Opening Dialogue to Strengthen Inter-team Productivity

Now it’s time to discuss how a leader can shift the team environment to allow for the reemergence of skills that will help the team to shine. Did you know that fireflies undergo a process called overwintering? In other words, they survive the harsh conditions of winter and very dry conditions of drought by burrowing underground or finding protection under the bark of a tree. They almost completely cease activity, only to emerge in the spring when the conditions for their survival are more favorable. Amazing, isn’t it, how much this resembles what happens to those with a thinking style that other members of the team might not value as much as they should? If our team’s environment feels like winter or drought, then we, too, may take our different perspectives, unique talents, and creative ideas underground.

It will require the emergence of spring - be it a new leader, a team setting that calls for change, or a critical business crisis - for us to take the risk of exposing ourselves to these harsh conditions. Monarch butterflies may migrate to a new, more favorable climate (or company), but the firefly holds out hope that it can wait it out until it’s truly time for them to shine.

In our last post, we talked about a team that didn’t value those with interpersonal strengths as highly as some others on the team. They needed a new perspective to be able to address the high-conflict situation they were facing, but would they see it before our two-day session ended? Would they take building the effectiveness of the IT team just as seriously as they would solving a technical problem that was standing in the way of their success? Would they realize that interpersonal strife and conflict were just as strong a barrier as any hardware or software issue?

The first step in fixing this problem was to realize that good teams know what is important to the other teams with whom they share interdependencies, and to learn more about the critical drivers for each of the other departments. Each team was asked to identify- within their own department and for each of the other three departments- what they believed to be the top five priorities and why. After they had this discussion and documented the results with their own department, they were then to disperse and form cross-department teams to compare results. The atmosphere was electric when they went into these second groups of teams. You could hear people voicing new appreciation for the other departments’ demands. People were talking animatedly face-to-face, often never having corresponded before today except via e-mail.

The interdepartmental problems they had identified weren’t personality based, but were rather solvable structural issues. However, the group’s lack of presence and appreciation for interpersonal strengths had kept them from facing these issues in an effective way. This often happens at this point in a really productive interteam conflict situation. They have become so used to making the other department out to be the problem for so long that they can achieve very significant breakthroughs just by beginning the dialogue between factions. Once they do so, they become aware of topics upon which they can agree, by really listening to others and realizing they are all working toward the same goal. Once this message was received, it was possible for spring to emerge on this team. In our next post we’ll counterbalance this success story with a story of near disaster.

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