The next time you are in need of a trainer or speaker to do a session for your organization, I’d suggest you consider these questions:

• What results are you hoping to affect, by what degree, and by when?
• What behaviors and processes have the greatest impact on those results?

Here’s the secret to your project’s success. Approach it as a process, not just a single event.

Behaviors don’t change easily. People need information, encouragement, coaching, practice, time, and incentives. It’s unlikely they will get most of these from a single event or as people in my line of work like to call it, intervention. There are a series of things that should be done to start making progress towards the goals.

Here’s an example. Imagine you’ve got employees engaging in malicious gossip that is hurting the team, and naturally you want it to stop. So what should be done? I can think of many things that collectively could help.

• You ought to tell the group what you’ve noticed and share with them the impact that it’s having.
• Someone should dig into what the gossip is about and try to make a determination about why it’s happening.
• The group ought to be let in on the findings of this investigatory work.
• The group can then engage around the question, “What should we do to change this behavior?”
• Maybe the group needs some skill development in the areas of assertiveness and listening.
• Maybe they need practice at working through conflicts.
• They could probably benefit from establishing group behavioral norms.
• Some individuals might need more hands-on coaching.
• A monitoring system should be established.
• Follow-up needs to happen.

And the list could go on and on. The point is that real change rarely happens with a single speech, workshop, or team building event. Change comes as a result of a purposeful process that addresses the true concerns and provides the support that people need to move from points A to B.

If you want to tweak people’s interest and get them thinking, a single intervention often will accomplish that goal. If you want to make major change, you’ll need a plan that includes a series of interventions to start moving people towards the goal. And in the perfect world, you take it one step further by creating a system that sustains the organizational culture you are working to create.

Photo by John-Morgan

Let’s face it. Sometimes people just plain don’t like each other. So what’s a team leader to do in these situations?

People usually attribute this sort of problem to strong personalities.  Labeling the problem this way seems to be a justification for not doing anything about it.  After all, one cannot change the basic nature of another person, right?

There are actions you can take as the team leader.  Here are four.

• Establish the Ideal. Engage the group in a conversation about what kind of team they want to have.  Get them talking about behaviors that will make the team more successful and interesting for the members.  Groups have their own unique cultures.  Your job is to get the group to compare the culture they have to the one they want.
• Clear up fuzzy leadership. Sometimes people clash in the absence of clear leadership.  Perhaps these two are positioning for power and control of the team.  Assuming neither is right for the role, make it clear who is in charge.
• Try the obvious. While it may be the least attractive option, it is probably the most effective.  Talk with these people individually or together.  Let them know that their behaviors are affecting the team.  Work with them to understand the underlying problems and together develop solutions that will address the conflicts.
• Clean house. As a last resort, the leader may want to remove one or both of these people from the team.  If your gut is telling you that they are significantly cutting into productivity and effectiveness, and you have tried everything you and others can think of doing, this becomes a reasonable action.  Take it.

When it comes to life at work, most people don’t like conflict. It makes them uncomfortable and increases their stress. If given a choice they will avoid it. What they don’t realize is that by trying to avoid it, they are only missing an opportunity to do something positive about it.

Here’s the organizational leader’s challenge. Help employees understand that the potential pay-offs of conflict are innovation, personal growth and stronger relationships. Prove to them that the rewards outweigh the costs.

One way of doing this is by making your expectations clear and modeling them through your actions. Develop, communicate, and reinforce a set of conflict standards that everyone can follow. Imagine the impact on your organization if these statements were true:

• We address problems immediately and directly.
• We understand others before trying to make them understand us.
• We balance being kind with being right.

Another way to stress the importance of resolving conflicts is to give people the skills they need for doing so. Put all employees through conflict management training upon joining the organization, and supplement with regular follow-up. Employees will feel more comfortable with conflict if they are confident in their ability to deal with it.

If you want an organization that effectively addresses conflict, you’ll need to begin by changing employee attitudes about it.

Conflict can be good for an organization. Ice cream can be too. In either case, too much of a good thing usually leads to problems.

If you think your organization is plagued by more than its fair share of conflict, it’s time to investigate the underlying causes. Often times there are unresolved problems that act as massive conflict generators.

