Raising Sensitive Issues in a Team

Lindoerfer

• Publisher: Center for Creative Leadership Press
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN:
  9781604910216
• eBook ISBN:
  9781604917291
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

Have you ever wondered how to deal with a sensitive issue within your team? For example, how do you raise the issue that the women rarely get listened to? How do you bring up your observation that the team members from Marketing always dominate the meetings? This guidebook focuses on ways to determine whether to raise such an issue in a team meeting - and if so, how.

Elements of the Process

The scenario on page 9 captures several core elements of the process we’re exploring. The first element is an awareness of what is transpiring. We use our awareness of our own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors during a meeting of a team to monitor the progression of events. Our reactions in these domains lead us to conclude that things are going well or not so well. Our awareness of the behavior, both verbal and nonverbal, of our teammates and our speculation about the thoughts and feelings these behaviors are tied to are other sources of information we observe and process to evaluate the team’s functioning.

Scenario 1

A team member sitting in a team meeting notices that he is having a hard time getting the opportunity to get his thoughts about the work aired. He recollects that this is more often than not the case in the last few meetings. He begins to pay a bit more attention to which of the team members are doing the most talking and which ones are saying little or nothing.

Over the next half hour of the meeting, he notices that the marketing director (a white male with considerable seniority in the company), an information technology manager (a white male, new to the company but quite senior and previously from a competitor), and the manufacturing director (the team’s nominal leader, a white male who has come up through the ranks over his career) are dominating the conversation. The other five team members are saying little or nothing.

He’s pretty sure that some version of this pattern has been prevalent for the last few team meetings, and he suspects that the three big talkers have joined together in a subgroup of the team to push their shared agenda for the project. They happen to be the only males on the team who are white and the only team members with substantial seniority in their specialties.

He struggles with the judgment about whether this emerging communication pattern is good or bad for the team’s functioning. It makes some sense that these experienced members with considerable credibility are influencing the nature of the team’s work. Yet the relative lack of involvement of himself and the four other team members seems to be blocking the team’s customary operating style and the free-flowing exchange of ideas.

He reaches the judgment that what he’s seeing is a problem at least for him and may be a problem for other members of the team and the team as a whole. He decides to bring the issue up, so he finds an opportunity in the discussion and raises the issue.

The first element is an awareness of what is transpiring.

We also maintain some awareness of how our team is working. Most of our teams have goals established and interim milestones set, and we team members are continually or periodically checking these to see whether the team is making progress. Team maintenance and team learning goals, in addition to the more task-focused goals set by the organization, are particularly useful in this regard. These metrics help us determine whether or not our team is working effectively, both at the moment and over time.

Additionally, conceptual and experience-based frameworks that all of us have accumulated during our working lives provide us with benchmarks against which we measure how our team is working. These frameworks create expectations for how things should go when we work with others in teams.

The point of this is that we have available to us, at any given time in a team’s working life, numerous sources of data we can use to stimulate our awareness of when things are working and when they’re not. (Read and consider the indicators on page 11 to increase your own awareness.) We have to attend to this data, make some sense out of it, and then decide what, if anything, to do about it.

Reading the Signs

Leader thoughts indicating poor teamwork:

• This conversation is going nowhere.

• I’m confused.

• These people are working at cross purposes.

• This isn’t work...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• From Awareness to Intervention
• Elements of the Process
• Raise or Hold
• How to Raise
• Intervention by a Team Leader
• Stimulation … and Terror
• Suggested Readings
• Background
• Key Point Summary