Everyone says they want to be on a winning team. And nobody ever says they want to be on a lousy team. So how come we end up on frustrating teams much of the time?

Here are the steps you can take to make sure that being on your teams remain the worst, most frustrating experiences ever. Master each of these four steps and then be sure to pass them to others so they, too, can bring all their teams down.

These steps are especially important if you want to bring agile practices to a standstill…

Step 1: Assume someone else is responsible for team building

Never, under any circumstance, should you allow yourself to feel a sense of ownership for the quality and productivity of the whole team, collaboration, partnership, or relationship. By all means, let someone else do that, preferably someone you can despise for not having as much technical competence as you. Also, assume team building is black magic instead of a skill set composed of straight-forward, repeatable conversations anyone can bring to any relationship any time.

Why? Someone — anyone, regardless of their role in the team — who cares about the productivity of the team will make a huge difference in putting into motion the conversations and ideas that build the team. But when no one does, then it’s completely up to chance whether the team develops effective dynamics.

Consider this: 15 years ago I had the opportunity to interview dozens of science and engineering staff in a couple of large, failed programs. Everyone was a “top 10 percent” graduate from a “top 10” university, the crème de’ le’ crème. When asked, “To what do you owe your participation in this failed program?” the No. 1 response was: “I got put on a bad team.”

Memorize that line so you can repeat it in your next review.

Step 2: Resist attending to anything other than the most narrow description of your role

Whatever you do, refuse all invitations to meetings, orientations, or informal gatherings where the team’s overall mission might be discussed. If you do, you might get sucked into caring. And if you actually cared, then you might feel a sense of ownership, and next thing you know you’ll be sub-optimizing for your own role and optimizing for the whole.

Why? The No. 1 point of leverage for team building and team leadership is to talk together about the larger goal. I call it the what-we-must-do-together-that-is-bigger-than-any-of-us,-requires-all-of-us,-and-none-of-us-can-claim-individual-victory-until-it-is-achieved conversation.

Step 3: Don’t care whether others on the team and extended teams are winning or losing

By all means, whatever you do, maintain a constant vigil of nonchalance about how what you do affects others on the team or beyond. This is relatively easy to master. Besides repeating the mantra “I don’t care” you can also:

1. Assume the only way to motivate anyone is with the carrots and sticks of management, which peers on teams don’t have available, thus you can’t affect other’s commitment.
2. Never, ever ask “What’s in it for you — beyond a paycheck — to work on this project?” That way, you can continue to not care, and you also don’t have to know whether you are stepping on someone’s win.
3. Never own up to having any inspiration at all about why you come to work other than for continued employment and a paycheck. That way you can maintain low interest and commitment to most things.
4. Finally, assume that other people and departments should do what you think they should do because you all get a paycheck from the same company.

Why? Most people say they want to be on a winning team. That means actually practicing win/win/win at every level and juncture, which requires some caring, knowledge, and effort. And that means understanding how peer motivation works and committing to generate as many wins as possible out of every decision and action.

Step 4: Make only agreements you must in order to get others to leave you alone, and don’t worry about keeping them.

Since there is a fuzzy authority system in teams, collaborations, and partnerships, feel free to say and do anything you can to get people to leave you alone. That usually means resisting opting in and engaging until they twist your arm and then saying whatever you must in order to end the pain and move on. Making agreements you never intend to keep is a great way to ensure continual frustration and failure.

Why? Teams, collaborations, and partnerships operate on a different frequency than the hierarchical functions of an organization. Where authority structures create the fabric of the institution, making and keeping agreements of all types, from operating rules to delivering work, creates the fabric of the team.

Practice, practice, practice

Repeat these four steps over and over. I promise you will be a whiz at bringing down any team without even trying.

What steps did I miss?

Did I mention or miss a personal favorite of yours? Let me know.

Christopher Avery, Ph.D. wrote the popular book Teamwork Is An Individual Skill: Getting Your Work Done When Sharing Responsibility — which Fortune Magazine claimed is the only teamwork book worth reading. He is a recognized authority on how individual and shared responsibility works in the mind and an advisor to leaders worldwide. Master leadership or build a responsible team (or family) with The Leadership Gift Program for Leaders.

