Leadership spotlight: How to lead high-performing teams

Help your team get along and like each other – Selin Kesebir

Recently, I was teaching a group of managers about giving feedback. I asked: “How many of you give positive feedback always, or almost always, whenever you notice something praiseworthy?” About half of them raised their hands. That was a good ratio – usually it’s a third or less. Next, I asked “Do we have anyone here who never, or almost never, gives positive feedback?” Two managers raised their hands. One of them was especially sceptical about the value of being so liberal with positive feedback. He asked if it wouldn’t make more sense to give positive feedback only to the one truly outstanding team member. Otherwise, how could that member know they are special? His point was that he would motivate his team more by having them compete for his positive regard, and the status of the “special one” in his eyes.

There are certainly some people who respond to competitive pressure more than they respond to positive feedback. But this manager’s approach has a major cost. The cost is to the relational fabric of the team. Because, in high-performing teams, members see each other as allies and resources, and not as rivals. They are not constantly self-conscious about their relative status and hence insecure. Rather, they enjoy a sense of safety and trust. As a result, team members are on good terms, everyone is connected, and everyone speaks up.

In contrast, poor teams are characterised by excessive internal competition, isolation, and relational conflict. In some teams, certain members don’t speak to others, meaning that the flow of information is curtailed. They may be competing and thus unwilling to give any advantage to the other, or they may simply dislike each other. In other teams, you can count on certain members to take opposite sites – no matter what the question. Things are personal.
Most leaders know that they need to have a good relationship with their team members. But few leaders pay attention to how the team is getting along internally. Fewer yet aim to actively promote positive relationships within the team. What can leaders do to support and enhance positive relational dynamics in their teams?

The first requirement is fairness. Where leaders play favourites and members are competing for the status of the favourite, relational conflict is hard to escape. Members will have fewer reasons to resent each other when the leader is constantly fair and transparent. While it is only human to like some team members more than others, good leaders treat all team members with the same respect and professional decorum. They do not gossip with one team member about another, and actively discourage gossip and relational conflict. This is because they know how gossip can create factions inside the team, which is often fatal to morale and performance. They communicate that relational conflict is hurtful to the team and all members are expected to focus and cooperate on team tasks rather than each other.

In sum, if you want to lead a harmonious team, you need to be fair and transparent. You need to stand at an equal distance to all team members and not allow any team member to create factions by gossip. Finally, you will want to communicate that relational conflict is not acceptable because it can only derail the team’s performance.

Selin Kesebir is Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School.

Stop blaming the team for underperforming – Randall S Peterson

If you have ever managed a team, you know that conflict within the team is as inevitable as it is distracting. Many teams simply do not reach their potential, oftentimes because they are embroiled in conflict, but sometimes it is just not clear. I have been working with and studying teams for over 30 years, and it is not uncommon to have an underperforming team made-up of high potential individuals. So, if it is not the individuals, then why might your team be underperforming?

The trap I see managers fall into over and over is looking to hold individuals to account for team performance problems. The insight from my research is straight-forward enough -- you can only solve team-level problems with team-level solutions. To illustrate this point, let me share a fairly common scenario I see. That is when teammate Chris explains to teammate Jay how to do something and Jay does it badly, whose fault is it? Chris will blame Jay for not listening. Jay will blame Christ for a poor explanation. We come in as a manager and are presented with two explanations, so we take that as given and assign blame to one or the other, or occasionally both.

Blaming both for any negative outcome is closest to the truth – which is that they are both responsible and neither are individually responsible. The problem is that there has been a communication breakdown, which could be one or the other, but could also be a result of a team culture that asks everyone to take-on a large workload, leaving little time to listen and deliver something new. In that case look to yourself as team leader and look to everyone on the team to change the culture of the team.

Here’s another insight: We are trained from early work to hold individuals to account for their actions. When we do this in a team, the blame game begins. Chris blames Jay, Jay blames Chris, and the team leader fuels the fire by taking sides or blaming them both as individuals. None of that solves the problem. This drive for individual accountability in a team encourages teammates to blame each other, defend themselves, and slowly they come to dislike each other, undermining trust in the team, and making it difficult to work with each other in the future. In other words, our instinct to assign blame is not harmless. Rather it actually undermines interpersonal trust and future team performance.

You can stop this process from taking control of your team by being vigilant whenever bad news comes to your team. It may be tempting, but do not ignore it. Nor should you take sides. Instead, you need to engage directly with the team, identify any team-level problems and solve those. Focus the team on fixing problems and avoid attributions of blame.

Randall Peterson is Professor of Organisational Behaviour and Academic Director for the Leadership Institute at London Business School.