Self disclosure in teams

How little do we know about each other when we are working as a team? Can we really work as a team when all I know is the professional persona of the person in front of me, or his or her role representing a particular constituency?

Many decades ago Harry Ingram and Joe Luft devised a clever two by two framework, known as the Johari Window. The history of this important contribution to the human relations field can be found here.

I have always liked this framework as it not only shows why feedback is important but also why disclosure is important, the kind of disclosure that gives others a peek behind the persona curtain.

I have had plenty of experiences with others who I was quick to judge, rather harshly, only to find out later that their life experiences were worthy of my respect . This discovery led me to change my judgment and increased my tolerance of the behavior I previously disliked.

When people start to disclose things about themselves there is a palpable shift in energy in the room; sometimes people even move in closer with their bodies as they don’t want to miss anything about how the other is shaped by the past. People’s life stories are endlessly fascinating – that is why we humans like to write, read and make movies about other humans.

There used to be a time that people were admonished to ‘leave their personality by the door.’ As if half a person could do the work of a whole person. Some people may still believe that it is possible to do so, but I think they are in the minority now. Anything personal, and in particular feelings, had no place in organizations, at least not when I started working, some four decades ago. I am glad that this is now changing thanks to the enormous body of research on emotional intelligence and the flood of neuroscience experiments measuring the presence, surges or absence of certain neurochemicals in our blood and how that changes our behavior and our thinking.

Because self-disclosure nearly always includes information about feelings (and if not explicitly mentioned, then at least some feelings will leak out), we see a more complete person emerge, complete and faulty, just like we are ourselves. This, contrary to beliefs about workplace efficiency from the days of the industrial revolution, helps with the task that the team has at hand. There will be less interference of assumptions, judgments and other energy drains that take us away from the work we have to do together.

I have seen teams derail completely by getting to work right away, with work meaning a review of the team’s terms of reference, charter or mandate. This is especially likely if the team leader abhors self-disclosure and thus cannot tolerate time for this upfront investment of time, as it seems frivolous, unprofessional, irrelevant.

A new year of trust?

I wish all of you reading this post a happy new year. I have been mulling over this happiness wish and find it unsatisfying. We could not possible be happy all the time. The wishes I have for myself and others are not about happiness but about the caring and candor that is needed to ensure trust, in our teams, in our families, in our organizations and simply in our transactions with others. When there is trust a whole host of other things become possible. Trust is the great facilitator.

I would therefore like to make this year the year of Trust. I would like us all to think about what makes or break trust and do whatever we can to heal what is broken and strengthen what is weak. And so I wish you a trusting new year.

I have come across a practical way to address trust in a program on Conversational Intelligence™ I am about to complete this month. I learned that one can look at trust as consisting of five elements: T for Transparency, R for Relationships, U for Understanding, S for Shared Success and the last T for Truth telling, or, if this makes you nervous, you can replace this with: Testing assumptions.

The practical implications of looking at trust this way lead straight into five New Year’s resolutions:

1. How transparent am I in my work, my interactions with others, my decisions?

2. What is the quality of my relationships, both at work and in my private life? What am I doing or not doing to enhance those relationships that could be better?

3. How well do I understand others? How well do I listen to them? Am I fully present when listening or am I formulating my point of view and simply pretending to listen?

4. Have I created a shared vision with my team (your family can also be your team)? Do we have the same understanding of what success looks like?

5. Am I telling the truth? Or, if you prefer, am I testing my assumptions when I draw conclusions about others, judge them? Is my judgment simply an opinion or is it based on facts that others can verify?

Imagine the possibilities! May 2019 be full of trust.

Buy-in or ownership?

On a flight some years ago from Amsterdam to Nairobi I watched a two hour documentary on the ten year renovation of the Rijksmuseum (Holland's National Museum) in Amsterdam. It is a tale of perseverance, human frailties, citizen input, ingenuity, and, most importantly, the difference between ownership and buy-in.

Most of the papers and talks about governance mention how important it is to listen to the voices of the people affected by a project or initiative, as if that is easy. The documentary shows what you have to be prepared for when you invite those voices in – in this case the voices of the bicyclists. You can see why people prefer not to bring those voices in when there is deep controversy. The documentary shows how this citizen input complicated matters beyond belief. It also demonstrates how the ability to manage citizens' input requires very advanced conflict management skills, a good measure of emotional intelligence, patience and, in this case, also lots of extra cash.

