The reason your team isn’t performing might be more complicated than you think
If you want to make a team or an organisation work better, it is easy to focus on tasks, outputs, systems and processes. Often, the answer to making a team work lies somewhere else entirely, writes Katie Goulding.
As I sat in a physiotherapist’s office, complaining about a knot in my shoulder, he first prodded at my neck. Then he tugged a little at my arm and examined my lower back. The offending knot isn’t in my neck, my arm, or lower back.
But the thing he knows, that I am learning, is that everything is connected. A knot in my shoulder is a symptom of something that needs attention elsewhere and my body is compensating.
Over my career, I have worked with many teams and organisations that are facing ‘knotty’ challenges. By which I mean, challenges that are tangled and it is not immediately obvious what the root cause is.
People are complex
It is easy to focus on tasks, outputs, systems and processes, but fundamentally, organisations and teams are made up of people. Ultimately, all organisations require those people to pull together around a shared purpose. But people are complex.
When something feels ‘knotty’ there probably is not a single solution, or simple explanation – and that’s ok. As someone who has spent years studying how teams and organisations behave, it is this unpredictability that strikes me as the most beautiful (yet messy) thing about working with people.
So how do ‘knotty’ issues present themselves? One of the tools we use at Kaleidoscope is our high performing teams (HPT) diagnostic. It is a set of questions that help a team or organisation locate where they are against a set of key characteristics:
- Having a shared purpose-driven strategy
- Team members believing their work has meaning and impact
- Structure and clarity within the team
- Capability, ie. the right skills mix
- Dependability and confidence in each other to deliver
- An inclusive culture of improvement
- Psychological safety
- Diversity, equity and inclusion.
We’ve researched and tested these qualities to know they are present in teams that are doing their best work. But, more than anything, our questions are a really good conversation starter. They help teams and organisations poke around at their knotty issues and find out what the underlying causes could be.
It is easy to focus on tasks, outputs, systems and processes, but fundamentally, organisations and teams are made up of people.
I once worked with a team who told us they didn’t have a shared strategy. We started the conversation there, but what soon began to surface was that the team wanted, and needed, to talk about psychological safety.
Having started with an idea of what their issue might be, they realised that they had to be able to talk more honestly and openly in order to produce a strategy they could own.
If you are familiar with the work of Patrick Lencioni and Brené Brown, you will know how important this kind of vulnerability is in generating team commitment.
Identify ways forward
The conversation got traction, and they shared with each other how their communication styles and workplace behaviours were not always serving each other well. With that surfaced, they could identify ways forward and talk more openly about their purpose and strategy.
Back to the physio office. It turns out that the knot in my right shoulder is caused by some pesky lower back muscles. If I don’t pay attention to my core a bit more then I am likely to jeopardise the marathon training I’ve been doing for a cause very close to my heart.
That had me thinking, most organisations and teams have knots, most teams could use some help to do more of their best work. Those little knots may seem like relatively isolated inconveniences, but start talking about them, dig a bit deeper. If you tackle the root cause, it can make a big difference to getting you where you want to be.
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