Archive for December, 2010

That’s my new line, and I start every team building class with it.

People come to a team building class thinking that somehow we will talk about different things from what they learned in their last leadership development class.  But it’s really all the same stuff.  An effective team member needs to develop self-awareness, understand the stages of team development and the roles people play, know how to align everyone on mission, vision and values, be able to leverage the strengths of the team and manage around the weaknesses, and know how to communicate effectively and manage conflict.  All the same skills a leader needs to develop, albeit perhaps not at the same level.

Sometimes in a team building class (which I distinguish here from a team building session–in a class, you have individuals who are not part of the same team, and who expect to learn team building skills as opposed to actually engaging in team building activities with their teammates) people ask me whether we will be focusing on how to be an effective team leader or how to be an effective teammate.  I ask them, what’s the difference?  If every teammate had the same skills that the team leader had, presto, you would have a high performing self directed team.

And does it matter that your team doesn’t meet the strict definition of a team?  So they’re not truly task interdependent; does that mean they don’t need to align around mission, vision and values, or that they can skip the work to develop their collaboration and conflict resolution approaches?  Of course not.

So it’s all the same stuff that everyone in the workplace needs to learn, in the end.  Sometimes I think we make too many distinctions, distinctions that are not ultimately useful to us.

There is one thing people like to debate with me in a class, and that’s whether people have bad intentions.

It goes like this: I’ll explain the fundamental attribution error to everyone at some point along the way.  It usually doesn’t matter what kind of class I’m teaching or meeting I’m leading — team building, diversity, communication skills, customer service — it will inevitably come up.  The fundamental attribution error is the theory that says we tend to attribute the cause of our own actions to circumstances, but the actions of others to their intentions.   So if I cut you off on the highway, I did it because I had a blind spot and I was getting squeezed by the truck next to me, but if you cut me off you did it because you are a bad person who wanted to make me mad.

I’ll generally ask folks at this point, do you really think any of your teammates get up in the morning and say to themselves, “I think I’ll go into work today and do as many annoying and self-serving things as I can to upset my teammates.”?  The answer to this question seems so obvious to me, but to my surprise, someone usually says yes.

In a team building workshop yesterday, someone told me he had a boss who often said, “It’s my way or the highway and I don’t care if I’m right or wrong, you’re still going to do it my way.”  The participant held this up as evidence that yes, people really do have bad intentions sometimes.   I suggested to him that the boss’s intentions still were not bad, despite his poor choice of words; he probably felt what he was doing was in everyone’s best interests because he was an experienced manager.  And he probably came from a generation where hierarchy and authority meant more than it does now.

But the participant said no, he was young, and he definitely had bad intentions.  He just wanted power and he didn’t care about the negative impact on others.

So I tried my next tactic, which is usually to point out that if we can see people as motivated by circumstances rather than intentions, it gives us more power to change the situation.  Now we can ask ourselves, what might I be doing or not doing to cause the situation and how can I change it by changing my behavior?  I suggested that perhaps the participant had challenged his boss in ways that made him feel threatened, and if he affirmed the boss’s sense of power he might find the boss would chill out a little.

But the participant said no, he hadn’t done anything wrong.  Only the boss had done something wrong.

I gave up.  It’s easy to give people advice about the fundamental attribution error.  It’s a lot harder to follow it, as I well know myself.  How many times have I caught myself attributing bad motives to someone else?  Too many to count.  We need to practice, over and over, the act of giving someone the benefit of the doubt, of allowing them to have good motives and tough circumstances.  I put it on my New Year’s resolution list every year.