[MUSIC] The more attention given to the teamwork planning process in debriefing, the better the team will be a diagnosing problems when they arise. This intern will enable them to self correct, saving you time and stress. What could go wrong? Nearly every team suffers some kind of setback. I have never experienced a project that had zero problems and if you do, most likely you are not implementing challenging enough ideas. What matters is how you and the team handle the setback. You can see from the chart that unresolved setbacks or problems lead to poor results in one or both team dimensions. When the team views setbacks and problems as learning opportunities, diagnosis them and makes corrections quickly, they can achieve success on their deliverables and also enhance their team citizenship and collaboration skills. This leads to an upward performance spiral, as every challenge improves their skills as well as their belief that the team's work is a valuable use of their time. For this reason, I recommend using the team debrief tools early and often in a team's life. When learning occurs too late, the team may fail on a deliverable. This can lead some team members to lose commitment. Teams that do not resolve their setbacks might deliver high quality work, if a few members carry the team. Your manager or client might be happy with the results, but unfortunately, your best employees may feel frustrated or even burned out. That can also limit the use of teams in the future, as members carry a negative attitude regarding teamwork forward. Negative team performance spirals can spread and obviously when setbacks are not resolved and even the most conscientious workers either will not or cannot carry the team themselves, the team's work quality suffers. And no one learns anything about teamwork except that it stinks. Here is an image from Rosa Beth Moss Kanter's work on performance spirals. Everyone thinks team debriefing takes too much time until they experience a negative performance spiral. Once you have been in one, you never want to be in one again. I once worked on a team in which members were evaluated on individual targets that so differed from each other, as to make paying any attention to our shared goals, nearly impossible. Company leadership believed that teams that compete internally will work harder because each person needs to achieve their own goals. Our raises and promotion opportunities were based on our individual performance appraisals. We had no team ground rules, no team charter, we certainly never completed a team debrief. So many of us were not even aware that we had disparate goals. We might have been OK had we not immediately faced a problem. Sales of one of our key product lines began to fall. Immediately, the company wanted to reduce labor costs so as to maintain margins. Instead of working together to negotiate for the staff are full project needed, each of us and yes, I'm sorry to say including me, went to our boss to negotiate for our own staff. And we did so as quietly as possible so as not to alert our fellow team members for fear they could copy our negotiating tactics. Step one on the downward spiral, secrecy. Before long we were accusing each other of causing the sales downturn, step two, blame and not sharing critical information with some subgroups, only talking outside of the office for fear of being overheard. Step three, avoidance plus one secrecy. Eventually it seemed like nothing we could do would turn around sales. Step four, helplessness. Now this will never happen to you because had you been the team lead, you would have held a launch meeting during which you would have quickly discovered the disparity and individual goals. That knowledge would have led you, I am sure to either change evaluation systems or if you didn't have that power work with senior leadership to change the systems. So that assessments would be based on team goals. And two, you would have had information from the team debrief surveys that would have alerted you to the obvious task and effective conflict, during the team debrief that I know you would have held you and the team would have discussed these and devised an action plan to resolve them. Sadly, neither I nor our leaders nor any other team members on that team knew about any of that. Regardless, no matter how well you manage problems and setbacks will occur and research by a Marble and Kramer shows that even small losses have a negative effect on team productivity. It is critical that team leads and members of self managed teams react quickly to prevent negative performance spirals. The first thing I recommend, is framing any loss as a learning opportunity. In the face of a setback quality meeting with two goals, one resolved the setback obviously and to discover what can we learn from it. The first will require the team to diagnose what happened, brainstorm options to resolve it, choose one and delineate an action plan. Generally this will be the most urgent need and you may not have time to get to the learning stage. That's okay. As long as the team commits to a specific date and time when they will have the learning conversation, you will likely have an employee or two who say that the learning meeting is a waste of time, it's obvious or it's touchy feely, It's not necessary. I strongly encourage you to push forward on the discussion. According to a Marble and Kramer's research, even a very small wind as a positive effect on team productivity. Framing setbacks as learning opportunities reframes them from a loss to a win. Kanter identified the ways a leader can turn around a negative performance spiral. And the earliest stage prevent the spiral entirely by using fact based dialogue. As soon as an error, a threat, a problem or a concern arises, gather all information from everyone and be transparent with it, as Kantor writes, it is hard to play politics when everything is discussed openly when the leader hoards information. As Marble and Kramer's say their employees feel infantilized. When you share information, you highlight the setback as a team set back, not as a personal setback for one team member. As soon as you notice team members blaming each other or treating each other with open dislike or scorn, reiterate your belief that each member brings something of value to the team. This helps build respect. As team members begin to trust the others competencies. Behave respectfully towards each member and take aside members who engage in disrespectful behaviors and coach them privately on team citizenship. Don't lecture them, coach them. We will learn to coach in a separate lesson. The further down the spiral the team has fallen, the harder it is to turn it around. If your team has gotten to the point where members are avoiding each other and working behind each other's backs to protect their own turf, to the detriment of the team's turf, Kanter says, you might have to create sub tasks that require a high degree of reciprocal work. This forces people to collaborate with those who seem to be from a different turf and may get them working well enough together so as to turn around the full team. Lastly, she writes that teams that feel helpless, need a bigger jolt. Talking is not going to solve that problem. Put a challenge in front of the team that they are all required to solve and solve on their own. Whenever possible, I recommend team leads and managers search for ways the team achieves wins, set challenging yet achievable short term goals, celebrate every time the team accomplishes one, create opportunities early and often to highlight wins and convert small losses two wins by focusing on learning. I do not mean in any of these lessons to send the message that you should talk extensively about employees effective behaviors. Often negative behaviors are related to task conflicts that are unresolved rather than personality differences. You are better off dealing with tasks, due dates, resources, workloads than trying to psychoanalyze people. The fact is, most of us can work with just about anybody so long as we don't see them as obstacles. Have you or your organization set up systems that mean that success for one member leads to failure for another member? Well, of course they're not going to get along in that case, focus on systems and processes rather than people's personalities. Set up the conditions that enable individuals and teams to express their full capabilities and motivation. The conditions for success.