When I ask business leaders and IT professionals about their experience of teamwork effectiveness — and I’ve asked thousands in 20+ years as a consultant and speaker — I get a consistent “so-so” response.

So what will it take to create consistently more effective teamwork across the board?

First, it requires a hard look at what doesn’t work.

Then it requires everyone to take greater ownership for their own teamwork.

This can happen only when we equip business leaders and team members with the often neglected basic skills to lead or work on a team.

Professionals – be aware that teamwork is an individual skill

What doesn’t work: Waiting for someone else to make your team experience a good one

Though this is changing in some sectors, we don’t yet expect individuals in the workforce to take ownership for the quality and productivity of their relationships at work. Yet we expect them to work successfully in teams — pods of shared responsibility, where each member’s accomplishment and paycheck depend on how the whole group performs.

We expect to hold individuals accountable for a work product within their area of expertise, yet we buy into their blame and justification when their excuse for poor performance is that they were assigned to a bad team over which they had no direct control.

What doesn’t work: Focusing on the parts and expecting a whole to emerge

We manage organizations by taking big jobs, breaking them up, assigning the pieces to people, and then — hopefully — integrating the pieces into wholes. But in our educational system and career paths, we create highly educated specialists and we micro-focus them on bounded pieces of work rather than on end-user value. This creates huge gaps between these well-bounded roles. Thus the need for integration.

Problems between the gaps hold the greatest opportunity to add value

As a society and as managers, we have low expectations of smart people’s abilities to work well together. As reasons we cite

• specialization
• ego
• competitiveness
• sensitivity
• aggressiveness
• conflict avoidance and
• (choose your favorite instrument) personality style differences.

What else doesn’t work: Low expectations (faith in people) by leaders

When we adopt humane beliefs and expectations about people’s abilities to build responsible and productive relationships at work, they do build those relationships.

We need to develop faith in smart people’s abilities to learn a new way of relating at work, and recognize teamwork as an individual skill — with identifiable principles and communication skills that anyone with an elementary school education can learn and master. This also means that smart, highly educated professionals are no longer let off the hook because of the advanced nature of their specializations and personal accomplishments.

Education and self-awareness supports successful teamwork

Along with raising our expectations, professionals can practice some basic principles and skills that support effective teamwork. As a society, we have thousands of years of experience with working in hierarchies, yet we have just a few decades’ worth of models, metaphors, and language about working in teams.

In my experience, smart, highly educated professionals don’t understand the basic concepts and skills to work in, lead, or manage teams. And our efforts to teach those principles and skills have fallen way short, often perpetuating a team-building mythology that just doesn’t work.

The critical path to creating more consistently effective teams starts with leaders taking ownership for perpetuating a society, a workforce, and a workplace where smart, highly educated and highly paid professionals are expected to acquire, practice, and master integrative skills.

To be successful in a shared-responsibility environment, master these concepts

“Tall” versus “flat” relationship structures — successful participation simultaneously in hierarchies and teams.

Shared responsibility — accomplishing tasks with others over whom you hold no direct control yet on whose effort your performance relies.

Simultaneous cooperation and competition — consciously choosing cooperation over petty competitiveness as your default relationship strategy and knowing when and how to choose competitiveness when a truly critical value or belief is at stake.

The principle of the least-invested coworker — motivating peers and dealing effectively with perceived freeloaders and other difficult team members.

We would do well to reexamine our fundamental assumptions about what bright people can and cannot learn. And we must modify our beliefs about leading, managing, and working in team-based environments. Most of all, more consistently effective teams starts with an examination of your own contributions to the problem and your responsibility to learn, correct, and improve.

There is an “I” in “team,” and you are it.

Christopher Avery, PhD, is a recognized authority on how individual and shared responsibility works in the mind and an advisor to leaders worldwide. Master leadership or build a responsible team with The Leadership Gift Program for Leaders.

