6. Your Team Dynamics and the Dynamics of Your Team

Sarah Singer-Nourie coaches leaders and their teams on how to tap energy, talent, and motivation for accelerated results in school systems, communities, and companies worldwide. Weaving practical application of brain research into team dynamics, personal development, and human performance, her work has sparked clients including Jump Associates, American Eagle Outfitters, Quantum Learning Network, and Bubba Gump Shrimp Company to break through. Founder of Sarah Singer & Company, Sarah loves to open possibility daily as a trainer, facilitator, and coach. Her M.A. is from Saint Xavier University and B.A. from The Ohio State University, yet she attributes her most significant learning to life outside of school.

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With a clear assessment of your organization’s capabilities and goals, and with a clearer understanding of your team composition by learning style from the previous chapters, you are now looking at leading this dynamic team of disruptive innovators. In this chapter we will give you the tools to lead the team most effectively, with notable focus on maintaining focus and perspective, managing and understanding expectations, mitigating the challenges of pressure, and knowing when and how to reset the team’s focus and energy for maximum performance.

Much of the time, the teams’ impact will depend on how you as the leader facilitate those elements within your team of disrupters, to make your superstars even better together. Then you can get to the business of disrupting something bigger than all of you.

The big misnomer about teams is that some magical synergistic chemistry just happens when you throw a group of talented, committed people into a project together. In my experience as the coach who is called in to either set up or get teams to the ultimate version of their capacity, although that magic sometimes occurs when just the right combinations of people come together, it’s actually rare. In working with hundreds of teams, I can attest that it’s also not so natural, especially with the superstar dynamos you’re looking to attract. The brilliant dissenters, the mismatching questioners, the mold-breakers...they’re the ones you want on your team, wired for creating the shift you envision. And yet they’re also the ones who make for a challenging team to lead. Although they have all the right stuff individually to make great things happen in the world through change, they might likely be the most challenged in coming together with others in a way that taps, multiplies, or accelerates talent and changes the way you’re envisioning.

• Dynamics is used to describe what’s happening on the team: the forces that cause change or growth.

Referenced as the “team dynamics,” the specific kind of interplay happening on your team between these big personalities is an element that requires your careful and constant attention as a leader. These dynamics can attract or repel others to a team, because they’re noticeable from the outside. Great disruptive teams attract; they often have a queue of people who want to join them, because people want to be part of the energy a team of that sort creates. Conversely, dysfunctional teams repel; they often experience avoidance, with less buy-in for their impact, and as a result drain rather than generate energy. In short, people would rather be part of something that gives them energy. As the leader, you can determine which kind of dynamic your team becomes known for by how you lead them. The bigger the force, intellect, intensity, and vision in your players, the more fiery the team dynamics. Although those characteristics are what drew you to hire each of the people in the first place, they are also what require your deft facilitation and intentional leadership—so that the dynamics don’t go off the rails.

• Dynamic is used to describe your players: characterized by energy and/or forcefulness, usually continuous and full of productive activity or change.

This is descriptive of both the people you’ve got and the process you’re leading them through. You are building a team of disrupters whose dynamic force already creates change and ripples wherever they go, so they’re perfect for helping you shake things up. They each bring their unique talent, expertise, and viewpoint to the task. By definition, the process of this team and its work will be anything but static or smooth. You’ll have moving parts, disparate voices, shifting positions, strong opinions...all of which can yield amazing change if led well.

If it’s the right team of disrupters, you’ll have some dynamic fire to contain and direct. Your role will be to keep fanning and directing those sparks with the following keys:

Perspective to ground and deepen the work

Process and context to push the team further

Clarity to acknowledge and clear the debris along the way

Nimble ability to strategically reset the team to keep it productive

So where’s your vantage point? Each of the levels on this pyramid represents the distinct components of any initiative, however tactically small or sweepingly large and strategic. Although some are more obvious than others at times, it is important to have a clear understanding of each perspective level for the team to engage and create. The key is to keep each layer clear and in proportion to the others, allowing for the best perspective.

