CHAPTER 19

Turn Around Your Team’s Performance in One Hour

Each individual on a team has a different idea about how team members should behave toward each other. Not only that, but unproductive habits emerge that undermine the success of the team. Unproductive behaviors are a precursor to poor business results. When you correct the behaviors, the team’s business performance improves.

When we work with a client during a two-day team off-site, within the first day we can see these unproductive behaviors plain as day. Frankly, so can the team members. They just haven’t openly discussed them as a group.

So we bring up the topic of team norms. Now, let’s be clear: team norms are not rules that must be followed. Instead, they are behaviors that the team aims to adhere to, but without success, and this hinders productivity. We want the team to spotlight the negative impact of these behaviors so they are motivated and aligned to behave differently.

When we open the team-norm discussion, the most common bad behavior tossed out is lack of respect. This is a tricky one, because “respect” does not have a universal definition. As a team norm, there is already an issue about lack of clarity! Everyone defines respect differently.

Don’t believe us? We’ll use ourselves as an example because our clients aren’t the only ones who confuse this word.

DIFFERENT DEFINITIONS OF RESPECT

We like positive or negative feedback in real time during team meetings. Yep, right in front of the team, because that shows respect for our clients. We don’t want to waste your time, so we course correct in mid-stream if need be. And if we ask you to do it, we better also be willing to be vulnerable and real.

In our early working relationship, we weren’t clear on our definition of respect. One afternoon, I, Susan, gave CrisMarie some feedback in front of a client’s team.

“I notice you are repeating the same point,” I told CrisMarie. “I think you’re stalling, and we should move on.”

Well, if looks could kill, I wouldn’t be here to tell you about it. She was so flipping mad at me. When we debriefed on a break, I got an earful about how disrespectfully I had treated her.

“You made me look like a fool in front of the entire team!” she said. Hmm, that’s not what I thought, but it was clearly what she thought.

Later, on the flight home, CrisMarie pulled out her notes. I thought she was going to type up the off-site team notes. But no, instead, she turned to me and said, “I have some feedback for you from the off-site. Are you open to hearing it?”

Of course I said yes. When she was on her third item, I started to squirm. When she hit her fifth point and was still not done, I got pissed.

“Really? You are telling me this now?” I said. “I have no time to recover.

Plus, if you thought this then, other people in the room were probably thinking the same thing! You let me hang out to dry without having the respect to tell me in real time so I could do something about it? I didn’t even get to hear how it was for others in the room!”

We both had a visceral sense of our different definitions of respect. Clearly, the definition is not universal. We each have our own sense of it. And if my definition of respect is right, it makes hers wrong. Somehow, that’s disrespectful in itself.

When we help teams define their team norms, we ask them to clarify the choice of respect by defining the word. The two most common responses are:

• To be polite
• To be nice

It may feel counterintuitive, but being polite and nice is far from being respectful. In fact, that behavior is a team effectiveness killer! Why?

When teammates are polite, they’re usually holding back. That doesn’t help the team, and it will quickly undermine the team’s performance and the leader’s effectiveness. When people make a conscious effort to be nice, they typically leave out what they really think. Instead they water down their point of view. The team misses out on valuable input and is less able to benefit from everyone’s smarts.

Sometimes the truth does sting. But wouldn’t you prefer honest feedback from a teammate than after the fact from a client, customer, a performance reviewer, or worse, an executive coach brought in from outside to tell you that your leadership style is problematic? (Yes, too often we have been paid to deliver the message a nice and polite team or boss would not!)

Don’t get us wrong, we are not suggesting rude and mean become the alternative. Our suggestion is that teams feel free to aim for real and messy, with a commitment to clean up the mess. Don’t let your team fall prey to nice and polite. Step in, say what’s true, and clean it up if you mess it up! That is the fastest way to build team trust and have healthy conflict.

Say what’s true and be curious about the impact—how’s that for a great definition of respect?

Today, when CrisMarie and I lead team off-sites or leadership events, we employ a hybrid definition around feedback that we both feel comfortable using. We give real-time feedback to each other while we work with you, the client. And when it feels too uncomfortable or will take too long to discuss, we have the conversation on a break or at the end of the day. For me, this is vastly better than waiting for the plane ride home!

What are your team’s norms?

DEVELOPING AND LIVING YOUR TEAM NORMS

To increase your team’s performance, identify what behaviors help the team and what behaviors hinder the team. People on your team may have very different points of view on what works for the team and what doesn’t. This makes for rich discussion. When CrisMarie and I talked about this, we learned a lot about each other’s styles and preferences, and how we could work together more effectively.

Here are five steps to develop powerful team norms, increase team performance velocity, and live happily with your team:

1. Brainstorm: What’s working? What’s not? Brainstorming helps identify unproductive team behaviors. Because you want everyone—both introverts and extroverts—to participate, give people a few minutes to collect their thoughts and write on their own paper what they think is working on the team and what isn’t.
2. Discuss the impact. Have a conversation about the items on the What’s Not Working list. Prompt the discussion with questions like, “How does this impact the team?” Or, “Why is this a problem?”

   This impact discussion is an important step, because people are unconscious of how their unproductive behavior affects their peers. This discussion inevitably reveals root causes of problem behaviors, and that helps determine creative solutions.

3. Pick the top three. There may be five or ten important items to work on with your team. However, it’s cumbersome to try to improve more than three areas. When you focus on everything, nothing improves.
4. Turn it around. In this step you will identify the desired positive behavior. Take a simple one like people are late to meetings. The opposite and team norm might be: Show up on time. Because you have had the impact discussion, this norm carries more substance.

   Avoid vague concepts such as be respectful. As we saw earlier, people have different definitions for respect. If vague concepts come up, be sure to include specific definitions in the discussion. For example, for one team be respectful might mean don’t interrupt; for another it might mean be direct and don’t speak behind other people’s backs.

5. Hold the team accountable. Here’s where the rubber meets the road. Without this step, the impact of the previous four steps dwindles away. It is the leader’s job to model accountability. The leader must be aware of, and actively and publicly address, when someone behaves counter to the top three norms.

   Holding someone accountable doesn’t mean punishing someone. Instead, it means stating the data and using the Check It Out! tool with curiosity. For example, “Tom, I notice you’re walking in ten minutes late to our meeting, and we have a team norm to show up on time. I’m curious what happened?”

   Tom probably has a good reason for being late. If not, he will likely change his behavior. In any case, the rest of the team will appreciate that you, the leader, hold everyone to the same high standards.

   Once you, the leader, have modeled holding people accountable you want to cultivate what we all hated in high school: peer pressure or peer accountability. You want to set the expectation that team members hold each other accountable for the team norms as well. This is a natural development for the team when we work with them over time.

We’ll go into team norms in more detail in Chapter 27, “Make Your Meetings Matter”, where we talk about norms in relation to meetings. Watch your team performance increase as you have the courage to hold your team to higher standards—three norms at a time!

Do you really listen when people talk? Let’s see how the power of listening can increase your team’s IQ.