I developed the following model to communicate the essence of partnering between any two entities, whether people or groups, and whether external or internal to an organization:

Partnering = Exchange + Expansion + Integrity

Let’s look at collaborating across boundaries — or what is frequently called partnering — and the first of three keys to sustainable partnering across any boundary: exchange.

We’ll take up expansion and integrity in future posts.

Teams are increasingly called on to partner with the business, with external suppliers, or with the offshore provider. But what does partnering mean? Usually, partnering refers to a sustained business relationship of increasing credible commitment and trust — as opposed to credible threat and distrust — between two or more entities, each governed separately.

Supply chains in many industries, notably high-tech, have pursued partnering to

• reduce costs
• improve quality
• accelerate pace
• improve forecasting
• manage technology roadmaps
• and more

And more and more software development teams are being called on to partner with the business to deliver more valuable solutions as — and where — needed in the business.

Two Types of Exchange: Transactional and Relational

Transactional Exchange

You would not continue doing business with an entity that took unfair advantage just because they could get away with it. If you are a provider, you would walk away from a customer that would not pay you a price that would allow you to remain in business and grow. And if you are a customer, you would walk away from a provider that charged you more than the value you received from the product or service. This type of exchange is generally called “transaction exchange” and partners tend to repeat the same or similar transaction over and over again.

In order to remain partners, entities who enjoy a world-class reputation for being great partners insist that they make the exchange fair or more than fair. They take responsibility for fully understanding and making equitable both sides of the deal. They do not begrudge their partner a profit — or at least don’t begrudge their partner the desire to remain within budget constraints.

In fact, the essence of collaborative leadership in a partnership is wanting your partner to survive and thrive. That’s a wildly different point of view than the “cut ‘em and leave ‘em bleeding” perspective of many bargainers in business.

Relational Exchange

The second type of exchange is vitally important but less well understood. Some call it “psychological exchange” or “relational exchange,” and it refers to the quality of the interaction in the relationship. An example: a situation where you decided to not return to a store, restaurant, gas station, airline, or other provider because the transaction was overly frustrating or distasteful. You felt “out of exchange” in the relationship — you did not deserve to be treated that way.

Partners measure the success of their relationship on the satisfaction of the other partner and constantly innovate in relationship management processes and procedures to improve the relationship satisfaction. Think of the airline, hotel, or car rental loyalty program in which you are a member. They provide special processes only available to your membership level that make it more convenient, trusting, and satisfying to do business with them.

A not-so-shining example of being out of relational exchange

Last week I read a fascinating New York Times expose about the owner on an online business who reveled in customer complaints. Why? The worse he treated customers the more they complained. The more they complained the higher his search engine ranking soared. Thus his website was at the top of the list when you and I searched online for prescription eyeglasses.

He was intentionally trashing relational exchange in order to earn ratings that would drive more transactional exchanges. Suffice to say he was not very interested in repeat business.

He’s since been arrested.

Transactional and relational exchange are the ground floor of sustainable partnering — and teamwork

If you don’t take as your responsibility the creation of an exchange relationship that feels good and fair to both sides, then you’ll never get off the ground in building a collaboration. Learn from these principles and apply them to your everyday teamwork. Think about what you have to offer toward the transactional and psychological/relational exchange and what kind of partnership you’re trying to establish with your team members. How do you rate?

Be honest with yourself and make changes accordingly — it will predict much about your success. Make sure your other team members know that you want them to be satisfied with what you have to offer and that they are satisfied, and make sure that they feel treated well and heard — before they walk off not wanting to do “business” with you anymore and hurting both of you and the whole team in the end.

Christopher Avery, PhD, is a recognized authority on how individual and shared responsibility works in the mind and an advisor to leaders worldwide. Master leadership or build a responsible team (or family) with The Leadership Gift Program for Leaders.

My principle of the least-invested coworker states:

Any, and every, team will perform to the level of its least-invested member

As dire as that prediction sounds, it’s true and straight-forward — and that makes finding a remedy for getting a team back on track straight-forward. Only a leader in denial will ignore team member motivation when assessing his or her team’s potential to perform highly.

Why is this prediction true? It’s true because teammates who are less interested in the collective project (regardless of technical skill set) show their lack of motivation through their level of engagement and effort.

