Organizational Health – Leaders and Teams

From the kitchen table of Michael Legut, Ph.D.

In my last blog I wrote about improving organizational health by fitting work activity to the specific working genius of individual team members. In this blog, I will go a bit deeper into what happens when a team demonstrates dysfunctional habits that can impair organizational health.

Key Takeaways

• Leader and team behaviors have a significant impact on how employees understand what it is like to work at your company.
• These behaviors define the company's culture and reflect the organizational health of the company.
• How employees experience behaviors related to trust, conflict, commitment, and accountability influences productivity, morale, turn-over and customer retention.
• Improving your company's organizational health is long-term commitment to a journey that can requires attention to your culture, leader and team behaviors, and the employee experience.

Leader and Team Behaviors and Organizational Health

The cumulative effect of leader and team behaviors have a significant impact on how employees understand what it is like to work at your company. Leader and team behaviors that occur during meetings, in business decision discussions, and at company social events all provide clues to the company culture. Everyday the culture plays out in those work situations. In these interactions, verbal and non-verbal messages are constantly communicated by leaders and teams about how trust, conflict, accountability, commitment and results are viewed.  These interactions also reflect the organizational health of the company.

Lencioni and others have done extensive research on leader and team dysfunctions, and how that impacts organizational health via team performance. Here is a quick summary of how Lencioni identifies the five dysfunction of a team.

 Lack of Trust - Here team members tend to see co-workers as rivals. They may hold back their opinions so that others don’t see their vulnerabilities or gain an advantage. In this situation, team members are trying to compete with each other rather than work together to achieve the group’s goals. Essentially the lack of trust saps the power of the team. It impacts the organizational health because distrust leads to isolation, myopic decisions, and the inability to tap into the team’s full potential. In a “low trust” work environment team members often feel under-valued, and which can have a negative effect on employee morale and productivity.

 Fear of Conflict - When team members avoid discussions that rock the boat, there tends to be a lack of discussion to pursue the best possible outcome. Instead, the leader and team members filter or avoid discussion that create conflict and may reveal vulnerabilities. Raising opposing viewpoints feels like rocking the boat, and so members avoid conflict so that they can be seen as a team player. Unfortunately the fear of conflict can also lead to poor decision-making and the avoidance to problem solving. Obviously some types of personal conflict can be stressful, but conflict that occurs in problem solving discussions is healthy conflict and can have a positive effect on the health of the organization.

 Lack of Commitment - This occurs when team members are not “all in” once a decision is made. Whether it is because they have doubts that may rock the boat or that speaking up about those doubts may reveal vulnerabilities. In either case, the team members may not fully commit to a decision because they didn’t provide input on the decision. The consequence is a lack of focus on achieving the desired outcome.

Lack of Accountability - In this situation, team members avoid calling out others when they are not doing the work needed to achieve the goal.  Calling others out on their lack of accountability could be viewed as creating conflict. In addition, team members may feel that discussing a lack of accountability is the leader’s job. When team members or leaders avoid discussions of accountability, the health of the organization is at risk because important work does not get done and that can increase stress, decrease morale, and hinder productivity in the company.

Inattention to Results - When team members focus on their individual results there is less focus on team results, and less emphasis on holding others accountable to the team and company goals. One problem is that in most organizations leaders tend to focus more on coaching, rewarding and managing individual performance. If you looked at the amount of time leaders spend conducting one-on-one meeting with employees versus engaging in team performance meetings, you would likely see more emphasis on individual performance. Unfortunately, this leader behavior may contribute to dysfunctional behaviors such as a lack of commitment and accountability to team goals.

When we consider the consequences of a dysfunctional team, it is likely that there are other organizational health issues in the company. Team resources are wasted, productivity does not produce expected results, morale is low, turn-over increases and customers leave.