Tackling conflicts one-by-one is akin to swatting at mosquitoes. You know that smashing one might provide a psychological boost, but will do very little for your long-term comfort. If you want to have a lasting impact, you need to tackle the problems that are creating all the conflict in the first place. Here are eight that are often at the bottom of things.

• Unclear goals
• Fuzzy processes
• Undefined authority
• Extreme segmentation
• Poor modeling by senior leaders
• Scarce resources
• Favoritism and excessive politics
• Unmanaged stress

There isn’t an organization in existence that doesn’t have at least a few opportunities in this list. Figure out which ones are causing problems in your organization, bring together some smart people, and do something about them.

Photo by rmlowe

• They don’t care about the goals.
• They don’t get along with their co-workers.
• They don’t do their jobs.
• They don’t measure up in terms of skills and abilities.
• They create a toxic atmosphere.

What’s odd is that both managers and well-performing co-workers are well of this and aren’t willing to do anything about it. The usual excuse is that it’s just too hard to fire someone. Too much paperwork, too many legal challenges, too many hassles. While there may be a lot of all three of these, the question is whether it’s really too much. To answer this question we have to identify the costs of doing nothing. This list is easy to make.

• Low morale
• Low productivity
• Turnover of the people you don’t want to leave
• Poor customer service
• Law suits

If your gut is screaming someone needs to go, and you’ve done everything you can reasonably have done to help the person succeed but have not seen any improvement; then it’s time to make the change. Your team members want you to and it’s your responsibility. Do the right thing. Do it now.

In my world view, most people are half-way decent human beings. They try to do what’s right and get along with others as they go about their work. Most, however, doesn’t mean all. And if you are unlucky enough to have one of the exceptions working in your department, you are well aware of the problems these folks can create.

In dealing with this issue, there are two challenges. First, you’ve got to figure out if the person really is a bad apple or is just temporarily behaving badly due to a wide range of causes that might include home life, health, or bad working conditions. If you decide the person is rotten to the core, you need to figure out what to do about it.

Identifying Toxic People

First things first. How do you know if the person really is a bad apple? You examine the evidence. In their book, The Orange Revolution, Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton offer the following behaviors you are likely to witness in a truly toxic employee:

• Constantly complain about other employees.
• Others are at the worst when this person is around.
• Attack people rather than issues.
• Have plenty to say in hallway conversations, but won’t say anything in the room when it counts.
• Extremely disagreeable.
• Words don’t match actions.
• Claims to understand own bad behaviors but never changes any of them.

Options for Dealing with Problem

If several of these behaviors describe your person, then you can be reasonably sure this isn’t a temporary problem. It’s time to act. You have several options.

1. Do nothing and hope it goes away. You shouldn’t and it won’t. Far too many leaders choose this option out of a sense of hopelessness or fear of confronting the person. This option is bad for the team, bad for you, and even bad for the person creating all the problems.
2. Coach the person. This is always a good place to start. But due to the last behavior in the indicators list, it isn’t likely to succeed. The bad apple isn’t lacking skills or dealing with some temporary difficulty. The person is choosing to behave badly, but won’t admit to the behavior or the negative impact it is having. Chances are he or she has no intentions of changing. Still, everyone deserves a chance to get back on track. The trick is not letting this go on too long.
3. Enforce the expected behaviors. Your organization already has plenty of policies and behavioral expectations on the books. Hopefully, you have been clear about the behaviors you expect from members of your team. If this person violates them and hasn’t responded to coaching, enforce the rules. Use your progressive discipline process. Provide other consequences that will get the person’s attention. Sometimes people won’t change because they don’t think they have to. If you can demonstrate that bad behavior has consequences, you just might get the person’s attention.
4. Fire the bad apple. If your gut is screaming that this person is wrecking your team and you’ve already done 2 and 3, it’s time to send this person on his way. Organizations typically have a process for terminating an employee. Sometimes that process seems overwhelming. It doesn’t matter. It’s worth the effort. Work the process. You’ll be glad you did and the rest of your team will be too.

