Silo Busting 101

 

The Blind Men and the Elephant is an old parable (popularized by John G Saxe’s poem as read in the YouTube video above), and like all great wisdom and insight, stands the test of time. It’s perhaps even more relevant in today’s overly complex world than it was when it was originally told. The basic premise is that 6 blind men each have a hold of a different part of the elephant.  One thinks he is holding a snake (the trunk of an elephant) another a tree trunk (leg), etc. Though each of them might be partly right, they are all wrong about what they are holding.

For me, it’s one of those powerful analogies that I call on whenever I work with teams and organizations who may have become “entrenched” or “siloed” in particular viewpoints and, therefore, aren’t really working well together.  It’s also something I have to remind myself to call upon whenever I have become entrenched as well!

It’s a simple concept. Why is it so difficult to apply? A few reasons occur to me:

  • We are problem solving beings who want quick solutions.
  • Our identities are wrapped up in being right.
  • We are too busy to take the time to fully explore a particular challenge.
  • If we consider other perspectives, we fear we will need to compromise or give up something.
  • We are future oriented and have a difficult time paying attention to present realities.
  • GU – goo – what’s that you ask? It’s Growing Up goo … and it refers to the types of defense mechanisms we develop in childhood based on messages we get from our families, schools, etc
  • Others?

Whatever the case, it’s true that this basic inability to “consider the whole elephant” is at the heart of most miscommunication and a silo mentality. Weisbord and Janoff in Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There! (one of THE best books on leading meetings I’ve ever seen) suggest that exploring the whole elephant (or “getting the whole system in the room”) is necessary in order that people experience that they:

  • live on the same planet, subject to the laws of nature
  • share the same psychological and physical needs

Only when they have experienced this, can people move on to resolve differences and tackle problems.

How can you do this in your organization? Here are a few things to consider based on some of Weisbord and Janoff’s ideas:

  1. Be willing to take the time to understand the issue/challenge BEFORE jumping to a solution or an action plan. This bit of patience is perhaps the hardest first step of all.
  2. Get the whole system in the room. If you want to silo bust, you need to bring people from each silo into the room together!
  3. Do regular roundtables or check-ins on topics as part of your meetings. Encourage all perspectives are heard by surfacing different perspectives yourself.
  4. Draw a mindmap of challenges with all stakeholders in the room before you try to resolve an issue.
  5. If your team is having trouble speaking freely, have each person brainstorm their challenges or perspectives, one idea per post it note. Post these notes on the wall, talk about them and then theme and name them. Then, discuss specific solutions.
  6. Engage in teambuilding activities that help you see each other as people.  When teams (and people across teams) start to drift apart, they often start to see each other as “positions” and the “enemy” and not people. Do things together that force you to have conversations that are not about work (like cooking together, bowling, golfing, etc)

 Do you have any other strategies for exploring the whole elephant? I would love to hear them!

This blog is based on the 8 of Diamonds, The Blind Men and the Elephant, taken from our Teamwork Explorer. Written by Tammy.

Break the Monkey Collecting Cycle

Used through Creative Commons

Photo from Missbrendatoyou

You’ve arrived early to work and are making great progress on that huge to do list.  At 8:30, one of your employees comes in with a problem. Fifteen minutes later, you’ve added 2 tasks to your to do list.  At 9:00 a second employee comes in and 15 minutes later, you’ve added another 2 tasks to your to do list.  At 10:00 a third employee comes in and 15 minutes later, you’ve added another 2 tasks to your to do list … and so on … and so on …

Sound familiar?  This is what William Oncken calls “taking on monkeys.” Taking on monkeys is work you take on that others should be doing and it’s a great metaphor to help managers understand where their time has gone and why their team is not functioning well. Why do managers take on monkeys?  Any number of reasons including:

  1. They are unsure about their subordinate’s abilities.
  2. They are unable to distinguish between helping subordinates and doing their work for them.
  3. They think it would take longer to get results from someone else than to do it themselves.
  4. They are unable to say “no”.
  5. They are control freaks.
  6. They are perfectionists.
  7. Others???  Just keep asking yourself why 5 times and you’ll get to the heart of the matter for you.

While familiar with all of these myself, I still struggle with #3 … just ask my husband and business partner Dave. I am definitely impatient and want everything done yesterday and done right (ok I might also struggle with #6).

