“In my twenty years as an executive I’ve never been on such a dysfunctional a team,” “Coming to team meetings fills me with dread,” “I’ve been thrown under the bus so often I have tread marks on my back.” These were just some of the comments I heard during my interviews to prepare for a two-day executive team development retreat I was asked to facilitate. I was astounded. After all, these were ten highly intelligent and accomplished professionals – MBAs, JDs, and a CPA. As individuals they appeared friendly and congenial. But when they came together, conflict clouded their ability to function. How did this happen?
I can’t blame you if you greet this post with skepticism. Leadership and poetry seems like an oxymoron, like rain and San Diego. I’m even a little surprised you are still reading. But here are lessons from two senior executives who recently used poetry to align their teams and build healthy cultures.
I’ve always studied teams. The youngest of three boys, as a kid I was mostly a bystander to my family’s tumultuous interactions. While my teenaged brothers and parents sparred in cycles of argument, cooling off and reconciliation, I stayed under the radar, vigilant to any verbal shrapnel that might fly my way. My friends’ families were even more interesting to observe. Some were yellers; some were quiet and civil, yet each seemed more exotic than my own, “normal” family. How, I wondered, could these families be so bizarre and still stay together? More formal education enriched my study of teams, and I’ve worked over the past twenty-five years supporting teams to get better results. But my curiosity has never diminished. Why do some teams flourish while others struggle? A few years ago I came across a body of work that greatly influenced my practice. I recently adapted this system for a senior executive team that was rife with conflict, which led to breakthrough results in their performance. And it was fun…
Silence often makes people uncomfortable. But remarkably, leaders can also use silence to generate breakthroughs in performance. Let me explore: I recently facilitated a two-day strategy retreat with 10 senior leaders of a company that had been reorganized. One objective of the retreat was to check in on the progress of the reorganization, which was designed to encourage more collaboration and decision making lower in the ranks. I had just summarized the findings from interviews I conducted with each team member, as well as with some managers the next level down. My report to the group was not pleasant to hear, but was consistent with what just about everybody had said: The company was not benefiting from the reorganization. Most people reported that cross-functional collaboration had become more stressful, less frequent, and less successful.
You buy a kitchen table from Ikea and haul it home. You spread the contents of the box on the floor. You glance at the instructions and start screwing pieces together. You stop reading the instructions altogether and quickly attach table legs to tabletop. You are done. You gaze tenderly at your work. You sit down and notice the angles are a little off. The table shakes just a bit. It doesn’t matter. You love your table. You assembled it yourself. A table expert drops by. He assesses your handiwork as just so-so. You silently fume and then vigorously defend your work against his insults. He leaves thinking you are nuts for so adoring your wobbly table. This is the Ikea Effect: The tendency to over-value that which we ourselves create. Even if objective standards say otherwise, we prefer our own creation over someone else’s. And as you can imagine, the Ikea effect in organizations leads to all kinds of impacts, some useful, others not. Let Them Bake Cake Michael Norton of the Harvard Business School coined the term after researching peoples’ attachment to things they construct themselves. In his research he described the introduction of instant cake mix in
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