Here is an excerpt from an article written by Annie McKee for Harvard Business Review and the HBR Blog Network. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, obtain subscription information, and receive HBR email alerts, please click here.
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Is anyone really an individual contributor at work anymore? I think not. Pretty much everything we do is done with others in groups. We’re tasked with planning and completing projects together. We negotiate roles and resources. We talk to one another—or text, tweet, email—and sometimes we listen, too. We’re dependent on and beholden to people above, around, and below us for collective success. We develop habits, over time, that dictate how we behave with one another. Add this up and you’ve got the definition of team: people who share a common purpose and goal, who have distinct roles and responsibilities, and who adhere to certain rules of interaction. Teams are everywhere at work. Sadly, though, most of them aren’t terribly effective—or fun.
How can we improve teams? How can we make them an aspect of work that contributes to our happiness rather than adding to our misery?
To start, we need to pay more attention to how important teams really are in the workplace. In most organizations, there’s a subtle undervaluing of teams. For example, while many companies nod to team-oriented behavior in performance management systems, it is not uncommon for this line item to be divorced from rewards and compensation. This reinforces the notion that we don’t have to pay attention to teams or teamwork (after all, we aren’t rewarded for it). What ends up happening, then, is that teams wither on the vine, at best. At worst, people—team members or leaders—are free to engage in bad behavior which leads to dysfunction, less than optimal results, and miserable team members. It doesn’t take much to blow up a team like this…and many of us have done it.
Paradoxically, it helps to learn what not to do with teams, before moving to what to do to make our teams more effective. Let’s look at some common mistakes even good people make when working together:
[Here are the first two of five.]
1. Forget your emotional intelligence (EI) and let your amygdala do the talking: Act on feelings and impulses, and don’t filter what you signal, say or do. Don’t let pesky things like social constraints or norms get in the way. Get really pissed off—and stay that way—when someone gets more than you do. Stereotype people who are different from you. Say what’s on your mind then excuse your behavior by telling people that you’re just honest and transparent, which maybe you are, but you’re also just being mean, and if it’s your direct reports, you’re bullying. Unfortunately, given the stress that people deal with at work today, an awful lot of people are walking around in a permanent state of amygdala hijack.
2. Stick to your guns: Awful phrase. How about “My way or the highway”? Same idea. If you want to ruin a team, be rigid, single minded, and obsessive about your goals or how to get things done.
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Here is a direct link to the complete article.
Annie McKee is a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, director of the PennCLO Executive Doctoral Program and the founder of the Teleos Leadership Institute. She is the author of Primal Leadership with Daniel Goleman and Richard Boyatzis as well as Resonant Leadership and Becoming a Resonant Leader.