So, what’s a manager to do?  Well, the main goal is to move through your day without collecting monkeys (and ideally getting rid of a few of your own monkeys!) and if you do accept a monkey, be deliberate about it and feed and care for it (in other words, if you take on a monkey then do that “to do”, don’t let it starve to death on your to do list.)  So the first thing you need to do is some soul searching about WHY you are collecting monkeys. If it’s any of the reasons above, get yourself a coach to wean you off a few bad habits.

If you’ve got subordinates who don’t have the skills or inclination to look after their own monkeys then Oncken suggests you need to help your subordinates move up the initiative scale. There are 5 levels on the scale as noted below:

5 Act on own; routine reporting (highest initiative)
4 Act, but advise at once
3 Recommend, then take resulting action
2 Ask what to do
1 Wait until told (lowest initiative)

There are two things a manager should do in relation to these levels. One is to not let their employees operate at levels 1 and 2 (and this is where getting your own control behavior tamed is so important … if you think that no one can do things as well as you, you are doomed to a life of longer and longer to do lists.) The second is to have your employee walk out of your office with their own monkey and absolute clarity about the level at which you expect them to operate.

So, help yourself and your team by breaking the monkey collecting cycle today.

This blog is based on the 5 of Spades, Delegate with Care, taken from our Teamwork Explorer. Written by Tammy.

No More Boring, Bad Meetings

Be honest … are you guilty of leading boring or bad meetings?  I know I have been even though I should know better.  Many years ago now, the brilliant (and much younger!) John Cleese dramatized his meeting sins in a now famous training video:

  1. failing to prepare himself
  2. failing to inform others of what a meeting was about
  3. failing to plan the agenda
  4. failing to control the discussion
  5. failing to record the decisions

This shortened YouTube version of the original 30 minute training video, Meetings, Bloody Meetings, is worth a watch.

A more recent and complementary take on this topic is Patrick Lencioni’s fable Death by Meeting.  Lencioni suggests that most meetings are bad because they lack drama, context and purpose.  Given that the majority of important work needs to get done in meetings, he suggests team leaders become more accountable and address it in the following ways:

  1. Take a lesson from the movies.  Hollywood movie makers know that they need to introduce some confict or high interest into the movie within the first 10 minutes. Likewise, leaders should put the most controversial or engaging topic at the beginning of their meetings.
  2. Schedule more meetings! Seems counterintuitive but Lencioni suggests that most leaders try to put every type of task or purpose into one meeting (probably to get away from spending too much time in meetings!) and in so doing, almost doom their meeting from the get go.  He suggests teams set up four types of meetings:
  • Daily Check-in – as its name implies a quick 5-10 mins “how are things going?” Avoid the temptation to spill over into the next two or this meeting won’t work!
  • Weekly Tactical – This meeting should be no longer than one hour, and deal with the discussion and resolution of issues that affect the team’s short term and tactical objectives.  The team should quickly decide which items should be discussed in this meeting and avoid the temptation to spill over into strategic issues.  For this to work, the team needs to be crystal clear on its priorities in order to spend its time on the right issues.
  • Monthly Strategic – This is the meeting for discussion of topics that will have a long term impact on the business. These meetings should be longer and include time for exploration, brainstorming and open dialogue. Limit discussion to a few topics and allow 1-2 hours for each topic.
  • Quarterly Off-site Review – As the name implies these meetings are for people to step away from the day to day business, take a time out and reflect upon the entire big picture – how the team is doing, morale, engagement, the company’s strategy, trends affecting the business and so on.  These reviews can last anywhere from half a day to two days.

In our work with many teams, we see a few patterns. One is the team that has a difficult time discussing strategy even when they are in a strategy meeting.  This can be because people on the team lack expertise or the tools to discuss strategy. Two is the type of team who, as Lencioni suggests, tries to accomplish every task at every meeting. Three is the team that doesn’t ever take time away for an off-site review or retreat because they don’t have time. Ironically, the less time they spend on these types of off-sites the more time they spend frittering their time away on the wrong kinds of things and/or getting into interpersonal conflict.

What strategies have you used to ensure folks look forward to meetings instead of dreading them?

This blog is based on the 9 of Spades, When to Meet and When to Work, taken from our Teamwork Explorer. Written by Tammy.

When to Meet, When to Work

It’s Time for the Adult to Take Over

Sandbox with thanks to lowlmagination

Sandbox with thanks to lowlmagination

“I feel like I’m playing in the sandbox with a bunch of misbehaving kids,” lamented Pat, a very successful CEO of a large company.  She was a collaborative leader who involved her executives in decision making, but the team was under stress and acting like a group of little kids in the sandbox.

