Building a Team that can handle Anything

A crew aboard a 47-foot Motor Lifeboat from Coast Guard Station Umpqua River conducts surf training along the Umpqua River bar near Winchester Bay, Oregon. Photo by Petty Officer 2nd Class Steven Stohmaier.

Years ago I was part of a team asked to work on high stakes projects for school districts. Our team was diverse in every way–by race, gender, background, and age. But what we all had in common was a desire to improve learning for students. As we started a project we listened carefully to the briefing. We determined the contours of the problem in front of us and broke the problem down into discrete chunks, assigning one of us to each part of the problem. We created a clear matrix of roles, responsibilities, and deadlines. After appointing one team member to be project lead, we dug in.

A week later, at a team follow up meeting, we were in a discussion about contributing factors to the problem. I remember sharing what I had learned from my research and a possible interpretation for the outcome. One of my team members disagreed:

“I don’t think that’s it.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, caught off guard.

“Your explanation doesn’t account for the constraints of the labor contract that I’ve been researching.” He plopped a large pile of documents on the table.

I could feel my pulse quickening, and my brain starting to move faster. Was my research inadequate? What was in the labor contract?

The situation started to escalate. Feeling threatened, I started to defend the research I had done on lackluster professional development and low teacher engagement.

“Aren’t you listening?” My team member raised his voice. “That’s not the problem! I have seen how labor contracts drive everything in districts. It’s the most important constraint.”

“Hard to listen when I keep getting interrupted!” I shouted back, not caring that I didn’t make any sense. I had extensive experience with building professional learning culture and I felt it was the most important lever to consider.

And things got worse, they spiraled into an all out shouting match. We left the meeting and didn’t communicate with each other for a while.

An incredible coach had been in the room, witnessing the whole conflict. He debriefed with each team member individually and then met with us together.

This coach helped me see what I did that led to the explosion, and hold three other explanations for what could have been happening in the room. He helped each of us see the underlying assumptions we were making, and how our different perspectives were preventing us from hearing each other.

The next time we met, we shared the results of an self-assessment with each other, and our coach helped us understand that we had extremely different personal communication preferences.

As we came back together we still had disagreements. However, I felt more secure with my team. I knew that we had each other’s best interests at heart.

I started to experience disagreement and debate as a helpful sharpening of ideas. A way that we could actually understand different view points.

Over the coming months, I grew from a person afraid of debate to someone who welcomed it as an essential part of building a strategy and exploring ideas on our team.

How will you raise your team’s consciousness? Consider these questions:

🎯Does you team have a clear, focusing purpose that it visits regularly?

📊Has your team identified different decision-making pathways?

💥Does your team have a defined process for harvesting conflict and dissent?

✅Does your team have a clear process for handling accountability and follow-through?

📣Do your team members speak up, and offer ideas, even if unpopular?

Third Order Change offers a variety of services that help teams with their growth:

🌱Team Assessments: Allows leadership teams to assess their current functioning and the gap between where they are and where they want to be.

🌱Leadership Development Experiences: Customized experiences that challenge teams to face where they are stuck and learn new ways of working together–driving collective leadership effectiveness and business performance. These can be delivered as workshops or in a retreat setting.

🌱Decision-making: We guide your team through a structured, collaborative process that leads to a clear decision about an adaptive challenge, a defined execution strategy, and measurable benchmarks for success.

🌱Implementation Audit: We support your team in assessing a current implementation effort, diagnosing the adaptive challenge, pinpointing areas for improvement, and providing actionable insights to optimize your approach.

A team cannot function at a higher level than the consciousness of its members, and an organization cannot function at a greater degree of complexity than its leadership team.

How are you and your team leading through adaptive challenges this month? Where do you think you have room for improvement? Contact us for more information about our services.