Tips to Improve Organizational Health via Leaders and Teams

As I mentioned in my previous blog, the health of an organization is like a thermometer. Low employee morale, employee burn out, declining productivity, disengagement, poor retention, autocratic leadership styles and employee disengagement, are symptoms that suggest all is not well in a company. In leader and team interactions, the symptoms of an unhealthy organization can be observed via the lack of trust, avoidance of conflict, low commitment, poor accountability and the lack of attention to results.

So how do you repair a team that is experiencing one or more of those five team dysfunctions. Some may say you need to change out the unhealthy team members. Unfortunately, that option can mean letting go of some key talent. This is not always the best solution. The dysfunctional symptoms may reappear because that is the way the team has always operated. The reality is that terminating or moving talented employees out of a team may not change the team’s past behaviors and patterns of interaction.

A potentially better and more effective solution can be to change the way the leader and team members interact as a unit.  If we use Lencioni’s five team dysfunctions as a guide, there may be some better options for teams to pursue to improve their organizational health issues. Here are a few thought-starters for those options.

1)    If a lack of trust is the team’s issue, then it is likely that the other dysfunctions are in play as well. Activities that can help build team trust are ones that promote more sharing of their personal selves. Things like talking about personal history including both good and bad life experiences (i.e. hobbies, family life, career journey) can help create a deeper and more trusting connection between team members. The goal here is to allow discussion where the leader and team members can feel safe with each other and appreciate the strength and vulnerability of each member. To build trust, activity like this should be done with some regular frequency, and even done on a monthly basis as part of a check-in for the whole team.

2)    Avoidance of conflict can be another inhibitor to team performance. Lencioni suggests that the first step here is to discuss how team conflict can be a productive way to solve difficult business problems. If the team has avoided conflict in the past, then it’s important for the leader to be a “miner of conflict”. That is, the leader should encourage working though the conflict until there is some level of resolution. This can be s bit tricky, but the key here is for the leader verbalize that this type of discussion is important because it allows to team to surface problems may impact the team’s success. Also it is important for the leader not allow members to shut down. Part of “mining the conflict” is to encourage those who may be a somewhat uncomfortable to verbalize what they are thinking.

3)    If there is a sense of low commitment to the team’s goals, it may be because team members have not verbalized their concerns or disagreement. This may be due to a lack of trust, avoidance of conflict or because members did not feel they had an opportunity to express their opinion. An activity to address this issue, is to spend time at the end of a meeting, reviewing what the team has agree to, and confirm the specific outcomes as well as the deadlines for those outcomes. Another way to increase the team’s comfort with commitment is to discuss a contingency option that can be implemented if the worst-case situation occurs with the original commitment.

4)    When there is a lack of accountability within a team, members often think that it’s the leader’s job to address it. The lack accountability may be due to low commitment, or it may be related to members not wanting to call out the low performance of co-workers that they’ve work with for many years. Whatever the reason, some remedies for this would be to publish the team goals, provide performance feedback to members about how they are contributing to the goal, and to shift the emphasis of the monetary reward toward the team goals and less on individual goals. While the leader must assume final decision on member accountability, it is important to allow members to provide feedback to each other regarding co-worker’s accountability for their assignments.

5)    Finally, low commitment and lack of accountability to team goals often occurs when team members are more focused on individual results. Some options here are to shift rewards toward team results and to create visibility about progress, or lack of progress toward the team results. To address the inattention to team results, the leader must shape their messaging so that team members see the team’s results as the top priority.

What’s Next?

This blog may seem a bit lengthy, but just like improving your health, improving organizational health takes time and requires more in-depth investment. The thought-starters I’ve provided are meant to inspire leaders and team members to understand that the work they do is more than the assignments and goals they are working on. It not just about what you do, it is also about how you do it. Hopefully these ideas will help you think about the organizational health of your company and how you might work to improve it. It is a long-term commitment to a journey that can change culture and employee experience in your company.

As always my goal is to help leaders understand how to improve their leadership skills, build effective work teams and contribute to their organization’s health. I can be reached at www.leaderimage.com or on my LinkedIn page for additional consultations.