“Perhaps it’s time for the adult to take over,” I suggested which led to a fascinating conversation about the challenges of being a collaborative leader.  I had learned this from IDEO, a very successful design company, whose innovation teams are very collaborative, creative and emergent, and also, at the right times, directed by a few of the “self appointed adults” to complete certain tasks to ensure that they don’t spin off into complete chaos.

You know it’s time for the team leader to be the “adult” and take over when:

  1. Problem solving processes have run their course and you need to move forward. Some teams can get into “ideaphoria” and resist closure because they are not confident about their ability to deliver.  The team leader needs to force closure on the team and help the team with its confidence.
  2. Timelines are critical and short and there is no time for collaboration. The team leader needs to provide the plan and delegate to get the task done.
  3. Some (or all) team members do not have the skills.  The team leader needs to provide direction and suggestions about how to tackle the problem at hand.
  4. The team is not functioning well as a team. Once again, the team leader needs to provide direction and suggestions or delegation of tasks to get things done.
  5. If a team is under extreme stress, the leader needs to help the team take a time out, regroup and get back on track.
  6. If there has been a major emergency or catastrophe that is likely to cause chaos, confusion, or strong emotions, the leader needs to step in and provide stability and direction for the team.

The key to switching between a collaborative and autocratic style is to let your team members know, ideally before, but certainly at the time, why you are using this particular style.  If you don’t, you risk breaking trust with team members. If you are on a team where there is no formal leader, have the conversation about who the “adults” will be in the above situations. It will save your team time and heartache.

What style do you use?  Are there times when you’ve used a more autocratic style?

This blog is based on the 10 of Clubs, Autocratic, taken from our Teamwork Explorer. Written by Tammy.

Autocratic Decision Making

What do Cartoon Thought Bubbles Have to do with Teams?

The Implications of Thought Bubbles

Thought Bubbles in Action on a Team

“I feel like Switzerland and I just want to bash their heads together.”  Sarah was exasperated with two members of her team and was telling me how tired she was of listening to their stories and how awkward team meetings were becoming.

“What would happen if you told them that? Perhaps not about bashing their heads together but about how you feel? How might that change things for you and your team?” It had never occurred to Sarah to do this and there was quite a long silence. By the end of our conversation she realized how her silence had been contributing to keeping the unhealthy dynamic between her two colleagues going. She also realized that there was some risk in actually letting them in on her “real” thoughts, but that the potential gains could outweigh the risks.

It’s pretty common for people not to reveal their true thoughts in team situations. Sometimes it relates to being conflict avoidant, sometimes to groupthink, sometimes to an overly “politically correct” culture on the team, and sometimes to fear of being vulnerable all of which are demonstrated in the cartoon above.  Whatever the case, if you find yourself going over situations long after they’re over and feeling unsettled, it may be time for you to examine the role that your “thought bubbles” are playing.  Here’s one of my own examples and how I dealt with it:

I’ve worked with many co-facilitators over the years to deliver various training programs and inevitably the program has some sort of evaluation form. Most times the form lists each person’s name and then asks for an individual rating of each person. This has always bothered me in that if we are working as a team and co-delivering a program, I think we should be rated as a team, not individuals. Inevitably, if rated individually, one member’s ratings will always be the lowest and one member’s ratings will always be the highest. It sets up a competitive and uncomfortable dynamic. So, I have been dealing with this for years and finally (sometimes I am a slow learner too!) I followed the 4 steps I recommend to others:

  1. What role have your thoughts and feelings in your thought bubble played in the situation unfolding as it has? Whenever the topic of evaluation comes up on a team, I get uncomfortable and a bit cranky and end up not participating meaningfully and saying things like “I hate evaluations … we get feedback along the way so what’s the point?” I end up having a conversation that doesn’t really capture my true thoughts and probably frustates my team members.
  2. What are the risks and opportunities of sharing your thought bubble? The risk is that someone might disagree with my suggestion to do a team rating and think that I am insecure about my own abilities, that the real reason I want a team rating is so I don’t end up at the bottom. The opportunity is that at least I can be more honest and authentic about why the topic of evaluation bothers me and perhaps even have my team agree with a team rating.
  3. What would need to change in order for you to share your thought bubble? I just need to be more confident about my own opinion, that I have given the matter some thought and that it’s not a suggestion I make lightly. The other thing that needs to change is to bring up the topic when we have time to more fully discuss it instead of at the last minute during a program.
  4. What’s a small step you can take to bring more of your thought bubble to team conversations? I can suggest that the next time we do a program that we add the evaluation form to our initial planning sessions.  I can also then preface my comments with “I’ve been thinking about this a lot and was wondering if we could …?