When other — more invested — team members observe this, they grow increasingly resentful. Why? Because the project responsibility is shared, which means individual efforts are interdependent and the rewards are shared. Everyone can recognize a free-loader in their team, and no one enjoys or looks forward to picking up the slack for them.

Instead, teammates subconsciously reduce their expectations — and thus their motivations — until they match the level of investment of the least-motivated coworker. You could think of it as a form of subconscious self-organized justice. For higher performers, this means they will shift their motivations to some other aspect of their work or life until they can get off of this project and move on to a project with more highly-invested partners.

So what’s the smart leader or teammate to do?

1. Let go of the idea that people should be motivated by a paycheck or company or team loyalty. See things as they are instead of the illusion you would like them to be.
2. Attend to issues of buy-in, commitment, interest, and motivation early and often. Learn to ask, “what is in it for you to work together with the rest of us on this project?” and pay attention to the responses. Play them back for understanding and clarification. Talk about interests as a team and acknowledge that “win/win” isn’t just a slogan, it actually means meeting everyone’s interests.
3. Learn about and use the potency of intrinsic (i.e., internal) motivation to your advantage. External motivators like compensation, benefits, and rewards may get people to show up and occupy space, but they don’t drive personal investment. Also, since peer team leaders don’t have much say over extrinsic motivators (like salary and bonuses), they assume there is nothing they can do about managing peer motivation. Not true! Remember, high performance is voluntary. And that’s an issue of intrinsic motivation — motivation that is defined inside.
4. Develop your proficiency at collaborative and participative communication practices. When team members have a legitimate say in what’s happening, their commitment tends to increase. When people are excluded, their commitment level goes down.

Technical skill sets are critically important for successful work, but team member motivation is the long lever of team dynamics. Empowering employees or team members will be rewarded with workers who are stepping up their performance.

Christopher Avery helps leaders worldwide to operate their business — and lives — far more productively and successfully. Find additional resources to master leadership and build responsible teams at ChristopherAvery.com and The Leadership Gift.

The popularity of the saying “win/win” speaks volumes – we all like to win. So let’s define what “winning” means. And then let’s turn that definition into a tool you can deploy as a brief agenda item for each team meeting or retrospective.

You can deploy this tool immediately in your next team meeting. And it can pay huge dividends in terms of team dynamics. Let me explain.

Predicting Excellent Team Dynamics

I recently wrote about powerful benefits of iteration retrospectives in developing excellent team dynamics in The Benefits of Retrospective Meetings at the End of Every Project Iteration. Picking up on that theme, let’s explore one specific way you can use the retrospective — or any regular team meeting — to boost three critical team dynamics:

• trust,
• respect for individuals, and
• goodwill and cooperation.

These three factors — trust, respect for individuals, and goodwill and cooperation — were demonstrated by research to be the greatest discriminators of high- from low-performing teams. That means these three factors generally exist in high performing teams. And it means they generally do not exist in low performing teams.

Here’s the problem: These factors prove difficult to develop or repair by addressing them directly. That’s why improving teamwork and collaboration can prove so challenging.

And here’s an answer: Research also shows that you can indirectly improve trust, respect for individuals, and goodwill and cooperation through five collaborative communication practices:

• creative dialog,
• brainstorming,
• conflict resolution,
• information sharing, and
• team learning.

And that’s the job of a collaborative leader whether a manager, scrum master, or a peer team member.

As I wrote last time, the retrospective is designed to enhance team dynamics because it employs the communication practices listed above. Let’s look at this notion of “wins” to see how you can use it to enhance team dynamics in your project.

Define a win as an intention that has been met

Consider this: A “win” is anything you intended to happen that did indeed happen and anything anyone intended to not happen that did not happen. Want a simple test? Think about when you exclaim “Yes!” — or high five, fist pump, or fist bump — when you get the outcome you were going for. That’s celebrating an intention met. That’s what I call a “win.”

Humans are intentional beings — we have desires, goals, and, well, intentions. We really like our intentions to be met, though they aren’t always, but that’s what makes winning so delicious.

