How to get teams to gel quickly — harsh lessons from holidays with loose connections that hold the answer
“There are 8 of us all nominally at the same level and we’re all senior but it is a total car crash. Nobody trusts each other and it’s led to so much sucking up to the boss, backstabbing, re-work and absolutely no decisions being made.”
This is what a friend told me when I caught up with her for a long overdue lunch recently about her newish role in a prolific UK company.
“As an expert in people dynamics, do you have any advice on how to navigate it?” she asked.
I thought for a minute and then replied: “Let me tell you about a couple of holidays I’ve been on that might hold the answer to your problem.”
The reason my mind thought of this was that I was not long back from an excellent holiday with 2 loose connections which had gone well as I had applied a technique I had learned the hard way 20 years ago and perfected 10 years earlier.
At the core, the technique was all about getting a team to build trust, and psychological safety and push through the Tuckman model of Forming-Storming-Norming-Performing as quickly as possible.
Funnily enough, this was exactly the topic I had spoken about at 2 different organizations that week, so clearly very topical.
Let’s talk about holiday 1 — not a great experience
Many years ago I joined 2 loose connections for a 4-week trip travelling around Southeast Asia. All three of us knew each other a minimal amount but not very well, but who lets that stop a holiday?
A few days in, it became clear that things weren’t going well. Everyone was being too polite which may sound great but no decisions were being made.
On the first morning as we sat around breakfast trying to plan our trip everyone said they didn’t mind what we did, they didn’t mind what we ate, they didn’t mind where we stayed, they didn’t mind the route we would take and so on [this is a common example of the Forming phase of Tuckman’s model where everyone is on best behavior.
Nobody was willing to stick their neck out and say what they really thought and this was causing us problems. Decision-making was slow, we ended up doing very average things to try and keep everyone happy and generally, people were unhappy but not saying anything.
About 6 days in the dam burst and people began complaining behind each other’s backs or making snide comments but still decisions were not being made and progress was not smooth.
On day 11 there was our first open argument between the two of us and this escalated over the next 3 days, effectively ruling out 3 days of our trip [this is an example of the Storming phase where teams erupt and share their true feelings] before rifts began to be healed.
At that point we had some honest conversations which led us to make some agreements on how we would make decisions going forward and how each of us liked to travel — effectively we were agreeing on Ways of Working that would smooth the way forward for the rest of the trip [this is the Norming phase].
Unfortunately, this effectively meant we had lost 50% of our holiday to poor team dynamics and I vowed to learn from this mistake — as we all know holidays are precious commodities and nobody wants to lose even a day of them if possible.
Holiday 2 — introducing the benevolent dictator
10 years later I found myself in a similar situation to the travels from before. This time I was traveling through Latin America for 4 weeks with 3 friends; I say friends but before the trip, I only knew one of the three.
Conscious of the challenges from the SouthEast Asia trip (and a lot more mature), I grabbed the bull by the horns on the first day of the trip.
“For the first week whilst we get to know each other, we will play the Benevolent Dictator game,” I explained to the others.
“If you haven’t heard of it before, it’s where one person is solely in charge for the day; they get to pick where we go, what we do, what restaurant we eat at, what hotel we stay at, etc. In return everyone else is free of decision making that day but we rotate who is the Benevolent Dictator each day.”
“To make sure we all take it seriously, at the end of each day, the three people who are not the Dictator will score the dictator out of 10 on their performance which we share after each loop of 4 and then we’ll keep a league table of the scores”.
The point of this game was to remove all the hesitance and compromising of the Forming Stage when we were all getting to know each other. The scoring also ensured that people brought their A-game to decision-making.
It also meant that at the end of the week, when we revealed the scores over dinner, we shared what we each had liked and not liked about the week and made agreements on the rules for the rest of the trip.
At that point, we had set our ways of working and didn’t need the Benevolent Dictator anymore.
The rest of the trip was a rip-roaring success and there were no tears this time [we had effortlessly reached the Performing Stage and this was a template I would use for all future holidays with others — in fact we just used it for my most recent holiday to the ski slopes of Austria with 2 friends, where I faced other challenges instead]
Getting teams to gel quickly
Nowadays, it is my job to get teams to work more effectively together [in fact it’s the very ethos of Shiageto ] so I am an expert in this.
To do this I occasionally deploy the Benevolent Dictator for teams that are just setting out or have polarised conflict but my main aim is to quickly establish ways of working and get through the Storming Phase as painlessly and quickly as possible.
I encourage every team to get to know more about each other as this will build trust quicker and serve them really well. Often we’re introducing things like:
- Random coffee generators
- Zoom libraries
- Getting to know your microsites
- Ask-me-anything sessions
- Leader open office hours
- Job swaps
- Day-in-the-life-of’s
- Team building days
- Training sessions
- Teach-ins
- Gamification
Who would have thought that my holiday experiences from years ago would be so beneficial for all our clients all around the world nowadays?
That’s why I love the work that I do 🙌
Thankfully now that I’ve had a recent holiday [and got over my manflu], I’m back in the game so if you want any help with your teams or your strategy then drop me a line 🙂
Faris
Faris is the CEO and Founder of Shiageto Consulting, an innovative consultancy that helps firms and individuals sharpen their effectiveness. Connect with him here
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