If your focus is on buy-in, rather than ownership, then the choice seems to be about anticipating a brief and intense outcry at the end of a project (in other words, not involving people) or, if you do, an agonizing and drawn out process of arguing and trying to convince the other side, which in Amsterdam took 10 years and contributed greatly to increased cost and delays. The conflict was eventually resolved, all parties are happy now, but the price was high. If anyone calculated the costs and looked at the pros and cons of inviting the voices of the people in, I am sure the cost-benefit analysis would counsel for ignoring potential opponents and dealing with the outcry later when things cannot be changed anymore. Eventually, one may expect, people get on with their lives and the protest will die down, except for a small very vocal minority which one could choose to ignore.

I am a fervent proponent of listening early on to the voices of those affected and involved to avoid problems down the line. The documentary showed clearly why we should never go for buy-in if we can go for ownership from the get go. Getting buy-in is selling. In a highly politicized environment such selling tends to pit groups against each other into adversarial roles, amplifying parochial and narrow self-interest.

Getting ownership starts with the creation of a shared vision of what success looks like; where everyone can see that their interests are recognized, even if not fully realized, for the sake of working towards an overarching aspiration that can serve as a magnet for the investment of resources (including human energies).

A receipe for productive meetings of minds - part 2 (facilitation)

We have all seen people in charge of a meeting who act like a traffic cop, giving the floor to this one and then that one without synthesizing or drawing conclusions. You may also have had the unpleasant experience of attending a meeting or an event during which powerful voices clash with one another and the rest of the participants are bystanders as personal agendas are played out.

Thus, a second important requirement for good meetings is skillful facilitation. The meeting chair needs to know how to facilitate the interactions between the people in the room in such a way that it reduces negative dynamics and helps people to listen to each other’s ideas in a respectful manner. We need meeting chairs to help people build on each other’s ideas rather than diminish them and draw people together around common goals and/or a shared vision; a goal or a vision that requires everyone’s good ideas, not just those from a few powerful and loud-voiced individuals.

Participation does not happen by itself, it needs to be structured

Think about structure: self-selected groups versus assigned groups, which depends on how much trust or safety there is in the larger group; working in small groups allows for parallel processing (several groups working on the same task in parallel). If you do this, make sure you budget adequate time for group presentations. Include time for individual thinking time (the introverts and minorities in the group will thank you for that). As a rule of thumb start with individual thinking, then paired sharing or sharing in a small group, then large group sharing. This ensures that everyone contributes independent of gender, rank and status.

Flow and rhythm

We are most creative when there is a flow/rhythm that allows all parts of us to be engaged: our intellectual, emotional, physical and spiritual sides. Thus plan for activities that engage the brain, the heart, the spirit and the body. Refer to deeply held values, acknowledge/vent emotions, make space for passion and excitement, use visuals, music, and have people move; sitting still for hours is not natural for human beings.

Learn how to ‘read’ a group

Recognize when people are getting bored or restless, notice when people walk in and out of the room a lot or are focused on their cellphones or computers. It is a sign that they are not fully engaged and find other things more important. It is a piece of data for you. Become more comfortable with silence; recognize signs of sleepiness in your audience, tension (nervous laughter, eye-rolling). Pay attention when too few people speak too much. Recognize whispering and side conversations as a sign of something else going on. Ignoring all this is at your own peril.

When in doubt about what is happening, ask!

Share your perceptions, concerns, hypotheses of what might be going on with the group or simply state – something is not right, please help me. If you were right you can enlist the group to address the issue; if you were wrong, move on, in each case you have created a break which was obviously needed anyway.

Support each new activity with visuals which spell out objectives and tasks (if any)

Some people need that kind of structure, even if you don’t. It can also serve you as a road map for the duration of the event.

Provide hand-outs

Tell people up front that you will give them copies of the slides or relevant materials. Some of this needs to be presented before the meeting, some at the beginning and some at the end. Think about this because there are choices to be made. Sometimes, when people are busy taking notes they become passive participants. In that case it is better to provide handouts with the text of slides so they don’t have to copy text from slides.

