Resentment and fear don’t help people stay on their best behavior.  Effective teamwork requires great communication, mutual respect, support, and accountability.  Hard times create an environment where gossip, backstabbing, blaming, and team members protecting their backsides are all too common.

So what can you do to keep your team together when times are tough?  Here are several strategies that will help.

1. Share what you know.  Some team leaders try to protect people from the truth because they assume it will make folks more nervous.  People are smart enough to know when things aren’t great.  If you don’t tell them everything you know, they will start making up their own versions of the truth, and their versions will likely be quite a bit worse than what it actually is.  Be honest and forthcoming.
2. Lighten up on the goals.  If the conditions make it impossible to meet goals, neither cheer-leading nor demanding is going to change the fact that it isn’t going to happen.  You may want to back off on the performance expectations for a particular goal or take one or two goals off the table altogether, allowing the team to focus on what is achievable under the circumstances.
3. Keep a lookout for people who are stirring the pot.  Let’s face it, when things get tough there are some people who handle it better than others.  If you know people who are creating more fear within the team, it’s time to provide them with some extra support so that you minimize the damage they cause.  Remember to help them work through their concerns rather than threatening them.  The latter will only create more unproductive behavior that will be harder to discover as they take their concerns underground.
4. Use slow times for team development.  When things are booming we don’t do development work because everyone is too busy.  If things are slow, it’s the perfect time to do some skill development that will strengthen your group’s teamwork.  Three topics that can always help are communication, conflict management, and change management.  Check out some of these workshop ideas.  Invest in your team’s future.
5. Provide a good example.  You certainly don’t want to strut around wearing rose-colored glasses.  People will think you are either manipulative or clueless.  But you can stay positive, focus on the work at hand, and remain optimistic about the future.  People look to their leaders for cues about how they are supposed to respond.  Model the behaviors you want to see.

If the economic conditions are affecting your team, don’t wait until things improve, take action now. If you need help with a specific issue, contact us so that we can discuss some of the team building services that might improve the situation.

Dear manager,

Here’s a little secret I want to let you in on…just between us.  When you hire me to do a workshop so that your employees get along better with each other, they almost always ask me this question.  “Do the managers have to attend one of these workshops?”

They don’t usually fill me in on all the background that has led them to ask the question (although sometimes they do), but it’s obvious that some of the participants think their managers are not walking the talk.  Now I’m not in any position to know if that’s true or not, but I can report that the perception of managers pulling the old “Do as I say, not as I do” act does not make it any easier for me to convince employees that they ought to treat each other with more respect.

So here’s my bit of advice.  Even if you’ve learned everything there is to know about delivering an “I statement,” and you are clear as a bell about the differences between passivity, assertiveness, and aggressiveness; I wouldn’t start a new training initiative without the managers attending it first.  If I can tell people that you’re learning the same skills they’re learning, they will be more open to my message.  And a little refresher is always, well, refreshing.

And one more thing…It helps if you practice what you’ve learned and even better if employees can connect the dots between what they are learning and what they see you doing.  Your modeling of the behaviors means a lot to them

All the best,

Your trainer

Lately I’ve been wondering more about whether this same phenomenon plays out in the workplace. Over the years I’ve heard plenty of managers complain about employees not working well together. Often these same managers refer to their employees as children. They express their dissatisfaction with having to be a parent to their employees.

So the question is, where are the employees learning these behaviors? I would argue that an organization’s culture is formed at the top and trickles down through example and the reward/punishment systems. If frontline employees aren’t demonstrating teamwork, I usually start looking up the chain of command to see what kind of behaviors are being modeled. It’s not uncommon to see turf battles, political backstabbing, deception, holding back information and all kinds of really unproductive behaviors at the top. In these organizations, it is no wonder the employees are behaving badly. They’ve learned the behaviors from their leaders.