Here are some examples of met intentions I’ve recently heard team members claim:

• We shipped all the planned features
• I slept at least eight hours every night throughout the iteration
• We didn’t have any management emergencies
• I learned how to code faster and better by pairing with Sally

These examples are obviously related to an agile project team and reflect the types of wins people might report if they were in the habit of claiming their wins and sharing them. When humans are winning (i.e., when our intentions are being met), we feel energized, fulfilled, and powerful. And here’s the performance key: when this is happening we feel like stretching and exercising our power of intention for more and larger accomplishments and wins.

Try this: think of a recent win of any size (“I meant to start the day with taking care of paperwork — and I did!”) and acknowledge it to yourself.

Congratulations! Now think of another.

Congratulations! Do you sense a power within you that you might not have noticed or forgotten existed? Does it feel good? Want to exercise it some more?

Reserve two to three minutes at the beginning of team meetings and retrospectives to claim and share wins

Try this at your next meeting.

1. Define a win as an intention that is met. Then give an example of one of your own wins from the last week or two. Also explain that a win can be large or small — and that every win is defined only by the person experiencing it. A win can also be a shared intention, so some wins might start with “we” as opposed to “I.”
2. Invite the team to claim wins from the recent iteration. Acknowledge each win. Say something like “congratulations!”
3. Don’t allow anyone to turn a claimed win into a joke or a discussion, just acknowledge the win and call for more.

When a team reports wins at the beginning of meetings, people start exercising their mental filters for wins. Your team and members will experience winning and will become accustomed to it. They’ll feel like winners and learn that there are lots of ways to win. They look forward to claiming wins.

Most of us in industry are in the terrible habit of deferring wins. And many of us as managers and leaders filter for issues, problems, and “what have you done for me lately?” instead of “how are you — and we — winning?” No wonder so many workplaces are full of unhappy people who feel like they are continually losing so the company can win (i.e., “We’re going to wait until January and celebrate all of the year’s wins then”).

Try it

Claiming wins might feel weird at first and your results might be rough the first couple of times, but stick with it and you’ll see amazing dynamics develop. You’ll also be doing your teammates and projects a big favor since acknowledging wins translates into engaged, motivated workers.

Christopher Avery, PhD, supports enlightened leaders worldwide to master agile and responsible teamwork, leadership, and change. Members of the Leadership Gift Program for Leaders claim wins ever time they meet.

• Start shining the spotlight on the whole, not the pieces
• Solicit help shining the light
• Know the standard you are striving to achieve

Building on that theme, I’ll tell you why the project team is the easiest team to build compared to the management team: The laboratory definition of a team is “a small group of people working together toward a common goal” — laboratory being the operative word here because most of the definitive research conducted on team dynamics occurred in lab experiments.

Researchers would give randomly formed groups various tasks to accomplish together and then observe their dynamics. The famous four-phase model (forming, storming, norming, and performing) by Bruce Tuckman [1] followed from such experiments.

Of all the groups you hope would develop effective team dynamics, the project team is most like the groups in that original research. Think about some key similarities:

1. A collective focal point for the group that requires their collective effort,
2. A clear beginning, and,
3. A clear ending.

These three similarities create what I sometimes call a “container” (or even a “vessel” as in “get the individuals feeling like they are in the same boat together”). This is an excellent recipe for successful engagement and effective dynamics to emerge. In a healthy organizational culture and with some good basic facilitative support or servant leadership, many project teams will develop fairly effective dynamics.

So why are management teams, staff groups, and departments so much more of a challenge to build?

Because they don’t fit the laboratory definition of a team. They seldom have:

1. A collective focal point for the group that requires their collective effort,
2. A clear beginning, and
3. A clear ending.

What’s a team-minded manager to do?

Do you want to know the most basic prescription for developing effective team dynamics in management teams, staff groups, and departments? Here it is: Develop a rhythm of serial (i.e., one after the other) collective focal points for the group that requires everyone’s collective effort to achieve. The focal points should be realistic, challenging and “winnable” for the group.