Make a habit of doing a reflection at the end of your gathering

Whether a short meeting or a multi-day workshop, conduct a reflection at the end: review what you did, what you decided and check how people felt about the process an accomplishments. Make sure you budget adequate time for this - don’t sacrifice this to save time!

Off track/recovery

Use the focus question (see part 1. Design) to refocus the discussions or deliberations when you see people going off track. Frequently look at the question (posted clearly on a flipchart or on the agenda) to make sure the group remains on track. Ask yourself if what you are doing now will get you to an answer or decision (assuming that is what you want). If you realize that the conversation is going off on a side topic re-read the question and, if you are not sure what to do, ask for help in getting back to the focus question.

Use a ‘Parking Lot’ for off-topic but important issues that arise.

A parking lot is an empty flipchart posted on the side where you can write topics you cannot discuss in the time available. You temporarily ‘park’ them there. Make sure that you agree on what to do with these topics (when and where to revisit them) in your closing reflection. If you are not doing that then there is no point in writing the topics down.

Unscheduled breaks

If you feel you have lost control of the groups (chaos) or when someone has hijacked the meeting, or if you are confused about what to do next call a 5 minute stretch break and consult with trusted colleagues on how to proceed.

Time budget

If you commit to starting and ending on time it means you have a fixed budget of hours and minutes, not one that can stretch endlessly into the afternoon or evening. Plan for late starts and afternoon energy ‘dips’ as you prepare your time budget.

Norms

Norm setting at the beginning of an event is only a good use of time if you make the group responsible for enforcing them. When people use abstract terms such as ‘respect each other’ ask them what that means and how it would manifest itself to avoid the ritual of mindless norm setting. Avoid becoming the enforcer yourself, or having a junior person identified as enforcer as they can never confront senior people with transgressions. Avoid monetary sanctions. This usually punishes the low power people as no one dares to exact fines from senior ones; besides you now have a problem of cash and who will manage it. Sometimes people will suggest that late comers dance or sing, but this tends to be enforced for a while and then no longer. The best remedy for late comers is to not wait for them before starting. If your event is exciting enough they will soon realize that they are missing out by coming late.

Be a model

Be a model to the group with regard to all stated norms. Check them regular to monitor yourself. Arrive at the venue before anyone else, start and end on time for breaks and closing. In workshops, if people keep coming in late, make it a topic of discussion and come to an agreement.

The flow of the conversations

Standing with your back to a dominant speaker sometimes helps to silence her/him; similarly walking up to, or standing right in back of a shy person sometimes draws them out. Standing in front center makes you the leader and conversations will always go via you; withdraw to the side, squat or sit down between the participants will redirect the flow of conversation between participants.

Changing perspectives

You can change dynamics and people’s perspective by asking them periodically to sit someplace else in the room. This will also break up clusters of friends or colleagues and provide opportunity to meet or get to know others.

Use the wisdom that is in the room

Although you may be the meeting chairperson, the boss, the director, head trainer or facilitator, you can never have all the answers and you don’t need to have all the answers. Asking good questions is a thousand times more useful than given an answer to every question. When asked a question throw it back at the questioner or ask someone else n the group if they know. There is often more knowledge and wisdom in the room than we recognize.

Relationships or numbers?

I have been reading Nora Bateson’s Small Arcs of Larger Cycles. It is a collection of short essays she has written over the last 5 years or so. The essays are of the kind that make you think and that change you. I am changed but not just because of the book. Nora’s essays found fertile ground in my head and heart because of what I saw here in Madagascar.

Last week we covered about 1200 kilometers, a few hundred of these over roads that looked more like dry riverbeds than roads. We went to places where foreigners are rarely seen, which meant that I created quite a stir – stares followed by smiles and waves from older kids and adults, fearful cries from the small ones.

