The Workplace Coach

I’ve been doing a lot of work with leaders and their teams over the past fifteen years or so, and I discovered one absolute truth.  In every single team where there is dysfunction (and by dysfunction I mean performance issues, conduct or behavioural issues, backstabbing, gossiping, blame cultures, a lack of accountability etc) there is always one missing ingredient in the team.  That ingredient is TRUST.

The team don’t trust each other, or they don’t trust their manager, or they don’t trust the corporate leadership team.  This lack of trust might be between individuals or may be the whole team, but I guarantee you that somewhere in that dysfunctional team there is a lack of trust.  You might be aware of some of the work by Patrick Lencioni and his pyramid which outlines the five characteristics of dysfunction in teams.  You guessed it, the foundational layer, the first dysfunction is a lack of trust. 

In a team where there is no trust, there will also be a fear of conflict.  You know those team meetings where you present an idea or propose a new way of doing things, and you are greeted with a resounding silence?  There might be a few cautious nods, one person might even say they agree that it’s a good idea, but you won’t get any dissenters.  People don’t feel psychologically safe to raise objections in the meeting. There is a fear of sounding stupid in front of their peers, of being shut down or ridiculed by the others in the team or by you as the boss.  Don’t you worry though, the objections will come up after the meeting, around the coffee machine in the kitchen, and you still won’t hear about them.

A fear of conflict leads to a lack of commitment.  People who feel like they haven’t had any input into an idea might passively agree, but won’t actively commit to it.  In fact, they might actively white-ant the initiative and then roll their eyes with an “I told you so” when it fails.  And because they haven’t committed to it, they won’t be held accountable for it either by you as their manager or by their colleagues who also aren’t fully committed to it.  They are far more likely to start pointing fingers.

This lack of accountability becomes evident in the obvious inattention to results.  Rather than focussing on what the team is meant to be achieving and working collaboratively towards those goals, every individual in the team will be in self protection mode.  They will be focussed only on making themselves look good, even if it makes others look bad.  This is a dog-eat-dog world and only the most cunning survive.

Okay, so that might be a little dramatic but you get my drift.  Simon Sinek in talking about the work he did with US Navy Seals tells the story about how they select people for critical mission teams.  He describes how they look at their people across two axis – performance and trust.  The performance axis is the technical expertise, how good they are at their job.  The trust axis is about how much are they trusted by their teammates.  He explains that in the Seals the one axis is “how much can I trust you with my life, the other is how much can I trust you with my money or my wife”.

The person who sits in the high performance/low trust quadrant is considered to be toxic to the team, and selectors will choose someone who is mid performance/high trust or even low performance/high trust over the toxic person.  Simon explains in this short video.

If you are experiencing any kind of dysfunction in your team then take a minute to think about where the lack of trust is, where it comes from and what you might want to do about it.  Feel free to give us a call, we would love to help.

The Workplace Coach