For example, you could set monthly (i.e., iterative) group results that cut across and require the collaboration of all members of the management team, staff group, or department. Then shine your biggest spotlight on that collective goal and shine your pen-light on the individual accountabilities. Hold monthly planning meetings to set and plan for these collective targets. Use weekly and daily meetings to adjust plans and focus on the collective targets. And “retrospect” (a term from agile software development for process improvement meetings — see the previous blog post) at the end of every iteration about how you could improve for the next iteration.

With a relatively healthy organizational culture and a little facilitative support and/or servant leadership, your management teams, staff groups, and departments will naturally develop effective team dynamics if they are challenged to work together — and high-performance results should accrue. That’s how you build successful, dynamic, collaborative leadership and happy team members.

Reference: 1. Tuckman, Bruce. (1965). Developmental sequence in small groups. Psychological bulletin, 63, 384-399.

Christopher Avery helps leaders worldwide to operate their business — and lives — far more productively and successfully. Find additional resources to master leadership and build responsible teams at ChristopherAvery.com and The Leadership Gift.

The basic process for an iteration retrospective is to gather the team for an hour (more or less as required by the length of the iteration), ask the team to generate two lists (what worked well and what the team would like to improve), then prioritize items in the list and commit to one or two small changes during the next iteration that, in the estimation of the team, will generate a large difference in product or process.

This process is simple and powerful. It follows an old, continuous improvement process for meetings called “plus/delta.” In the plus/delta process the group will reserve the last five minutes of any meeting to list pluses — or things that worked well — for that meeting (e.g. facilitation, staying focused) and deltas, or things the group would change to improve (e.g., too noisy, missing key people).

There are a number of obvious benefits to the retrospective (and the plus/delta), as well as some more subtle benefits that are powerful.

The Subtle Benefits Provide the Real Leverage

An obvious benefit to the retrospective is that it provides the team with a scheduled opportunity to reflect on the recent past and illuminate events, choices, procedures, and behaviors so each can be sustained or changed as the team desires. Successes and positives can be pointed out, checked for relevance, celebrated, or reinforced. Mistakes and disappointments can also be called out and assessed. Team members can agree to course corrections while individuals who may have committed a faux pas can be granted a second chance. In this way, the team and its members can claim ownership of how it executes its work, and it can exercise and reclaim that ownership during every iteration.

There is one situation that rises above all others in giving any team an opportunity to demonstrate team spirit — that place is team meetings.

Three related developmental benefits to the retrospective that are not so obvious:

1) Enactment: we create our reality by “acting as if.” The retrospective is designed for members to demonstrate that they are a team. The iteration retrospective is designed for

• high participation
• every voice to count
• individuals to combine and integrate their perspectives and interests and
• to reach a workable consensus about how to go forward together into the next iteration — to commit individually and as a group.

The key is participation. If a group doesn’t act like a team in team meetings — because of controlling leadership, disengaged members, horrendous meeting etiquette, or lack of opportunity to be heard — then it’s not likely to act like a team elsewhere. Encourage and make time for retrospectives and your team will be more likely to work well together. People who feel like their voice is being heard and that it matters are usually eager to do a great job and to support their team members to excel.

2) Reflexivity: the act of reflecting together for the sake of learning, correcting, and improving. Individuals who create time, space, and permission to reflect are able to grow and develop faster than individuals who don’t. The same is true with teams — in fact, some team experts consider reflexivity as one of the greatest predictors of team effectiveness. Any team that devotes face time to talking about how it is working together as a team is practicing reflexivity and will give itself a better chance to reach sustained high performance. Keep doing retrospectives well, and your team will be more likely to develop, grow, and be a learning team.

3) Closure: it’s difficult to start something new when something else remains mentally or emotionally unclosed. Win or lose, all teams (and all people) need closure. If a project or initiative abruptly ended without warning and you were expected to report to work the next day and “continue” with your work as usual, it probably felt awkward. That’s because you felt incomplete. So, while an iteration may be a short period of time, it’s still a whole cycle of intention and deserves to be completed. The retrospective is an excellent place for people to say what needs to be said — win, lose, or draw — so they can let it go and move on to the next iteration.

