Bringing Teams Together in Times of Discord
Considering the complexities that teams face in the modern workplace, it’s common to experience discord from time to time. The challenge lies in turning discord into an advantage——a launch pad for improved team cohesion.
Whether the business relationship manager has the luxury of well-established team relationships or not, the following points are helpful when managing difficult group dynamics:
Embrace convergence
Though it’s challenging, learn to be comfortable with friction in the group and encourage others to do the same.
Why?
Divergence is often the gateway to convergence. Bruce Tuckman’s forming-storming-norming-performing-transforming model of group development emphasizes that stages of discord are necessary for a team to grow, tackle challenges, find solutions, and deliver results.
Divergence is often the gateway to convergence.
Challenge the vision
Take steps to clarify goals and outcomes as early as possible. Identify a common goal to promote team unity and a collective purpose. Build excitement about the objective and the steps required to get there. Encourage the team to identify and communicate what success looks like to them. Promote dialogue that turns conversations from the negative to the positive.
Connect like-minded thinkers
Conduct team reconnaissance to get a pulse on individual team members to understand perspectives. Then, foster connections between team members who share similar thought processes and point to work that can be tackled in partnership. This is a simple and important way of promoting collaborative action as the way forward.
As a team leader, it’s critical that you lead by example and contribute wherever possible to drive performance.
Quick wins
Identify projects that can be accomplished quickly and easily to gain momentum. Celebrate accomplishments by deliberately identifying the impact of the work, acknowledging the contributors, and encouraging others to get involved accordingly.
As a team leader, it’s critical that you lead by example and contribute wherever possible to drive performance.
Build trust
Be authentic about your commitment to the team and its challenges. This means listening intentionally and asking meaningful questions to achieve understanding.
Remember not to overcommit—be honest about what you can and can’t do, and deliver on the commitments you promise. Reaching out to group members one-on-one can encourage candid conversations, in turn deepening trust-based relationships.
Be patient
Recognize that it takes time to build relationships and restore harmony after a period of discord. Be prepared to make continual and ongoing investments to promote team dialogue and encourage comfort with the uncomfortable.
When that seems difficult, take the time to remind yourself and your team that transformative opportunities lie on the other side of these rough waters. Embrace the journey.
Reflective practice
Take stock of the situation both individually and collectively. Lead dialogue that inspires reflective thinking to obtain a clear understanding of the current situation and the steps that led everyone there. Retrospective reflecting serves to diffuse harboured emotions and sentiments when examined in context, and high performance leaders commonly journal and reflect on past behaviour to improve future action. Challenge each team member to leave behind existing biases or positions and start anew.
Promoting team unity is a relational act, nebulous in nature and time-consuming in practice. Many business relationship managers sacrifice investments in team restoration to focus instead on achieving immediate business outcomes—don’t be one of them!
When you undervalue the relational component of delivering results, you ignore the fact that team convergence is a foundational business outcome of enduring and powerful consequence.
When you undervalue the relational component of delivering results, you ignore the fact that team convergence is a foundational business outcome of enduring and powerful consequence.
Investments in high-performance teams pay dividends that foster total business success, not to mention convergence with the broader business. It’s an investment worthy of the time.
Cyndi Cossais is a life-long learner who pursues opportunities that enrich her diverse experience and skill set. With a passion for innovation and relationship-building, she has successfully led profit-driven ventures through complex and challenging times over the past 20+ years. As a leader of diverse, multi-stakeholder organizations, Cyndi genuinely enjoys the authentic relationships built along the road to delivering results. An alumna of the University of Waterloo (Economic Development) and Brock University (Adult Education), her motto about work and life is to “stay curious.” She currently works for the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care, Health Services I&IT Cluster as an I&IT Senior Business Relationship Manager.
