Brainware Vault

The draw to remain in the dark is powerful when the bright light of feedback feels like a threat to a leader’s self-image or the legitimacy of their being in their role. Given the significant benefits of feedback, the challenge for organizations is knowing how to encourage team leaders to develop the habit of getting feedback. Answering that requires digging a little deeper into the root cause of why some team leaders feel threatened by feedback and others don’t.

If you’ve ever played the game of golf you quickly realized that there are countless ways to hit the ball wrong, and far fewer ways to achieve a consistently good result. Coaching conversations are much the same. There are many ways to create conversations that produce results that range from awkward to disastrous, while finding a consistently effective approach can be a challenge. The common question asked by many golfers and team leaders is: how do I improve my game?

Feedback: The Breakfast of Champions | While big data and predictive analytics are gaining popularity, in most organizations the employee survey remains HR's favorite feedback tool. People from organizations that consistently sit at the top of the “most recommended places to work” – Google, Amazon, IDEO, Deloitte, and Facebook – have a very different narrative. For these organizations, feedback plays a leading role in developing and sustaining the cultures, norms, and values that drive team performance and employee well-being.

For team leaders, adopting a team development model, and developing a point of view on team leadership excellence, is the key to avoiding the creation of reality distortions or blaming external conditions that lead to accepting mediocrity. With a robust team development model and checklist, a leader has the external benchmarks for objectively comparing his or her team’s performance across the important fundamentals that make up the foundation of a highly-effective team.

There is an opportunity for organizations to turn team coaching at all levels into a more structured developmental process that inspires improvement and enhances individual and team effectiveness. This starts with helping team leaders develop a coaching strategy that is simple enough for overloaded managers to implement, yet powerful enough to make a real difference to their team’s performance and well-being. The challenge is ensuring that the good intentions associated with internal team coaching don’t result in the negative relationship experiences often reported by team members.

In his March 2018 HBR article, "To Reduce Burnout on Your Team, Give People a Sense of Control", the author, Andrew Wittman, observes that team dynamics play a key role in workplace stress. The rush to an easy solution often results in an appealing, but overly simplistic prescription – a common ailment in a business world looking for quick fixes.

Complex global business environments, and the need for agility in both decision making and execution, is driving organizations towards ever greater collaboration and teamwork as the means of resolving challenges and creating competitive advantage. Most leaders agree that one key component in ensuring effective team functioning is the content and quality of communications to, and among, team members.

Many teams struggle with a fundamental conundrum: how do you get disciplined execution along with innovative, creative solutions? It often seems that any efforts to improve one-dimension causes losses on the other one. Disciplined execution stymies innovation; by its very nature, innovation and creativity are undisciplined. Agile development practices provide a way for cross-disciplinary teams to deliver new products incrementally and iteratively.

Many factors influence performance and well-being at work, including: professional and personal goals, job design and flexibility, skills and competencies, and perceptions of the fairness and trust across key relationships. For many organisations and teams, the simultaneous pursuit of performance and well-being can feel like chasing conflicting goals. And research supports this conclusion, showing that greater well-being affects individual and team performance through employee attitudes, motivation, and behavior. The challenge for organizational and team leaders is knowing how to maximize both well-being and performance.

For organizations in search of talent, people born between 1977 and 1994 matter because a) there are a lot of them; and b) by 2020, their generation will make up 50% of the global workforce. This generation’s career aspirations, attitudes about work, and comfort with technology will define the work culture of the 21st century.