Claim All The Value Retrospectives Offer

Retrospective meetings are extremely valuable, not just for the obvious reasons of looking back with an eye for improving operations in the future but also for the contribution they make in developing the cherished qualities of team spirit. You won’t be sorry to invest time in retrospective meetings — they create trust, goodwill and cooperation, and respect for individuals — three key predictors of high performance.

Want a Good Resource?

I recommend Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great by Esther Derby and Diana Larson to my clients for a useful and practical book of tools for keeping retrospectives fresh and engaging.

Christopher Avery, PhD, supports agile leadership and business practices with the only how-to approach for taking and teaching personal responsibility. He is an advisor to leaders worldwide. Find additional resources for mastering agility and leadership or building a responsible team at The Leadership Gift.

Shared Responsibility

Early in my speech I asked how many in the room are in a position of “shared responsibility” in their workplace. I asked: “Are you in a position where you are  not in charge of them and they are not in charge of you but your own performance depends on what you do together?” Every hand went up. This is a challenging situation for most as the setup leaves us vulnerable because we can not guarantee that our teammates are doing a great job. If they don’t, their bad performance reflects on us.

As an organizational scientist I have spent the last 30 years researching the phenomena of people having a hard time taking personal responsibility. When things go wrong, we immediately find excuses and blame others for the poor performance. Why is that? In my speech I went into detail about what actually happens in those situations.

It is fascinating what goes on in our brain and how we are hard-wired to respond in a predictable fashion. There is a natural mental process that plays out dozens, maybe hundreds, of times every day that protects our egos from our own painful mistakes. More importantly, it keeps us from solving problems, adding value, and making forward progress.

The mental process is simply this: each time something goes wrong, we do our best to avoid owning it.

We all do it, no matter how responsible we attempt to be. It matters not whether the problem is big or small — the mental process is the same. The existence or lack of personal responsibility is not so much a character trait (or flaw) as it is a well-developed and practiced mental process. People who are well practiced in avoiding ownership for their actions are usually quite effective at it. The level of a person’s intelligence or other professional skills make little difference. In fact, the smarter someone is, the more creative that person will be to avoid ownership. Have you ever noticed that the most intelligent people tell the most elaborate stories?

“Who took my keys?”

Here’s an example to see this response in action. What’s the very first thing you think and maybe even say when your car keys are not where they are supposed to be? I’ll bet you it is: “Who took my car keys?! ” That’s not just a figure of speech. That’s the communication of a thought rooted in an assumption of cause and effect.

I call this Laying Blame, and it is the first of six ways we avoid owning it when something goes wrong. The other five ways are: Obligation, Shame, Justify, Lay Blame, and Quit. These are the positions of irresponsibility you’ll find illustrated on my Responsibility Process poster. You can download it for free at ChristopherAvery.com.

Why does our mind work like that? I’ll get into why we justify our behavior when our competence is challenged in my next blog post in this series. In the following weeks I will explain the whole Responsibility Process and point out why it is so important that we master to overwrite these initial responses in our mind with taking responsibility — because if we don’t change our behavior we will always be dependent on other people changing, and that is unlikely to happen.

You can see the whole video of the Agile Day NYC keynote speech here.

Christopher Avery, PhD, is a recognized authority on how individual and shared responsibility works in the mind and an advisor to leaders worldwide. Learn more about mastering leadership or build a responsible team (or family) at The Leadership Gift. Enjoy a more productive way to live and lead.

In general, managers and leaders foster way too many feelings of negative interdependence in their organizations. That is an unintended consequence of compartmental- ization, single-point accountability, budgeting, and sub-optimization in the name of organizational efficiency.

The Unfortunate Result

People are running around in each other’s way instead of helping each other toward the collective goal. Then we call problem-solving meetings to blame each other for being in each other’s way.

Interestingly, people’s behavior changes instantly and organically the moment they feel — not think, feel — that they are in the same boat together. They stop complaining and fighting for dominance and start supporting one another, coordinating with each other, giving and asking for help, and making contributions toward the whole. So perceptions matter, a lot. This is really about the meaning of work, not the actual design of work.

