to struggle more with these changes than those who have been in their roles for fewer years. Often, accountability measures make experienced employees feel judged, put down, and less valued at a time when they believe their experience should produce the opposite performance perceptions. Accountability extends beyond work tasks to teaming expectations. Determining how and when to hold employees to higher teaming and relationship standards is difficult. And yet, failing to hold team members accountable for basic workplace teaming skills will impact performance as much if not more than inadequate measures in other performance areas.
2. The emotional content of work, self-esteem.
How much drama is there in the workplace? If your organization seems like it breads drama, it is likely a strength that is being applied to workplace stress. At its heart, drama is passion and you want passion. When people care, they can move mountains. And when they care, they are sensitive. It is utterly useless to play the "logic" card with a team that is living in a soap opera world. I find that the helping fields, especially health care, experience more drama than many other industries, but each team is unique.When drama is high, you will experience more angst when implementing changes. As managers, this needs to be considered in the planning stages. Emotional commitment is critical for all employees in all industries. The opposite of emotional commitment is detachment.
3. Managerial practices that enhance or hinder ownership.
While most managers are clear that they need to improve accountability, fewer also focus on building ownership or they don’t understand how the two concepts relate and are different. Employee resistance does not usually come from the change itself, but from how team members feel about the change and how their managers make them feel in the face of changes. Managerial habits that build ownership include those that demonstrate care, enliven creativity and participation, make employees feel important and valued, enable employee growth, and make the workplace enjoyable. This theme represents the “people-oriented” stuff and the fundamentals of motivation. More than with any other theme, it is critical for managers and leaders to be positive role models. It can be tough to hold ourselves to the highest standards of teaming and relationship building when faced with busy administrative calendars and when team members reject our honest efforts – but this is what we need to do.
4. Affiliation.
While some people are introverts and others are extroverts, we all want to feel that we belong. Throughout our lives, we band together many times in work groups, sporting groups, church groups, families, and other affiliations. For example, when diagnosed with an ailment, many join one or more groups that share an interest in the specific disease. Groups are important to us. For managers, this is both an opportunity and a challenge. While it is normal that departments may have several groups and sub groups within the team, it is critical that at least one strong affiliation is between management and front line team members. In the absence of a strong connection between management and the team, we often see counter-productive team behaviors (e.g. unionization, real or quasi-mutinies, disproportionate responses, a lack of cooperation even when changes are positive and logical). It is also important that sub-groups do not become competitive and start defining success in terms of win/lose or right/wrong.
We feel affiliation when we care for people, share a common purpose, when there’s reciprocity, and when there is trust and transparency. Being affiliated means that we feel like insiders, not separate or outsiders. Although the employee culture will not include management, managers play important roles in the stories employees tell. If employees have not “bought” into leadership, it is because leaders have not “sold” it to them. Enrolling the team, versus persuading them, will help build emotional commitment and improve the stories employees tell. "Neither management authority nor logic are compelling enough to create emotional commitment." (quotes from Stan Slap) "If the culture does not want it to happen, it won’t happen."
5. Workplace hassles.
Every workplace offers some number of hassles due to regulatory requirements, strict protocols, red tape, crazy style preferences, and safety standards. Even though hassles are to be expected, they can become a focal point for employees and groups and can get in the way of broader change acceptance. For example, a team might focus on the stress of schedule changes as a reason why broader changes are unwarranted or why managers are ineffective.
How these five themes interrelate.
These themes come together and affect the overall productivity and morale of the team. Management is complex and difficult when these themes are out of balance. What these themes indicate is that if you want to make changes, it is not as simple as planning and implementing a change. If you want to increase accountability and change adoption, you must also take action to reduce drama, increase ownership behaviors, increase affiliation between employees and management, and reduce the hassles that can blur focus.
The most common imbaance I have seen in the last few years is a spike up in accountability practices but no corresponding increase in ownership/love. If you want to increase one, you need to increase the other. It is an equation, not a one-time plan, and managers must practice alignment every day. It is important to realize that even when managers do this, not all employees will come on board. This is what makes managing a tough and humbling job. It is also what makes it amazing and magical.
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