Boost Team Collaboration for Peak Performance Strategies
School
University of North Carolina, Wilmington**We aren't endorsed by this school
Course
MBA 564
Subject
Management
Date
Dec 11, 2024
Pages
5
Uploaded by BarristerSpiderMaster1208
S P R I N G 2 0 1 6 4 3E X E C U T I V E F O R U Mpositive into a loss for all. This article describes those dynamics and offers strategic and practical guidelines to counteract them so you can lead your team toward greater collaboration and superior results.The Fundamental Dynamic of Human RelationsEvery organization—whether a team, division, or corporation—confronts what I refer to as the “fundamental dynamic of human relations.”On the one hand, we have a yearning for affiliation—to be one withthe team, to be a full-fledged, emotionally accepted member. On the other hand, we have a desire for autonomy—to be one fromthe group, free to exercise our will without undue imposition from others. These two desires can pull us back and How do you motivate teams to collaborate at peak performance? Although leaders often use authority to influence behavior, it can come at cost to the relationship and to the quality and efficiency of the output. In fact, authority risks becoming an impediment to collaboration; the more the leader asserts, the more the team may resist.This article offers insights to help you boost collaboration within your team or organization, describing the basic outlines of a method I have formulated in my recent book Negotiating the Nonnegotiableto help companies reach peak performance. Through my international research and consultation with government leaders, corporate executives, and organizational units, I have identified a fundamental relational tension that impedes collaboration, along with a dangerous mind-set that can easily turn team productivity from a net LEADING YOUR TEAM TO PEAK PERFORMANCEHOW TO NEGOTIATE THE NONNEGOTIABLEby Daniel L. Shapiro
4 4 L E A D E R T O L E A D E Reveryone says they support but that no one believes is sensible.The Tribes Effect: A Crucial Obstacle to CollaborationWhile conflict is inevitable, we hold the power to shape our team’s conception of it: as either a partisan battle for dominance or a shared opportunity for understanding and mutual gain. Obviously, if we want to get the most out of a team, it is essential for members to work collaboratively, even around points of strong difference.But unless we are able to effectively manage the tension between autonomy and affiliation, conflict can quickly trigger what I term the “Tribes Effect,” a mind-set that pits team members against one another: It is me versus you, us versus them. This outlook can happen between individuals or groups, and spurs us to make a blanket devaluation of the other’s perspectives simply because it is theirs. For example, the moment we feel that a colleague is imposing a decision on us, the Tribes Effect can overtake our perspective and turn a simple request into a stressful dispute.Every organization is susceptible to the Tribes Effect. Any time people feel that their sense of autonomy or affiliation is being threatened, they are likely to tighten their psychological borders and enter a self-protective state. For example, two executives within the same department may form rival “tribes,” each viewing the other as a threat to its share of the annual budget and smearing the other’s reputation. But this mentality diminishes the broader organization’s bottom line. These two tribes end up caring less about their absolute gain than about their relative gain vis-à-vis each other. Fear and self-interest drive them to prioritize individual achievement over the company’s long-term success, resulting in a net loss for the company.We must become aware of the Tribes Effect’s key attributes to avoid succumbing to it. First, it leads us to view conflict through an adversarial lens, magnifying differences between us and the other side and minimizing similarities. Even if we feel affinity forth in a dynamic tension that requires vigilant management.This tension between affiliation and autonomy boils in almost any organizational context. For example, the fact that individuals are all part of the same project team, which affiliates them, also limits their perceived space for independence, because they must work within the confines of their team’s rules and expectations. Autonomy thus can feel like a fixed resource for which people compete; if someone encroaches on your turf, you pounce.Consider a common scenario: the CEOs of two companies agree to merge their companies. On paper, the merger guarantees skyrocketing profits, but as these two executives implement the agreement, the situation turns disastrous. The newfound affiliation has given rise to a turf battle: because the employees have not been properly inducted into the newly merged organization, they have maintained loyalty to their original ones. They have effectively become two tribes, panicking over the potential loss of their members’ jobs, authority, and culture. As a result, they begin to battle for power, wreaking havoc on both productivity and morale.A team who cherishes close affiliation also can produce inferior results. If its members all covet inclusion and fear being excluded, they may make important decisions on the basis of conformity rather than on the basis of rigorous analysis, suppressing dissension out of fear of being disloyal to their leader or group. In the early 1970s, Yale University psychologist Irving Janis famously termed this dynamic “groupthink,” and team leaders should guard against it. Otherwise, your entire team may move forward with a project idea that Autonomy can feel like a fixed resource.