We went to visit teams that had participated in a leadership development program (LDP) sponsored by the USAID Leadership, Management and Governance (LMG) Project. It started nearly a year ago in the region of Haute Matsiatra. The local facilitator team had selected the five best teams – best defined as ‘those who had achieved their measurable result.’ These results consisted of more women who came for their first prenatal visit, more women delivering their babies in a facility, more children vaccinated. The teams had selected those as leadership challenges that stood in the way of achieving the indicators set forth by CARMMA, the African Union’s campaign to accelerate the reduction of maternal and child mortality.

As we interviewed the teams on how they had managed to increase the numbers it became quickly clear that it wasn’t actually the numbers that were important. It was the relationships that made the positive changes possible: relationships that either had not existed before or that were of poor quality. The participants in the LDP had created relationships were none existed or improved relationships that were bad. They had moved these relationships from mistrust to trust. Contrary to popular opinion that trust, once broke, is as hard to put back together again as Humpty Dumpty, we saw that trust could be established or re-established easily.

Nora Bateson’s book and my experience here brought something sharply into focus, best illustrated with her words “Within the great whirl of life there is culture; in culture there is language; in language there is conversation; in conversation there are two beings; in the beings there are frames of perception and, in their communication, a kaleidoscope of unpredictable repatterning."

What had happened is that people had realized that it was only through the relationships, and thus through conversations, that they could hope to make things better. And in those relationships they changed as they learned about the other. The simple act of approaching and asking changes everything. It led to sharing and discovery, finding out that one’s point of view was not the only one and not necessarily the right one because it came from an expert. When interactions are based on trust rather than mistrust all things become possible that were not possible before.

And in this process people changed. We heard the same echoes wherever we went: “I changed from dictatorial to cooperative; I changed from impulsive and careless to caring and thoughtful. Ask my wife!” Those wives were often present or nearby as we interviewed the doctors at their health centers. They confirmed the changes. There was much laughter.

As a result of this trip I am changed too. I am also changing my vocabulary. I have become suspicious of words like ‘solutions.’ We ought to know by now that the problems that catapult poverty in our living room are not solvable from the mindset we have. It was Einstein who observed that problems cannot be solved from the same mindset that produced them. This quote is often cited but the deep meaning of it seems to be lost.

The mechanical, engineering mindset (every problem has a solution) is deeply anchored in our culture and it is easy to be sucked into its promises of engineering a better world. Yet I know that a better world cannot be created using an engineering framework simply because we are not made of steel and bolts. And now we are talking about systems, and system approaches and systems thinking, but they are still anchored in mechanical thinking: arrows and boxes, cause and effect, if this then that. Old wine in new bottles.

When Nora Bateson searched images for systems on Google she noticed that she had to scroll down through hundreds of images of circles and arrows and boxes before she found a picture of a human.

Indicator improvements do not make for better health care, although they may show that dollars entrusted to us were well spent. But the numbers don’t guarantee that they will continue to get better or at least stay where they are after we are gone with our extra resources, per diem, attention. I have come to believe that health care will only improve if the local relationships improve so that mistrust can be replaced by trust. It is only when people can talk together in ways that recognize that no one can do the difficult work alone and that we all need one another to improve whatever it is we want to improve.

Toxicity in the workplace

“The higher you go, the more problems are behavioral” —Marshall Goldsmith[i]

Over the years I have often been asked to work with senior leaders on their management and leadership skills. These requests don’t usually come from these leaders themselves but are suggested by other interested parties who feel that the dysfunctionality at the top gets in the way of project or program success.

I have been involved in a variety of senior leadership interventions, such as senior leadership development programs, teambuilding retreats, field visits, or executive coaching. In my past life at Management Sciences for Health, we received US government funding (when there was a lot of that) to send some of those senior leaders to the US to get a degree. Sometimes this served the double purpose of removing the person from the environment so that others could breathe again or thrive, and also to open their minds by exposing the person to other ideas, cultures and ways of working with people.

We don’t have a lot to show for how these interventions changed things. We may have some anecdotes, if we stay in touch with the people we worked with, but the impact of senior leadership development programs and executive coaching interventions is hard to measure. There is so much variation in how such interventions are done that it is hard to extract any lessons from them about how we should deal with dysfunctionality at the top. As a result we have very little guidance for people who find themselves working in situations where the quality of the work environment gets in the way of improving performance, no matter how good our interventions are.

