Real Team Players Throw Stones

Stone-throwing sparks teams into adaptive action.

 

You know the feeling, you’re in a team meeting, sitting comfortably around the table, the elephant is just behind your right shoulder, wedged up in the corner, and you’re all waiting for one of you to say what everyone is thinking. 

 

The opportunity passes and the meeting is over and what needed to be said is left unsaid and will grow and fester until the next meeting. Some people describe this as ‘working consensus’.

 

How can being a ‘team player’ be detrimental to a team? It depends on the game you are playing.

 

Business teams, unlike sports teams, are playing more than a ‘technical’ game, that is built around generally accepted rules, objectives, roles, responsibilities and process. Although often not appreciated in business, the game is ‘adaptive’ and such games aren’t always won by politeness, consensus, peacekeeping or playing by the rules.

 

Critically, ’adaptive’ games depend upon a diversity of thinking and behaviour to address the changing, and at times, unpredictable nature of the challenges faced by the team.

 

Teams that operate in an ‘adaptive’ environment face significant threats to their way of the world, their roles and their reputation. Without ‘stone-throwing’, characterised by opposing opinions, divergent views and heated debate, teams are at risk of failing to fulfil their true purpose.

 

No doubt ‘stone-throwing’ is confronting. We have our ego, we have our pride and our own sense of fairness. Furthermore, given the nature of the corporate landscape with continuous restructures and uncertainty, it is natural for people at times to react by resisting and protecting and the last thing people want to do is stir trouble by ‘stone-throwing’. But this is exactly what an ‘adaptive’ environment demands.

 

Importantly, ‘stone-throwing’ is a shared responsibility of the team. Accordingly, with the trust built among team members that is fundamental for any success, ‘stone-throwing’ is conducted with respect of the individual and the team objectives. But this doesn’t prevent the likelihood of casualties.

 

An ‘adaptive’ environment requires a deeper level of trust to withstand the potential personal fallout from ‘stone-throwing’, be it personal challenges, questions of fact, divisions in thinking and opinion. Nevertheless, managed effectively and with care, it is these very divisions and differences that drive the team’s effectiveness. 

 

So what can you do to start getting your team to throw stones? Understand the purpose of your team and establish the necessary behavioural expectations for it to function effectively. Does a team really need to exist in an ‘adaptive' environment if it does nothing but agree?

 

Consensus doesn’t mean agreement all the time. Effective consensus is a point of agreement best preceded by a healthy debate of opposing views. Without divergent thought, ‘adaptive’ challenges remain unaddressed, superficially solved and likely to re-emerge at some later time more complex and harder to solve than before.

 

By identifying and utilising our differences of opinions and championing divergent thought, we create teams with a greater propensity to address new challenges. Otherwise, we might as well all go and live in glass houses.

 

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