S P R I N G 2 0 1 6 4 5with teammates, the Tribes Effect instigates a kind of relational amnesia, in which we forget all the good things about them and recall primarily the bad. Second, the Tribes Effect breeds the self-serving conviction that our perspective is not only right, but morally superior. Legitimacy stands on our side, and we prepare a rationale to defend it. Third, the Tribes Effect makes us believe that each side’s perspective is immutable. There’s no way they will ever change! There’s no way we can ever work with them again! Rather than listening to each other and exploring avenues to reconcile differences, we critique each other’s perspectives and blame the other side for making the conflict hopelessly nonnegotiable.The Tribes Effect can even turn small issues into big ones. An executive may feel resentful that his or her colleague was assigned to easier tasks, received extra acknowledgment in a meeting, or was selected as the lead consultant for a VIP client. Humanity’s infinite commonalities pale in comparison to a singular difference that takes on outsized importance. In short, the Tribes Effect can lead the trivial to become more than a matter of trivial concern, and this can have a devastating impact on the prospects for collaboration.The Hidden Source of Organizational DivisionOvercoming the Tribes Effect necessitates a strategy much like that adopted by the Greek hero Odysseus. As he navigated his ship home after ten long years of fighting in the Trojan War, he met the Greek goddess Circe, who warned him of a danger he would face on his journey: beautiful sirens with enchanting voices who bewitched sailors, compelling them to steer toward the goddesses’ island, where their ships would crash against the shoreline’s sharp rocks and leave “heaps of bodies.” Before he set sail, Odysseus ordered his crew to put wax in their ears and tie him to the mast. If he begged to be released, they were to refuse his orders and bind him even tighter. With this plan in place, Odysseus and his men sailed safely past the Sirens.The Tribes Effect, like the Sirens, draws you toward it. The deeper you envelop in its emotional folds, the more difficult it becomes to resist its pull. In an emotionally charged conflict, this attraction originates in a powerful set of emotional dynamics, which I call the Five Lures of the Tribal Mind: 1. Vertigo: Your team enters a warped state of consciousness in which members become so emotionally consumed with the conflict that it damages productivity.2. Repetition compulsion: Your team repeats the same self-defeating patterns of conflict again and again, despite everyone thinking, “Here we go again. . . .”3. Taboos: Your team is afraid to discuss core issues driving your conflict, because they fear political or social ostracism if they raise those matters.4. Assault on the sacred: Team members feel that something to which they are deeply attached— a belief, value, product, or aspect of their identity—has fallen under attack, revving up strong negative emotions.5. Identity politics: As conflict boils, team members divide into factions that try to sway company politics to their exclusive benefit—and to the detriment of the other side.The lures are emotional forcesthat shape your relations as adversarial, drawing you toward the Tribes Effect or pulling you deeper into it. They saturate your consciousness with self-righteous feelings, banish negative sentiments to the unconscious, and promote oppositional behavior. They also tend to affect your relations at many points in the course of a conflict. Every organization is susceptible to the Tribes Effect.
