“Burnt out, disengaged, burnt out, disengaged, burnt out, disengaged, disengaged, burnt out”.
The team had left the room, and I was debriefing with the leader. The chairs were still in the circular layout we had created at the start of the day.
The leader pointed to each chair one by one and assigned the person who had been sitting there one of two labels – burnt out or disengaged.
This leader had inherited a team that was getting their work done but struggling behind the scenes with dysfunction. It was putting a real strain on everyone’s energy and motivation. Despite managing to hold it together, the team couldn’t last like this for much longer.
This workshop was the first step to addressing it.
Perhaps this is a scenario you’re experiencing. You’ve recently taken on a new leadership role, and the team for which you are now responsible has problems with conflict, is unhappy, and the atmosphere feels heavy. Your predecessor wasn’t able to address it, or in some cases, even ignored or avoided it.
You’re more forward-thinking with a different leadership style and understand the value of intentional culture-building. You’re committed to improving the situation because you want a better environment for your team. You know that resolving this dysfunction is essential to achieving the business success you’re working towards.
However, because it’s been unaddressed for a while, the rifts run deep. The team has lost trust, and there is a big cultural debt to work through. This is what happens when superficial fixes have been applied to more significant challenges.
It will require a bold approach to turn this around.
Getting to the heart of the matter
Although on the surface, team dysfunction may present as people simply “not getting along”, there are often underlying, more complex factors that are causing it.
As the team’s new leader, you will need to discover the full picture, which could be a mixture of:
- The team’s history and long-standing personality-based conflicts. Team members may have started to avoid each other, limit interactions and become protective, which is impacting the quality of work
- The environment within which the team operates. Team members’ work could lead them to operate under constant high pressure. Lots of change and uncertainty in the organisation could be causing insecurity, or wider market changes may bring apprehension and worry.
- Systems and structures that are not set up for the team to perform at its best. This could be causing overlap or even direct conflict between roles and strained communication lines. Or high workloads paired with a lack of direction are burning out the team.
- Challenges that are a natural result of the work that haven’t been articulated or addressed openly and effectively. The team keep bumping up against these invisible roadblocks, and they feel frustrated and insecure.
There may be elements you find that need a direct ‘fix’ and others that just need to be acknowledged and discussed. However, any clearly harmful behaviours should be addressed as soon as possible.
It’s also vital to recognise the areas that are working, so the team can appreciate them and double down on their positive characteristics.
Uncomfortable unravelling
It’s a natural tendency to want to solve this quickly, but these factors will often unravel over time. While team workshops and off-sites can support the turnaround process, these deep-rooted cultural problems cannot be solved in a single session. It’s possible, but unlikely, that you’ll experience that immediate, seismic bang of change.
This isn’t traditional “teambuilding” as we understand it – the fun, energetic activities that are all “high fives and good vibes”. This unwinding will involve some discomfort as you shine a spotlight on the things that aren’t working. It may feel messy.
However, you will need to bring people together to address some of these challenges, so these sessions are an opportunity to observe team dynamics in a way that is not possible to see in day-to-day work. Dysfunction in work life is experienced in“pockets”, such as short, heated exchanges in meetings, quick comments, email threads, and the replay of events in one-to-one conversations.
These interactions become concentrated in a facilitated workshop, allowing the whole team to witness the culture in real-time. This often leads to validation, insights and breakthroughs and becomes a catalyst for kickstarting the change process.
Rebuilding trust
It’s likely that the team members, despite being talented individuals, have adopted unhealthy and unproductive coping mechanisms just to get by, and this has become their norm. They are either not aware that the environment could be different or are very sceptical that positive change is possible.
The situation won’t be resolved by asking everyone to “just get along”. And it won’t happen overnight. It’s a slower process of rebuilding trust in each other and rebuilding trust that things will improve.
Even with your best intentions, your different leadership style can feel jarring to the team. Anything new, despite being positive, can seem like a threat to their status quo – especially if their previous experience has led them to believe that a happy team and high performance are incompatible. A tired and cynical team will want to see evidence that their efforts will be worthwhile before investing time and energy into change.
You may hear things like: “We’ve already tried that, and it won’t work because….”.
Or the lack of trust manifests in a reluctance to take the first step because they are thinking:
- What if I’m the only one who makes the effort?
- What if we put in effort, and things still don’t change?
- What if we try for a short while, and things go back to how they were?
It’s almost as if the team has reached a deadlock and needs to see a shift somewhere else before they commit to changing themselves.
So you will need to signal that it will be different, for example, by scheduling time to focus on culture, initiating a strategy clarification or reset, and starting with some quick wins.
The only way through is through – the bold leader’s approach
The turnaround process will undoubtedly involve some hard conversations, uncomfortable moments, and possibly difficult decisions about team structure and make-up. At some point, you’ll find yourself in the “messy middle” – the moment where you’ve identified some of the challenges but only made a little progress, and it feels overwhelming. As you’ve kicked off the process, you have to keep moving forward. The only way through is through.
(Also read: Making Shift Happen: starting your journey to a better team culture)
And it’s precisely this reason that it takes a courageous leader to embark on the journey of a team turnaround. This daunting task does not turn them off – they head straight towards it.