In the way that you lead and communicate, you can come from any of the levels of the pyramid, each one coloring your message and influence differently. The deeper you go on the pyramid, the more foundation of grounded perspective you bring to the team. As a leader, you’ve got some choices....

• Adjust the timeline as you go, making space for team members’ emergent process as they collaborate.

• Strategically, use time and deliverables to create urgency when needed. Deadlines spur action.

• Get alignment on the process early, and check in and adjust course often, looking to make sure the how is tapping their talent consistently and providing a way for it to manifest in great work.

• As the leader, be the keeper of the process.

• Document your process. Innovation work rarely follows the same path twice, but showing the process of a past successful innovation is helpful when you are seeking time, space, and resources for future explorations.

• Have the team articulate the goal, get it visually up on the wall of your workspaces, and keep reiterating it for them.

• If the result you’re going for is ambiguous, set shorter-term what milestones along the course for them to focus on and hit.

• Lead your team with the why. Tell the why. Ask the why. Every time, every conversation, every day.

• Open with the why, and then layer the what, how, and when on top.

Steve Jobs: “To make a dent in the universe.”

As a leader, get clear about your big why. When you do, it will come through as the passion that fuels everything else you do, and will serve as inspiration for every person you lead.

You also need to get team members’ individual big whys. When you know their why, it can be very powerful, giving you a way to frame communication with them—an entrance into their world at any moment. When they’re in need of motivation, acknowledgment, or perspective, you can frame it in the most meaningful way for what matters most to them. Their why is their buy-in, and your why can be their inspiration.

After you’re grounded in this deepest, most stable part of the pyramid, the others—what, how, and when—are easy to reference and command as needed, because they’re truly held in perspective of the biggest why.

• Give people space to think about this. Know that these questions are the kind that might require them to search a bit internally if they haven’t already clarified it for themselves.

• Ask big why questions in layers. For each answer they give like, “Because I care about XXX,” ask another why question (“Why X?”) to peel the layers back like an onion.

• Then add each layer, in order from the bottom up. Why → what → how → when. Each layer adds more specificity, ending with when as the driver.

• When you or the team is stressed, use the pyramid to check your perspective. Often stress occurs in the top layers of the pyramid, when you get too wrapped up in the execution of how or when. If so, come back down to the why, and then add the others back in on top, keeping them as important, yet back into perspective.

• As a leader, keep zooming in and panning out. The details of each layer are critical for quality of the work, whereas the whole perspective is the clutch for your team’s focus in doing the work fully engaged.

Everything transforms. Literally. It’ll push through the threshold to a stronger, more stable structure, which can withstand more pressure.

The wood turns into coal.

That coal under sustained pressure over time transforms into a diamond.

Water at its boiling point transforms into steam.

Individuals pushed with enough pressure of challenge will transform inalterably, the ultimate learning.

Unrivaled championship teams perform best in the playoffs.

And none of these, like you and your team, go back to their original form.

You, your organization, and your team will go through this. It is simply how irreversible transformative change occurs. You’ll know it’s happening when the various forms of pressure increase the heat on the team—metaphorically—yet also the temperature of the individuals and in the room literally goes up when the pressure of those dynamics rises. This can happen when team members have been wrestling through an idea or a process in search of a breakthrough, and have been at it a long time. It can happen when they’re being challenged by an outside force or time running out, and have to pull out a solution they haven’t yet discovered. This is where you come in as the leader. The way you hold and facilitate those dynamics makes all the difference in your team being able to push through to transformative change or not.

“Never leave a teammate alone” and “Work through upset on the team directly, immediately, and out of the public eye” are examples of agreements that call the team back to one another, build solidarity, and enable them to stand in the heat all the way through to the other side.

Blair Singer calls this context of agreement the Code of Honor, and it’s what makes the difference between teams that fall apart under pressure and teams that step up to their best work under pressure.

• Ask, “What gets in the way of your being able to do your absolute best work on a team,” and then create agreements to proactively guard against those obstacles.

There’s a lot to be said for how upsets and their resolution are communicated, but for now let’s go to the source itself....

Any upset on the spectrum breaks down to an expectation that didn’t get met. Every time.

People handle it in a few different ways. The key for you as a leader is to create a culture on your team of getting expectations articulated clearly and upsets cleared out quickly.

An upset almost always presents itself as an irritation to start, possibly a complaint. Depending on how egregious the upset is or how long it’s allowed to compound, it can quickly move to a full-out glaring conflict (see Figure 6.4). The context you set for the team to play by (handling upsets) and the role you take as a facilitator (to move them through quickly) will make all the difference.

In coaching hundreds of these moments, I find that most of time, the person carrying a judgment about the competency/quality of another is doing so from an upset based on unarticulated expectations. What was expected in the first place for “good” or “competent” wasn’t ever clearly articulated, so those expectations weren’t ever met.

The most problematic and common expectations are ones we either assume or don’t even realize we had until they weren’t met by someone else. These upsets end up as judgments and decisions about whether a person “has what it takes,” or whether an organization is the “right fit” for me and my talent. They can be devastating to a team, because invisible upsets like these insidiously erode trust, collaboration, and uninhibited engagement for people.

• Establish a team practice of asking and articulating, “What am I expecting?” in team members’ interactions with one another.

• Get as articulate as you appropriately can about your expectations with those you’ve got on the hook to deliver.

• Get agreement. After someone’s expectations are voiced, they need to be renegotiated, adjusted, or accepted, becoming agreements. Then you’ve got a way to hold one another accountable.

• Articulate assumptions. Make the unstated common sense assumptions explicit.

• Be clear in what you agree to, and teach your team to do the same. If by, “Yes, I’ll take that piece of the research,” you really mean that you’d like to read more about it, and might do that if you can fit it in, you’re setting yourself up for an upset.

• Get flexible about your expectations. The more flexibility in your expectations, the more chances for success, but be honest—our expectations are usually more solid and inflexible than we’re willing to admit, let alone articulate.

• Create rigor on your team to dissect upsets down to the expectations beneath and to reset quickly. With each one, they’ll get stronger, faster, and more unified.

That’s all reliant on the disrupters’ state, composed of the three inextricably linked parts of where one is mentally, emotionally, and physically at any given moment (see Figure 6.5). There’s enormous power in monitoring, changing, and maximizing state for every member of your team in the process you lead.

As a leader, start paying attention as much to their state as you do to their performance output, because it’s actually fueling that output already. Your team’s state of tired, irritated, or distracted will yield very different results than focused, curious, or excited. This is because attention, learning, and performance are completely state dependent. To maximize your team’s flow, start facilitating their states. Your mastery here is directly proportional to their motivation, focus, and productivity. Although there are many ways to do this by causing even the slightest mental, emotional, or physical shift, for now we’ll focus on the power of reset within your team’s process.

The brain craves clean beginnings and clean endings to its focus and tasks, not never-ending thought loops, like open apps, that drain power. It also has a limited attention span. The average attention span correlates roughly with age (like 5 minutes max for a 5-year-old), up to about 18 to 20 minutes as the general limit of most adults’ focused attention span in the work they’re doing (outside of gaming and other immersive altered-state activities). All attempts of “plowing through” beyond that window are a waste of time and energy, because after that state is gone, so are their focus, learning, and performance. If your disrupters get stuck on a thought or position in their intensity, they need a way to “unstick.” Quick resets of attention—state changes—about every 18 to 20 minutes in the work process or in natural transitions (whichever happens sooner), and the brain/performance/focus stays fresh, keeping it all clear.

Although it might be too slow to get far enough into team members’ internal dialogue to reset their thinking, you can quickly and easily change their state from the outside. Change one of the three parts, and they all change. The easiest access for you is physical...by simply getting them to move, you’ll break the state they were in and help them reset. You’ll see it before they will, because you’ve got that perspective, right?

• Keep and use physical manipulatives for people to handle in the space, such as squeezable balls—they are instruments for fast state change for people as they think.

• Give your team the awareness and language of state, and the conscious practice of state changing.

“We choose to go to the moon not because it is easy but because it is hard...this is an act of faith and vision. For we do not now know what benefits await us....”
—John F. Kennedy