I’m pleased to report that I did indeed bring up this topic and that the outcome was positive. It allowed me to be more authentic and it allowed my team members to get to understand my perspective a bit better.

While this was a positive outcome, sometimes your reflections might lead you to conclude that it is simply too risky to share your thought bubble. If this is the case, then you need to find a way to let go of the issue and not let it continue to permeate your thoughts and, therefore, your presence and interaction on the team.  How to do THAT is another blog post …

This blog is based on the 10 of Diamonds, Sharing Thought Bubbles, taken from our Teamwork Explorer.

Sharing Thought Bubbles

Sharing Thought Bubbles

How to Stop Avoiding Difficult Conversations

While the old adage suggests that silence is golden, on teams it’s deadly.  That’s because in the absence of information and open communication, people make up stories about what is happening, whether positive or negative.  And once people start to make up a particular story about something, that story holds more power over their behavior than anything else happening on the team.

There are many reasons why people might avoid conversations, but in our experience the main reason is because they don’t know how, and they’re afraid that the conversation might escalate into conflict. We’ve worked with many tools over the years and next to the intention/impact tool we wrote about in February, this tool based on Sherod Miller’s work, provides a step by step process to preparing for and having a difficult conversation.

The First Step

So, instead of avoiding that difficult conversation or launching into it ill prepared, take a few moments to write down the answers to the following 5 questions:

  1. What have I seen or heard? Make sure you jot down the facts of the situation, those very objective details that are not debatable. If you find yourself having a hard time coming up with ‘just the facts’ then you know you have already made up a pretty compelling story about the situation and need to slow down, and identify just the facts.
  2. What do I think is going on? — This is the “story” part of the situation, the assumptions and beliefs you have about it, the meaning you have attributed to a particular situation. In our experience people are pretty good at identifying their story, but not so good at being open to the other person’s story.
  3. How am I feeling? Some people are really good at this step (and in fact can get stuck here or overwhelm others!) while others are uncomfortable identifying and/or expressing their emotions. The six basic emotions are anger, fear, sadness, surprise, happiness and disgust. Other emotions common to difficult situations are disappointment, frustration, betrayal, or anxiety. It is important to identify and name your emotion in order to deal with it in a helpful way.  In our experience, people who skip this step tend to “act out” their emotions and this then creates more confusion and unintended impact for others.
  4. What do I want? This is a simple question but it often stumps people. They are usually so preoccupied with their story and/or emotions that they get stuck there.  In our experience, often the main “want” is to feel heard.
  5. Am I open to another perspective? This is probably the hardest step of all.  If you really want open communication and a productive team, you need to be prepared to be wrong.  We often ask people “if the other person was 10% right what would that be?” If you can be open to even a 10% shift in your thinking, there’s a stronger possibility that your difficult conversation will turn out ok.

Hopefully writing down the answers to these questions has allowed you to develop some perspective about the situation and deal with your own emotions in a positive way.

The Second Step

Now, you are ready to have the conversation using the first 4 questions above to structure it. If you are completely new to having this sort of conversation, we would suggest you choose a very low risk situation to practice and let the person know you are trying out a new tool.  Here’s how to structure the conversation:

I ‘m trying a new approach to our teamwork (communication) and would like to chat about what happened at our last team meeting.  Would you have a few moments to do that? Assuming a yes, then identify your responses from question #1 above and ask the other person for theirs. Once you have agreed on the facts, you can proceed to your story (#2 above) and ask for theirs.  Move through all  4 questions above, asking the person for their perspective at each point.

In our experience most people who have a solid relationship going into the conversation are able to come to a better understanding and strengthened relationship with each other.  If the situation has been going on for some time, trust has been eroded and either party is not open to the 10% shift, you may need to call in a third party to help out with the conversation.

What tips do you have for difficult conversations?  We’d love to hear from you!

8 Steps to Protect your Team from Disengaging

What are the chances of you being actively disengaged when your manager primarily:

  • ignores you
  • focuses on your weaknesses
  • focuses on your strengths

Drum roll please …40%, 22% and 1% respectively according to a 2005 Gallup poll.  Translated, that means to me that managers who are too busy to spend any time with their employees are at risk of them being 40% less productive … that’s pretty staggering. In my experience this stat translates equally well with teams. Those teams who focus on and play to their respective strengths are highly engaged, productive and enjoy their teams. Those teams who ignore the conversation about strengths and/or do not ever revisit roles run the risk of losing momentum and energy.

The best resource we’ve seen about uncovering strengths is StrengthsFinder 2.0, developed by Tom Rath and based on years and years of Gallup research. The most powerful aspect of this framework is its definition of strengths – those activities we find energizing. Most of us think of strengths as the things we are good at … seeing strengths as those things that energize us is a subtle but powerful shift.

So how does a team go about exploring strengths in a structured and meaningful way?  Here’s what we suggest:

  1. Each member buy the StrengthsFinder 2.0 book, complete the online assessment, and read the customized report.  Amazon online has it available for $15 per book, a great deal!
  2. Set aside 2 -3 hours (depends upon the size of your team) at a next team meeting to work with the results.
  3. Draw up a big wall chart … listing the 34 strengths horizontally across the top and team member names vertically along one side.
  4. Each team member then places an x in each of their strengths.
  5. Based on the results, organize your team into groups of 2 people, each group of 2 exploring a shared strength by identifying what it means to them and some concrete examples of the strength.
  6. After the report out, have a broad discussion of the team’s strengths.
  7. Then, list all of the projects your team is engaged in and identify the strengths most needed in those projects.
  8. Finally, have a conversation about roles/accountabilities … are the right people doing the right things? Can you shift your team work to more readily accommodate team strengths?

We have facilitated this activity with dozens of teams and are inspired by the conversations that people have and the level of excitement and engagement.  It is one of the most useful tools we have seen to protect a team from disengaging, or to put it more positively, Play to your Strengths, our teamwork tip of the week.

Play to your Strengths

Jack of Spades – Play to your Strengths

Everybody performs better when they play to their strengths. Make sure that individuals’ strengths are taken into account when roles are assigned and tasks allotted. One way to do this would be to have the team discuss what strengths would be needed to accomplish a role or task before it is allotted. Also check out Gallup’s Strengths Finder book for a more formal approach to discovering your strengths.

What % of time do you think your team is playing to its strengths? What might happen if you increased that by 10%?

Would you like more help re-engaging your team?  We offer customized teambuilding and team coaching experiences. Contact us today for a free consultation.

Don’t Read This If Your Team Is Stressed

Well, here you are reading this so your team (or perhaps more accurately you) are stressed. And I just know what you’re going to say … you have too much work and too little time. So if I suggest anything at all to you at this point, you might just rip my face off (you laugh but I just had that happen and not that long ago). But I will risk it anyway and suggest that at your next team meeting, you ask for 5 minutes and have everyone do the following:

  1. Write down all of the things that you can celebrate right now about your lives, your work and your team. And yes, do feel free to tweet, text or email each other if you simply can’t pull yourself away from your technology.
  2. Make a list of the things you are stressed about that you can control and ask yourselves for each one – 6 minutes from now will this be important, 6 hours from now, 6 days from now, 6 weeks from now, 6 years from now. I’d like to humbly suggest that you put all of the 6 minute, hour, and day things into perspective.
  3. Then, make a list of things you are stressed about that you can’t control and banish them from your heads. As someone once said (and I’m sorry I cannot remember who said it or where I read it), don’t let them live rent free in your head. It’s like giving someone you don’t trust the passwords to all of your accounts and that’s just plain crazy.
  4. TAKE A MINUTE, AN HOUR, OR BETTER YET A DAY OFF!!!! If your team is stressed, you have opened just one too many programs and your computer will crash (I know this because my husband watches me do this all the time and, yes, even that brand new super dooper computer will crash at some point if you just keep installing software on it.)
  5. Next, get reacquainted with the original passion and intent of the team. What is your team being called to do? How does that fit into the overall goals of your organization? How and where does your team need to prioritize its work?  How can you reignite how you all work together?
  6. Now that you’ve rebooted, take a deep breath and prepare yourself for the final bit of advice …

LOOK AFTER YOURSELVES!!!! Instead of winding yourselves up like the Ever Ready Battery Bunny, try to keep our teamwork tip of the week top of mind, or better yet the wallpaper on your iPhone.

