When Bad Teams Happen to Good People

Your Complete Repair Guide for Successful Teamwork

Valerie Patrick

• Publisher: Career Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781632651822
• eBook ISBN: 9781632657534
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

The teamwork troubleshooter we all need! Turn your team into a cohesive unit.
“This timely book provides readers with a new way of thinking about work and survival strategies for those who find themselves on bad teams. Readers who are looking for a playbook that can help them to understand and develop soft skills needed for teamwork will be eager to have a copy nearby.”—Booklist

Why do some team members not get along? What is the best way to get new teams and ad-hoc teams to maximize their performance in the least amount of time? How can meetings be designed to achieve useful outcomes?

Teams are the source of problem-solving and innovation that today’s organizations need to survive and thrive in an increasingly complex and challenging marketplace.

Teamwork is hard because there is no magic formula or step-by-step procedure to ensure results. Think of a programmer asked to develop new features for a cell phone: they write new code, test the code, troubleshoot problems encountered, revise the code, and repeat the testing process until the new features work without problems. Similarly, a team leader asked to deliver specified outcomes develops a plan, runs team meetings, troubleshoots problems encountered, revises the plan, and repeats until the team outcomes are achieved. The difference is that a programmer has tools to help streamline troubleshooting, while team leaders do not—until now.

Valerie Patrick applies a troubleshooting mindset that includes:

• Proven tactics for team members and leaders to address leadership problems
• Guidelines for recruiting and changing teams for optimum performance
• Techniques to identify and address aspects of team climate that are limiting the productivity of one or more team members
• Examples of effective ways to operate teams and of meeting designs that produce transformative outcomes

CHAPTER 1

Bad Team? Heal Thyself First

If you find yourself on a bad team, and you are not at your intellectual and emotional best, then chances are you will become part of the problem rather than part of the solution. I remember having a particularly challenging morning trying to entice my toddler son to get dressed and eat some breakfast so that I could take him to daycare and get to my staff meeting on time. I don't know whether he sensed my anxiety, but he was moving at what felt to me like a glacial pace. Of course, when we arrived at the daycare center, he was clingy and did not want me to leave him that morning—thank goodness for the caregiver who distracted him so I could duck out. I was late to the staff meeting, and the meeting leader made some snarky comment like, “Good of you to join us this morning.” I wanted to say, “If you had to clothe, feed, and drag a reluctant two-year-old to daycare, then you would have been late to this early staff meeting too!” But that response would have made an already tense moment more tense. I couldn't think of anything positive to say, so thankfully I didn't say anything. In retrospect, I could have diffused the tense situation by saying something like, “If my two-year-old had a say in the matter, then I would not be here at all, but between you and me, I can't begin to tell you how excited I am to be in a room full of adults!”

You want to be at your intellectual and emotional best when you are part of a bad team experience so you can be part of the solution. Neuroscientists are uncovering the kinds of things that can be done to boost brain performance across different types of intelligences such as visual, verbal, logical, kinesthetic, musical, intrapersonal, interpersonal, and naturalistic.¹ This chapter summarizes key research findings on how to improve brain performance so that a good person can survive and even thrive in a bad team. It turns out that a healthy brain is the reward for practices that promote overall well-being. High brain performance helps you think in the moment in ways that are helpful to a bad team situation.

Research suggests that engaging in effective interactions may be more challenging than we realize. For example, a measure of social prowess is social intelligence, a concept that was first introduced in 1920 as a way to predict how well we can interact with other people.² But the idea of social intelligence has proven elusive enough that after one hundred years of ongoing research there is still no standard way to measure it.³ In fact, archeologists have correlated the tripling in brain size for humans from 3.5 million years ago to today with changes in social structures that increased the number of daily interactions.⁴ Interacting with other people is challenging enough that we had to evolve a three-fold bigger brain!

As you might surmise from my daycare story, this point in my career was hectic. I was assigned to be a member of a presentation team to impress potential buyers on the strengths of our business, which was up for sale. Then my all-time favorite boss was replaced by an older man who had been appointed to lead the research organization from the new company's European headquarters. Just when I had succeeded in building a good relationship with this new boss, he got promoted to a fantastic new opportunity in Asia. After only four months with the second man from the company's European headquarters appointed to lead the research organization, I already sensed in my gut that he did not have adequate leadership skills. In fact, I was starting to question my decision to stay in the workforce with an adorable toddler at home.