Keys to getting everyone feel they are in the same boat

1. Stop shining your huge spotlight on the pieces and start shining it on the whole. Spotlight the collective outcome or mission and hold it there while using just your tiny pen-light to illuminate the myriad assignments. Pursue that focus with the group, regardless of the size, until you achieve a condition I call “shared task clarity.” That condition is reached when everyone is completely clear about what the collective must achieve together. Only when that happens can everyone also stop worrying about whether others are working at cross-purposes to them.
2. Solicit help shining the light. Many of us attempt to clarify the bigger picture by independently crafting and sending a message — perhaps a statement of vision, mission, or purpose. If this achieves the desired condition, fine, but most of the time it doesn’t. Usually a dialog process, sometimes ongoing, that invites people into the process of pursuing shared task clarity is much more successful. Successful leaders understand the condition they must achieve at the beginning of a project — perceptions of shared task clarity — while others merely check off the “purpose statement” action item.
3. Know the standard you are striving to achieve. Here’s is the question the group (project team, staff group, partnership, etc.) must reach consensus on: What must we do together that is bigger than each of us, requires all of us, and none of us can claim individual victory until it is done?

It is exciting to observe the immediate and organic behavioral shift in people when they have successfully achieved this condition of feeling like they are in the same boat and are eager to help each other work toward the same goal. That’s the art and science of collaborative leadership at work.

Christopher Avery helps leaders worldwide to operate their business — and lives — far more productively and successfully. To find additional resources to master leadership or build a responsible team, please explore ChristopherAvery.com and The Leadership Gift.

4. Ideally, challenge the team to discover such a goal and invest time in that discovery process

In my five-step team orientation process (see Teamwork Is An Individual Skill: Getting Your Work Done When Sharing Responsibility), I treat the clear and elevating goal as one of five conversations a team must have (in fact, that a high-performance team will naturally engage in). But it’s not the first conversation I would encourage; it’s the fourth. There are three other things I would do first to give the team the best chance of reaching high performance. Those are:

1. Gain shared clarity about the team assignment or task as the reason for the team
2. Discover what’s in it for each member of the team to work on this assignment with this team
3. Make and keep operating agreements or a clear code of conduct to support the team and each team member

These conversations are based on the science of teamwork, and they are in the order of the leverage they provide to the team for the time and resources invested in the conversations. I’ll tell you more about it sometime at my workshop Knowledge Team Leadership.

5. It’s always a nonlinear process, a lateral-thinking exercise, and a surprising result

Most leaders make the mistake of challenging teams to “choose a number,” setting as its goal a performance metric for the business, project, or technology. That’s frequently misplaced MBA talk. Clear and elevating goals are usually qualitatively different than the assigned task while beautifully supporting the task getting done. For instance, a Wells Fargo team I supported in the early 1990s assigned to launch the first Internet banking service created the slogan “We’re reinventing banking” and envisioned itself on the cover of its industry’s trade journal. The team designed hotel-like hangers for its doorknobs that said: “Do Not Disturb. Busy reinventing banking.” It worked to create an inspired atmosphere for the team.

6. Breaking through conflict helps the team’s performance

It is important to note that clear and elevating goals seldom emerge until well into the project. In the forming-storming-norming-performing metaphor of team development, I’ve found that the storming phase is often resolved by the emergence of a clear and elevating goal, which then guides the norming and performing phases. You can support this process by helping the team develop healthy ways to disagree and stay committed to each other as a team.

Studies show a very high correlation between healthy communication practices (such as brainstorming, creative dialog, team learning, and conflict management) and the highest predictors of team performance (trust, goodwill and cooperation, and respect for individuals). This means you can create the conditions that are ripe for breakthroughs.

Want to apply this information right away?

Assess your project environments, leaders, and teams according to these six observations and ask yourself how you can alter the leadership equation so that teams are free to discover what they really want as a team. You will find that giving team members the change to take ownership of their involvement will create a better end result because they are motivated from having their individual voices heard and validated.

To learn more about maximizing teamwork results while empowering the individual team members, attend Knowledge Team Leadership or bring it to your work site.