How to spot your team delusion, and what to do about it…
Sometimes I have to think quite carefully and diplomatically about how I give feedback, but I’ve also found some people just prefer me to be blunt.
Like the client who spoke to me last week about some of the challenges he’s having with his team “not stepping up and constantly bringing me problems about each other.”
He prefers his feedback straight, so I gave it straight: “You don’t have a team. You have a team delusion.”
To paraphrase the immortal words of Brian Clough, we sat down and talked about it for twenty minutes, then decided I was right.
At the end of the conversation, he reflected that it was probably the most useful thing anyone had said to him in years because, while it may have been clumsy and brutal and deliberately provocative, it was true.
They were his words, by the way. Apparently “straight talking” works both ways. And yes, we are still working together.
But I knew it was true because I’d sat in his team meetings. They mostly comprised updates from each of his direct reports, perhaps with some questions, challenges and suggestions going the other way.
That might sound familiar.
But it isn’t a team meeting. It’s a series of bilateral conversations in front of an audience, most of whom are quietly checking emails while listening with half an ear as they wait for their turn to go.
They’re not team meetings because it isn’t a team. It’s a bunch of direct reports who happen to share the same boss. This is the team delusion.
A fundamental property of a team, you could say a founding principle, is that they have a shared purpose – a common goal. That’s the reason you form a team, because there’s something needs doing that none of them can do alone.
Which is why, when a leader breaks a problem down into a bunch of things that people can do alone, you no longer have a team. You just have a leader with the weight of the world on their shoulders.
My client had assumed that his team’s common goal was to grow the organisation. But as he reflected, he came to realise that the only person who felt genuine ownership of that goal, was him.
For everyone else it was “important” in a two-steps-removed kind of way. But their own goals, the things they actually cared about, were simply the things they could directly control. Running their teams and departments; hitting their individual targets; keeping the boss and the board on side.
This is one of those hangovers from our industrial heritage that we rarely notice until it’s pointed out. It’s the legacy of individual accountability over collective ownership.
They were coming to him with all the inter-departmental tensions, because he was the one divvying up the targets and accountabilities into separate little boxes that should theoretically add up to the whole.
And they weren’t stepping up because there was no space for them to step into, nor was there any real need, from their point of view, to step anywhere.
Why would they? That’s clearly his job.
The thing is, at some point in our careers, we have all been in these meetings. And my client is far from alone – I’d say most leaders have a big slice of team delusion going on in their organisations right now.
And it’s remarkably easy to address.
We have a challenge. I don’t think I can solve it myself. In fact, I know I can’t, and I don’t think any of us can individually. I’m going to share it now, and I’d like us to all take off our departmental hats and just think together as a team about how we could solve it.
That’s it. That’s all you need do. That, and shut up, and remember how it feels when the team actually starts to do it, right there in front of you.
That’s all my client did and it’s started something of a leadership transformation.
Not everyone will adapt, some will struggle, and that’s OK. Because now, when you ask the question “why aren’t they stepping up”, you’ll find it’s a lot easier to answer.
The biggest single feature on almost any organogram is the white space between the boxes. Which is why that’s also where the biggest opportunities can be found.
So, where might you have team delusion, and how can you help those people to step up and out of their boxes?