4 6 L E A D E R T O L E A D E RA second tactic to overcome the Five Lures is by emphasizing what I call the “Relentless We.”As conflict escalates, the Tribes Effect pulls members of your team toward division—and it is critical to combat that force with an even more powerful emphasis on the value of connection, the Relentless We. You must work incessantly to reframe the conflict not as us versus them,but as fellow team members resolving difficulties together. Just as the Tribes Effect seeks to divide, you must seek to connect— and with at least a comparable amount of time, effort, and intensity. In a conflict, the team leader might repeatedly remind the group: “We are a team, and though we have substantial divisions, our differences are our source of strength. We all see things differently—so it is critical that we listen to each other and better understand each other’s perspectives and work this out together . . . and we’ll end up much stronger as a team.”The power of the Relentless We came to light recently when I answered a knock at my door and encountered an alarmed neighbor. “Did you hear?,” she asked, shaken. “There was a terrorist attack at the marathon. We don’t know if Melissa is okay.” Melissa is a mutual neighbor in our town outside Boston, and an avid runner. “No one’s heard from her yet.”I hurried inside and turned on the television. Two bombs had exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring 250 others. My heart raced. I had nearly taken my boys to the finish line that day, but at the last minute remained at home to catch up on work.Shortly thereafter President Barack Obama made an impassioned speech. He could have talked about terrorism, and how the United States would renew its war against it—constructing a negative identity for us as a nation—but instead, he created a positive national identity. “There are no Republicans or Democrats,” he said. “We are Americans, united in concern for our fellow citizens.” In a situation that threatened to draw an entire nation toward the Tribes Effect, the president resisted, choosing to unite people instead of railing against the yet-unknown perpetrators of the tragedy.The Relentless We can foster groupthink, so to guard against that, invite a rotating set of two or Some, such as identity politics, frequently incite conflict; others, such as taboos, appear during the conflict itself; still others, such as vertigo, arise as a psychological consequence of conflict.Countering the Five Lures of the Tribal MindIn Negotiating the Nonnegotiable, I present a comprehensive method to overcome each of the Five Lures and build collaborative relations. Though there is not space in this article to share the full method, the general advice is straightforward: Be proactive. As tensions simmer, members easily can become so focused on defeating each other that they take on a negative identity: they define themselves through their opposition to each other. A classic example of this dynamic involves a rebellious preacher’s son who so despises his father that he takes up atheism and begins drinking heavily. The same dynamic arises in organizational politics, such as when rival business executives spend every feasible moment undermining each other’s projects rather than building their own. The leader who watches this emergent dynamic and does not take action has lost the battle before it started.First, to counteract the pull toward a negative identity, encourage your team to consciously build a positive identity. This involves clarifying who you arerather than who you are not. What are the critical values of your team, department, or organization? What do you stand for? Work with your team to identify and prioritize a list of values that best represent your group. Your goal is to articulate the underlying ideals that your team identifies with and to hold yourselves accountable to those values.What do you stand for?
S P R I N G 2 0 1 6 4 7three members of your meetings to serve as dissenters, individuals required to critique ideas that emerge. The successful dissenter will provide counter-perspectives to everyone’s comments, including authority figures. By playing this role, the dissenter gains legitimate autonomy to voice nonconformist perspectives without being branded a traitor. Information flows more readily and collaboration is enhanced.A final illustrative tactic to boost collaboration is to consult individuals before making a decision on matters of personal concern to them. For example, as company leadership formulates a merger strategy, they would be well advised to appoint cross-company, cross-departmental, multilevel consultation groups to devise ways to improve the merger’s success. They can consider likely social, cultural, and political impediments to the merger’s success, and develop policies to ensure that members of each of the two merging entities hold fulfilling roles within the new organization. Institutionalizing the consultation groups will help create a new corporate identity in which everyone feels connected. The Tribes Effect may still try to rear its destructive head—the autonomy–affiliation dialectic is inevitable—but can be blunted through preemptive efforts to enhance inclusion.SummaryCollaboration is a team effort, and specific method-ologies can enhance your group’s ability to reach peak performance. The key is to promote positive relations and counteract the Tribes Effect, turning conflict from an obstacle into an opportunity for organizational success.Collaboration is a team effort.Daniel L. Shapiro, PhD, is founder and director of the Harvard International Negotiation Program, associate professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School/McLean, and a regular consultant to leadership of Fortune 500 companies, governments, and other organizations. This article is based upon his newest book, Negotiating the Nonnegotiable: How to Resolve Your Most Emotionally Charged Conflicts(Viking, 2016).