One Friday afternoon, the leader I had doubts about called me into his office. I took a seat in front of his desk, and he got up to close his office door behind me. Before sitting back down, he got a very serious look on his face and said, “We need to talk. . . . You are spending far more money on books than anyone else in this research organization.” What? Books? Our research organization was at risk of being dissolved because of a redundant organization at the new company's headquarters, and this numbskull was tracking book expenses! God forbid I be a learner to improve the performance of our research organization! I focused hard not to roll my eyes and not look incredulous as I listened to the boss's book rant. When he finished his rant, I forced a smile, thanked him for the input, and told him that I would correct the situation immediately. We shook hands, and I not only got out of his office as quickly as I could but also headed straight for my car and drove home early that Friday. The next day I felt pain in my right arm and told my husband that I thought I was having a heart attack. He called an ambulance, and I later learned that I had suffered a panic attack. A panic attack feels like a heart attack except that it dissipates as quickly as the onset once a medical professional confirms it is not a heart attack.

At that point in my career, I did not have the overall well-being needed to address the frustrations I had felt interacting with a boss who I believed had misplaced priorities. I could have offered great advice to the new boss based on the success of his predecessor to have helped him perform better. If I had channeled my frustration into the positive behavior of helping the new boss rather than the negative behavior of getting angry, then I could have improved my relationship with this boss. Instead, I internalized the frustrations of interacting with him, and my physical health suffered as a result. Thankfully, I left the research organization before it ended up being dismantled and its incompetent leader returned to a lower position in Europe.

Looking back, I remember a graduate student who was ahead of me at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and was married with three children. Can you imagine having a family and meeting the intellectual demands of pursuing a chemical engineering PhD degree at Caltech? Yet this student not only met the challenge but did so with flying colors. He routinely greeted me with a smile and reveled interacting with other graduate students. He also made time for daily exercise, practiced spiritual traditions with his family, and brought in a healthy lunch from home every day. I realize in retrospect that he knew something that I had not yet learned: you need overall well-being to be well with other people.

Several years later, a wise female pastor told me when I became a mother to a newborn son that I needed to take care of myself before I could take care of others. In talking to others, I found out that it's not that uncommon for first-time moms to become so focused on taking care of their newborn that they neglect to take care of themselves. The pastor could see how run-down I had become and that I needed some “me” time away from caring for the newborn to take care of my own needs. The pastor also reminded me that my needs weren't just physical like grooming, eating, exercising, and sleeping. There are also needs to be in the company of other adults and to do things to bring joy and inner peace. At the time, I was on family leave from my corporate job and was feeling guilty about looking forward to going back to work. However, by taking care of my well-being needs, I was able to enjoy both my work life and my home life.

Since my son was born, I have become a well-being nerd. I have been reading both popular science books and research articles about well-being for more than thirty years to support my leadership aspirations. Neuroscientists have found that different dimensions of well-being support brain functioning. In addition, they have found that social thinking activates many of the networks in our brain. Thus, building a healthier and better functioning brain improves social thinking and enables the development of social skills. For example, social prowess takes social well-being, cognitive well-being, and the ability to discern and follow social rules in the moment whether you are under any sort of stress. Furthermore, being able to discern and follow social rules under duress takes emotional, physical, and intangible well-being. These dimensions of well-being are needed to be at your intellectual and emotional best so you can be part of the solution when in a bad team.

You can remember the five dimensions of well-being by using the acronym SPICE: social, physical, intangible, cognitive, and emotional. The SPICE assessment in the next section will help you get a baseline of your current capacity to handle a bad team based on the five well-being dimensions.

The remainder of this chapter following the SPICE assessment provides evidence-based guidance on improving well-being in each of the five dimensions. I will share what the experts have to say and my own approach for each dimension as food for thought. Well-being, like sustainability, is a vector in which direction is more important than destination. The reason is that well-being is understood within the context of an individual's situation and life experiences just as sustainability is understood within the context of an organization's operations and customers. We can agree on ways to improve well-being or sustainability, but what well-being or sustainability looks like as a destination depends on several factors. Well-being for an individual depends on factors like age, genetic make-up, disease, personality, and resources. Sustainability for an organization depends on factors like the upstream supply chain, downstream supply chain, financial situation, political situation, and impact on social justice. Not only is direction more important than destination for well-being and sustainability, but thinking in systems is also an important factor. Well-being applies to the system of the human body while sustainability applies to the system of planet Earth. When you change an aspect of a system, that system will achieve a new state of balance that you want to be in a desirable direction. Balance is a guiding principle for the survival of all living things,⁵ and neglecting this principle in improving well-being can lead to unhealthy outcomes. In other words, too much of a good thing can be bad for your well-being.

SO...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• FOREWORD
• INTRODUCTION: Why Do Bad Teams Happen to Good People?
• CHAPTER 1: Bad Team? Heal Thyself First
• CHAPTER 2: Self-Awareness for the Will to Endure Bad Teams
• CHAPTER 3: Troubleshooting Team Leadership
• CHAPTER 4: Troubleshooting Team Composition
• CHAPTER 5: Troubleshooting Team Climate
• CHAPTER 6: Troubleshooting Team Operation
• CHAPTER 7: Troubleshooting Meeting Design
• ENDNOTES
• INDEX
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR