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The first time my daughter brought me a tangled ball of her necklaces, she had lots of questions.
Like how did this happen? Which necklace started it? And what did the tangle look like on the inside?
These were tough questions to answer. But ultimately they didn’t matter so much. Because our job, I told her, was to be outside of the tangle and unwind it.
Which perfectly captures my approach to working with tangled or dysfunctional teams.
When teams are experiencing dysfunction, team members too often wonder how this happened. And who started it. By the time they come to me, often they’ve spent months or longer trying to unwork the tangle from inside of it.
And I tell them we can only untangle the mess from the outside in. And here are some ways to approach this.
You can't untangle a mess of necklaces from the inside. You have to look at the chaos from outside.
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Redefine a shared purpose
Not at the altitude of rainbows and butterflies. But practically.
Commonly, when I come in, the team may have shared goals – like sales or revenue targets. But how they believe they are collectively striving to deliver those goals? May be misaligned. Which causes friction and fighting for resources.
Stepping outside of the tangle begins with a collective discussion of what we’re all building, for whom (customer? Patient?) and why that matters.
It’s not spiritual or existential. But a North Star everyone can look toward.
2. Understand the core value of each team
The next essential piece is for each member of the team to truly understand the value their colleagues bring to the table. Meaningfully.
See, often I’ll find each member of a leadership team can state the high-level job description of their colleagues. But that’s insufficient. Because also often? The head of one team or function really sees another as an obstacle – a point of slog or friction.
Like the head of product “knows” the job of marketing. But fundamentally the product leader wishes marketing “would just listen more – because we know the specs and they’re always trying to…”
Understanding the job – on paper – our colleagues are meant to do is not the same as valuing the contribution they’re making to the end goal. And in a great untangling, this is an essential step.
They’re often fighting for decision rights – to know “who gets the ‘D’.” But this is the wrong question. When we step outside and can see and appreciate the value each team brings to the outcome? Ways of working begin to work themselves out.
3. Choose the right inflection points
In Dan Heath’s latest book Reset, he talks about the power of inflection points in creating change.
In essence he’s saying (or at least, what I’m hearing is…) we don’t push a boulder up a hill by pushing a boulder up a hill. We find a spot “where a small amount of effort can yield a disproportionately large return.”
Like in the untangling of necklaces, you don’t randomly start yanking. You find a small point of slack and begin there.
With teams, I don’t focus on the heat of the conflict. I help them find a simple starting place – perhaps a single recurring meeting or way or planning or forecasting that – if we made a small change (how the meeting is structured; who participates or plays which role) could potentially have an outsized positive impact on downstream interactions.
4. Craft experiments
And finally, we pull. And we see what happens.
We don’t sit in a room together crafting a 12-month solution. We begin with just our first steps.
We make some small changes to that meeting or forecast. The team commits to test driving it. And we watch the outcome. Did it infuse any slack or ease? Did it teach us something important? Should we do it again? Dial it up? Or do we need to try something new.
Untangling dysfunction takes time. It’s a journey.
But not until everyone inside the tangle is willing to step outside of it can progress begin to happen.