Look After Yourselves

Jack of Hearts – Look After Yourselves

Our work lives can be challenging, and demanding. Make sure you take time for yourself on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. Ensure that you are in touch with what really matters in life and strive to separate challenges and failures at work from your own personal sense of worth and efficacy. Take time for exercise, rest, leisure activities, family, friends, daily time-outs, and vacations.

How is your team doing?  How do you encourage each other to look after themselves?

Curious about the rest of the tips and want to know all about them now? Find out more.

Do you have the right skills?

A fascinating report by the BC Premier’s Technology Council outlines the new skills needed for our knowledge-based society. Among them, creativity, communications, teamwork, personal organization and self-regulation stand out as key skills that can have a profound impact on performance at individual, team and organizational levels.

We’ve been delivering workshops on creativity and innovation for many years now. It’s sometimes the most fun we have at work. We’re finding people are naturally attracted to creativity and innovation but our educational institutions and formal workplaces have somehow subdued a natural talent that is often just waiting to burst out. Check out Ken Robinson’s 2006 ted.com talk if you want to know more.

“Communications is the ability to relate concepts and ideas to others either in person, on the page or through technology” … so says the report. Unfortunately, I fear the PTC has fallen in to the trap of considering communication a one-way street. In our work we’ve found an ability to listen is often the most obvious communication skill that many need to develop. Communication needs to be about sharing ideas and building common understanding, not simply pitching your own thoughts effectively.

We’re so glad to see teamwork on the list. Most of us now work in sufficiently complicated jobs that no one person can achieve anything of real value without the mutual support of others. Once again I worry that our educational institutions are partially to blame for encouraging individual achievement over good team skills.

Adding EQ to the IQ is something we discuss a lot at Calliope. All of our clients are smart, but IQ alone does not guarantee success. Research has shown clearly that Emotional Intelligence (or EQ) has a profound impact on an individual’s capacity to be successful both at work and personally. The most popular framework for understanding EQ, developed by Dan Goleman, divides EQ into self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and relationship management. We see clear overlap between the domains of self-awareness/self-management and the critical skills of personal organization and self-regulation.

You can get the full report from:

http://www.gov.bc.ca/premier/attachments/PTC_vision for_education.pdf

We’d love to know what you think?

Dave Whittington, Calliope Learning, 2011

Team Trust Buster #2

There’s nothing that breaks trust faster and contributes to organizational miscommunication, angst and lost productivity than triangulation, our Teamwork Explorer Tip this week. Not the map related kind or the research related kind but the all too common and human kind where you talk to your husband about how much your friend has hurt you or vice versa. Or the organizational kind where you tell everyone you know how much of an idiot your boss is but never have the courage to actually tell him to his face. Or the even more destructive kind that gets going on a group level contributing to silos in organizations.  Bad mouthing another department or unit in your organization to another unit or department might be human, a fun past time and a way to release your frustration, but it’s also really bad business.

On teams, triangulation is poisonous. You know it’s happening when there is more talk about the meeting AFTER the meeting in hushed voices in offices. There are two guilty parties in triangulation … the one telling and the one listening.  If you really want to improve trust and productivity on your team, you need to implement a no triangulation zone which means that a) you don’t talk about anyone else behind their back and b) if someone else is doing it, you challenge them to stop.

It might sound overly simple … but it’s amazingly difficult to live consistently. Having taught this concept for close to 15 years, you’d think I would have mastered it, but I am still working on it myself. What I have discovered about triangulation is that the more centered I am, the less likely I am to engage in triangulation because I am strong enough to see my own role in situations and not blame others.  When I get stressed or off balance and don’t create time to focus on the things I am doing well or the successes I have had, the more likely I am to blow off steam and avoid difficult conversations.

Queen of Diamonds (communication) – Triangulation. (Need to know more about our approach to teamwork?) See our Teamwork Explorer blog post.)

Triangulation

A common response to conflict on teams is to speak to others about the situation. This sets up an indirect communication pattern (often called triangulation), encourages people to not see their own roles in the problem, and leads to unresolved conflict in the team. The essence of any productive team building and effective organizational learning is de-triangulation.

Is your team guilty of triangulation? How can you encourage people to talk directly to each other?

Curious about the rest of the tips and want to know all about them now? Visit our store!