Dysfunctionality at the top has been described well by Peter Senge[ii] in his classic ‘The Fifth Discipline,’ in particular in the chapter where he describes the “myth of the senior leadership team.” One of the ways we see this dysfunctionality expressed is in the form of ‘toxic teams.’ Toxic teams are a huge problem in organizations. Unfortunately they are quite ubiquitous around the world.

I often ask people about their experiences in working in a great team. It is troubling to see how many people have never had such an experience. Recently I asked a group of mid-level and senior leaders from six African countries the same question. Very few hands went up. When I started to talk about ‘toxic’ teams nearly everyone nodded their heads in recognition.

Most people know intuitively what a toxic team is. Toxic teams are created by toxic leaders. Toxic leaders are people who have responsibility over a group of people or an organization, and who abuse the leader–follower relationship by leaving the group or organization in a worse-off condition than when they took on the role of leader[iii]. They harm their staff, and thus also their organization, unit, program or project “through the poisoning of enthusiasm, creativity, autonomy, and innovative expression.”[iv] They spread their ‘toxic fumes’ through over-control, believing that leading is about control. The resulting toxicity in the work environment is bad for morale, bad for self-confidence and makes it unlikely that anyone would risk proposing something new or take initiative. Ergo, we have an organization or team that functions well below its potential.

Toxic teams especially where employment is not easily found and walking out not an option, perpetuate themselves as people have no other role models than those who control and depress. Consequently when members of a toxic team move into positions of authority themselves, at best they have no other models to emulate, and at worst, there new position of power triggers a wish for revenge. We can talk about performance improvement, better results or innovation until we are blue in the face, but we are unlikely to see any of this in teams (or organizations) that are awash in toxins.

So we should be very concerned about toxic teams and help people who are the source of the toxicity become aware of the impact they have on others and then help them with tools and coaching to turn things around.

Since we cannot change others, unless they ask our help in changing (but they’d still be doing the change, not us), we can contribute to reducing toxicity in the environment by asking ourselves some questions first. We can later use those same questions to assist a toxic leader who is ready to detox:

The questions are adapted from Goldsmith’s book “What got you here won’t get you there.”

1. Do you need to win, to be right, and to be the expert, all the time?

2. Do you always have to add your opinion, your advice to someone who has an idea? Is the proposal or presentation not good enough or complete without your ideas? Do you always have to add something, even if someone else already said the same? Can you ask yourself, before opening your mouth “what is lost if I don’t add my two cents?”

3. How often are you passing a judgment, on a person, someone’s idea? How often are you using judgmental adjectives in your head when listening to someone speak??

4. How often are you using words that dismiss the other’s ideas or proposals? Do you have a tendency to make destructive comments? Or share your negative or destructive thoughts out loud, even when not asked?

5. How often do you start your sentence with “No,” “Yes, but,” or “However?”

6. How important is it to you to tell the world how smart you are, by speaking out at a meeting, giving your opinion? And how often do you make your opinions sound like there are facts?

7. How often do you speak up or out when you are angry, even if you pretend you are not?

8. How often are you withholding information that could help others do their job better?

9. How often are you failing to give proper recognition or claiming credit for something you don’t deserve?

10. How often to you find yourself making excuses when something in your performance is being questioned (by anyone who cares) – sure way to stop getting feedback about things you could improve, or passing the buck or blame to others?

11. How often to you find yourself clinging to your past successes, things you accomplished when you were in a very different (often technical) position?

12. Do you find yourself playing favorites with some people, who may be exactly the ones that suck up to you, flatter you and make you feel great? What about the ones that make you feel uncomfortable? How do you treat them?

13. How often should you have said “”I’m sorry” but didn’t, or refuse to express regrets? And how often did you miss an opportunity to say “thank you,” express gratitude or recognize someone for a job well done? Especially when this person is critical of you??

14. How often do you find your mind wandering when (supposedly) listening to someone? Are you listening better to some people and less so too others? Do the ones who are your favorites get a better ear than the ones who critique you?

15. How often do you punish the messenger of bad news?

16. How often do you say, in the face of criticism, “that’s just the way I am”?

[i] Goldsmith, M. (2014). What got you here won't get you there, Hyperion eBook. Page 41.