Here are some of what I’ve seen bold leaders do differently:
- They address culture sooner rather than later. Culture transformation is at the top of their list as soon as they start in their new role. They recognise that aligning this with a refreshed focus or strategy is the best time to do it. This means the team can discuss their new goals alongside how they will work together to achieve them.
- They lead with empathy and patience. Because the dysfunction is often more than just “people not getting along”, new leaders listen to understand the tensions and tradeoffs that have led to these problems. Whilst being firm and not tolerating behaviours that are clearly harmful, they wait to gather all information before making their assessments.
- They are bold in their communications. Bold leaders ask questions they may not like the answers to and don’t avoid difficult conversations or decisions. This is not always pleasant, but they know that maintaining the status quo is worse.
- They roll up their sleeves with the team. The leaders who are successful in their turnarounds show their team that they’re all in it together. When we work on programmes like this, the leader is in every workshop, they keep the conversation going with their team between our sessions and adopt facilitation principles into their own practice.
- They balance the macro with the micro. They create a clear image of a positive future state, but understand that the team might not be ready to grasp this straightaway. So they stay committed to making small shifts on the ground to edge them forward, especially when they’re in the “messy middle”.
A plan for turning around a dysfunctional team
As it’s easy to get derailed by other urgent priorities, it helps to create a plan to stay on track.
Understand where you are starting from, list the areas that need improvement, set an overall goal and create a plan to make gradual shifts over time. This might sound a bit full-on for team culture, but this approach will help you stay grounded when you risk being disrupted. When you view this as a distinct project with a roadmap, targets and milestones, it won’t get lost amongst more visible and tangible tasks that your team has to deliver.
We use our five-pillar framework – alignment, cohesion, communication, design, and change – to underpin this process. Although the framework isn’t designed as a step-by-step process, when working with a team that needs to rebuild its culture significantly, we take the first three pillars in order.
Alignment – stepping back to explore the big picture
In a dysfunctional team, people will have been operating in survival mode because they are consumed by the “drama” that surrounds their work. They are taking one day at a time, and it’s difficult to think creatively and strategically.
They are still passionate about their work, but haven’t had the capacity to think beyond “getting things done”. When you provide space to help them reconnect to the purpose of their work and dive deep into the subject matter, you start to reignite that passion.
Team members will often discover they are more aligned on the impact they want to make than they thought, and see how interpersonal issues are getting in the way of that.
Bring the team back to the meaning behind their work and review vision, goals and values, to start restoring motivation and repairing relationships.
Cohesion – understanding different working styles
Building cohesion increases team members’ capacity for uncomfortable and difficult conversations. This will be essential in the “messy middle” of change. However, after a period of dysfunction, their capacity for this will initially be low.
So focus on revealing the individuality of each team member – their working styles, perspectives, expertise they contribute (which may require them to reflect on this for themselves first), so that you can demonstrate the value of differences within your team.
It may also become more apparent why and where some of the interpersonal conflict has occurred, not necessarily because people have been right or wrong, but because they have seen and approached things differently. When harnessed and worked through effectively, these points of conflict can be one of the most unique superpowers of your team.
Working through these differences builds trust. Your team can start being more honest and open with each other without it having the same intensity, and you’ll gradually be able to turn up the dial on difficult conversations.
Communication – supercharging your meetings
To rebuild relationships, your team needs more time together, whether in-person or virtual. This helps create familiarity with each other’s communication patterns, mannerisms, and perspectives, and provides opportunities to talk through issues face-to-face.
This means intentionally crafting moments to work through challenges. The foremost opportunity to do this is in your regular meetings, which serve the purpose of both building connections and progressing work.
Well-designed meetings are containers where a team feels safe to ask questions, give and receive constructive feedback, challenge each other and be vulnerable.
Review the types of meetings your team needs and use facilitation techniques to ensure they are productive and enable everyone to interact.
On the other side – spotting the signals
While the initial stages of transforming a team might feel slow, you’re uncovering the layers gradually and also going at a pace that is workable for the team. You are shifting the underlying structures and behaviours that made the team dysfunctional. You are cultivating more collaboration and resilience for the long-term, rather than papering over the cracks in the short-term.
As a result, these changes can be hard to notice, sometimes imperceptible, and through a challenging transformation process, it’s important to note the small signals you do see. Such as:
- Someone references a conversation from an earlier meeting or workshop about culture to keep each other accountable
- Your team initiates a meeting to problem-solve an ongoing challenge without your involvement
- Someone suggests redesigning a process that isn’t working
- You look back on a big project and realise there were fewer bumps than usual
Although your transformation is never truly done, you’ll eventually start to pick up momentum. Overall, you’ll feel that your team have more confidence in getting better at working together with time and intention. Eventually, you’ll notice that you’re less involved as a leader in dealing with conflict and setbacks, as the team has stepped up to resolve them themselves.
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When you’re at the start of this process, it can feel daunting – you don’t know how long it will take or be able to predict the exact outcome. The dysfunction didn’t develop overnight, and so it won’t disappear overnight.
With a bold leadership approach, a sustained effort and a willingness to work through discomfort, you can transform a burnt-out, disengaged team into one that functions well and is supportive. By addressing interpersonal conflict, openly discussing common or frequent challenges, creating better ways of working, and improving systems and structures, your team are set up to perform at a higher level than before.
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