Negativity in groups - issues in team coaching

We'd had  a great day - the group were humming with creativity and the outputs from their discussions covered the walls. I was bringing it to close when a voice piped up from the back. "What's the point?" he asked, "Nobody's going to listen us-  even if they did, what we've come up with is never going to work!". The mood in the room plummeted and several members of the group rounded on the dissenter - why hadn't he raised his concerns earlier in the day, why was he being so negative? Some of the group even made fun of him "Trust you to see the dark side, keep us grounded why don't you!"

Dealing with negativity can be a real challenge as a group facilitator. You want all perspectives to be represented and know that sometimes it is the 'marginal voice' that brings fresh perspective and guards against group think. However the negative voice often isn't interested in solutions so much as proving to others that their pessimistic views are right and realistic - " We're all doomed and I predicted it". Its therefore sometimes a fine line between supporting difference and keeping productive work flowing. All in a days work...

Thinking together

I'm fascinated by how groups of people talk, listen and think together. So often the experience is dispiriting - something about the sum of the parts adding up to less than they should. So it always of interest to observe, and be part of, a group in which the quality of collective thinking outweighs what seems possible individually.

What makes the difference? William Isaacs ** reckons it is often down to the quality of dialogue and some apparently very simple, very teachable behaviours:

• Listen - like a peer
• Suspend - your certainties
• Respect - others views
• Speak - your true voice

Easy .. no not at all . We, by and large, don't 'get' the difference between debate and dialogue. We've all be trained in a 'debating' culture and have few really positive role models of group collaboration and skilled dialogue.  It takes time and patience to learn these apparently simple skills, and get the balance of advocacy and inquiry consistently right. 

Watch next time  you are in a group that's going round in circles - which of these behaviours is being overplayed and which undercooked? Always illuminating.

**Isaacs, W. (1999), Dialogue and the art of thinking together, New York: Doubleday.

People Data – getting the wrong end of the stick.

I've become a bit worried about how we use people measurement tools of late - too often I think we confuse measuring something with changing something. Anyone who has been on a diet knows that the scales don't make us thinner ... even if we'd like to pretend it does. 

This issue was brilliantly illustrated by a Global team I worked with recently who were struggling to find more effective ways of working together.

I'd used a team 'climate' survey with them to provoke conversations about how they worked together. Each regional sub-teams were tasked with setting up a meeting to discuss their particular slice of the data. Most managers grabbed the opportunity and were able to have a very different (and better) conversation with their teams resulting in some really helpful changes. However one manager sent out the data in an email to his team with a directive to improve the lowest scores. Any coincidence that this was the group with the poorest overall scores in the first place?

So how does your organisation use ‘people data’? As a tool to provoke constructive dialogue and change or incite recriminations and yet more measurement?

The curse of perfectionism - issues in coaching

I was recently called in to work with a team who by any objective measure could be described as ‘high-performing’. They were leaders in their industry, consistently produced great results and had the respect of their peers and customers alike. However, far from basking in the much justified praise they received from all quarters, this was one of the most miserable and least satisfied teams I have ever encountered. All they could see was how much they had yet to do, and worst still, they saw each other as rivals and competitors. They were in very real danger of fracturing as a group and destroying their hard won reputation.

None of this made too much sense until it occurred to me that this was a group cursed with perfectionism. They had impossibly high standards for themselves – nothing less than perfection was good enough them and even perfection probably didn’t cut it. Rather than motivating them, their self imposed expectations were leading to paralysis, inaction and in-fighting. What really made the difference for this group was discovering – to their huge surprise-  that they all carried a strong sense of failure and under-achievement, and assumed that their peers were more able/bright/together (fill in the blank) than they were. And strangely enough just by being able to see their assumptions they were able to start the conversation to fix the situation. 

So... where are you expecting of yourself? Progress or perfection?

Coaching the team - the 'shared history'

I was recently coaching a team and used an old favourite of mine - the 'shared history' - as a way of catching everyone up with the 'story' of the team. It involves sitting everyone in the order they joined the team and briefly telling the tale of how they came to join and what was going on at time. What usually emerges is a rich picture of the team's back story which gives a sense of the struggles and successes to date as well as the personalities involved.

The exercise had the reaction I often get - the old hands are amazed at how much water has passed under the bridge  - "I'd forgotten about ....I hadn't realised how much we've done!". The new joins are mightily relieved to get a handle on the context they now find themselves operating in and why things are the ways they are - "It all makes a whole lot more sense now!"

The membership and purposes of a team are always shifting yet we often talk and act as if a 'team' is a static entity. How would it be if we considered the team to be new team every time a new member joined? What would it take to pay more attention to their integration and assimilation into the team story?

Can you coach a team? Stakeholder management

Much of team development practice pays attention to the internal relationships within a group - we have a vast array of tools, models and processes for helping groups face into how their relationships are inhibiting or enhancing their performance (and peace of mind). All good sensible stuff but often not enough.

Just as with an individual client, I think it is important for teams to consider how they are managing and shaping their external relationships - ie the interfaces with different parts of the wider organisation in which they operate. Teams as well as individuals have stakeholders and all too often these are poorly understood and unsystematically managed. Somehow the conversation about stakeholder management either never makes it to the team agenda or gets squeezed at the end the meeting. However failing to meet stakeholder expectations can be severely career limiting. 

So... do we do teams a disservice if we only teach them how to look in and forget to teach them to look out to the wider world? 

Can you coach a team? Being client led.

Some writers are very clear that team coaching cannot exist - you can only coach individuals not teams they say. However in my work I am as often as not asked to work with a group in some capacity that is developmental or performance enhancing and otherwise looks and feels very much like a coaching relationship except for the fact that there is more than two of us in the room!

One of the knacks I believe is to see the collective as the client, 'defocussing' the needs of the team members.The outcomes are therefore about creating and shaping a more coherent collective that can think and act together, rather than improving the performance of any one individual.

However, staying in 'client-led mode' can be a challenge as I find that groups expect you to 'train' (aka entertain) them or in some other way stand in an expert position ... it's what they are used to after all. However when groups catch on to the notion that you are there to facilitate the conversation they need to have, rather than the one you (or their boss) think they need, they can get real value.

Team coaching vs team building

On the whole I would rather be doing team coaching rather than team building. For me, the focus and expectation of team development is all too often on having a bit of fun and doing a bit of work, with the emphasis on the former rather than the latter. A sure sign is when the commissioning senior manager spends more time talking about the fun team building activities he'd like to try out rather than the business objectives of the group.


Quality time together is too precious to waste on building straw towers and so much more can be gained from learning from real work together than on pretend tasks. At its best, coaching a team allows me to work at many different levels - the individual contributor, individual relationships within the group,  the team dynamic, the team task, the team process, and the team's relationships with external stakeholders to name a few.


So can we do a bit more team coaching please and a little less team building?

Team to Team coaching – breaking down ‘us and them’

Strange how the same issue hits you from different directions. I was talking this week with leaders from two very different organisations – one a large corporate and the other a medium sized IT company. Both were bemoaning the ‘us and them’ syndrome going on in their organisation... sales hating operations, marketing hating supply chain etc. You know the sort of thing I’m on about, and you’ll also know how much energy this can consume.

What was interesting was how both these leaders saw this as an issue of personality clash rather than of organisational alignment. “I’ve tried for 10 years to build a relationship with those guys but I’ve just come to the conclusion they are odd” said one.

I’ve learnt that one of the simplest and most effective things I can do to help teams function is to get the ‘us and them’ into a room and get to walk in each others shoes – at least for awhile. People just seem to get a whole new appreciation for each other and remind themselves that the real enemy is outside not in.  I heartily recommend it.

So.. who is ‘us’ and who is ‘them’ in your organisation. How could you find out what it’s like in their world?