Nobody wants to deal with a bad apple on the team. The reality is that they do exist. If you find yourself needing to deal with this issue, my advice is simple. Plan your approach and get on with it. Things are not going to improve unless you act.

Once, after a three night stay in Madison, WI; I was left pondering three questions?

1. Why do more times than not hotel bathtubs drain slowly?
2. What processes do hotels have in place to clean drains once they don’t drain at all?
3. What percentage of hotel customers hate standing in water when showering?

My visit to this hotel would have been perfect, except for the whole plugged tub problem. Whenever this happens on a one night stay, I usually let the staff know on my way out so they can correct the problem for the next guest. Although I have no way of knowing whether they do or not, I assume that they didn’t know it was running slowly and I provide them with what I believe to be useful information.

On this visit, since it was three nights, I left a note on the tub after the first night, thinking problem would be solved for the next two nights. Nope, drain still clogged on night two and three. There goes the theory about they just didn’t know.

Like I said, I really liked this hotel. Staff was helpful, breakfast was tasty, room was clean and quiet. Is a slow-running drain a deal-breaker for where I go next time? No, especially because every hotel chain I’ve tried seems to have this same problem.

Maybe the staff cleans drains on a schedule, and it wasn’t time yet. Maybe they wait until it’s completely plugged and notice it when trying to clean a tub that’s full of water. In either case my conclusion was that they knew about the problem and chose to do nothing.

My note read “Hi, tub is draining slowly. Thanks.” I suppose a person might have interpreted my intent as “No biggie, but when you get around to it, you might want to check this tub drain.” Unfortunately that would not have been the correct interpretation. A closer one would have been, “I can’t stand the sound of shower water hitting standing water in the bottom of a tub and want this thing cleaned out so that I can enjoy my next two showers.”

If it is small stuff, don’t sweat it. Just make sure you know what is and what isn’t. And when you are in the customer service business, you aren’t the one who gets to decide. If the customer mentions it, the problem matters. Do something about it.

What do you do when someone on the team is unwilling to own up to anything?  If there is a mistake or some other kind of problem, this person almost always blames something or someone else for causing the problem.

Blaming is a behavior that hurts teamwork.  First of all everyone starts worrying about being blamed.  Trust among team members declines.  Communication erodes.  Fighting increases.

Second, blame keeps us from what we are trying to do.  Our goal should be to identify and solve problems.  If our energy is focused on who to blame, it is not on what happened and how we might prevent it from happening again.

If blame is a problem on your team, I recommend working hard to do something about it.  Here are three actions you might take.

• Evaluate the environment.  You need to figure out why people are blaming others.  What happens to people who make mistakes?  Are people rewarded for blaming others, reinforcing the bad behavior?  What is it about the system that makes this behavior acceptable?
• Point out the behavior.  Sometimes, as we defend ourselves, we turn so quickly to blaming that we are not conscious of the behavior.  Provide the person with feedback about his or her blaming behavior and inquire about the cause for it.  You might learn something important while helping the person gain a valuable insight.
• Shift the frame.  Help people understand that we need not find someone to blame, but might better use our time understanding what happened so that we can learn from it and hopefully prevent it from repeating.

Photo by misery.loves.company

How do you handle a new person who seems to know everything?

This is such a common problem.  The team members who have worked long and hard feel like the new person does not understand or appreciate their experience (and this is probably true).  The new person feels like the existing members are set in their ways and not open to new ideas (there is probably some truth to this as well).

Both sides become frustrated and upset and act in ways that perpetuate the misunderstandings.  While there will always be some growing pains, they can be managed using a few simple strategies.

• New member equals new team. When someone new joins the group, it will be tempting to expect the new person to fit into the existing team culture.  The problem is that every time membership changes it results in a new team.  The best approach is to open up all team processes and rules for reconsideration by everyone.
• Build empathy. Both new and old team members could benefit by trying to understand the opposite perspective.  When people are new, they want to be noticed, accepted, and valued.  When people have been on a team for a long time, they want the new people to recognize and appreciate the problems they have already solved and the work they have put in getting things to where they currently are.
• Provide coaching. If the new person is really ruffling feathers, it can be easy to sit back and watch the person self-destruct.  Don’t let that happen.  Talk to the person off line and give him a heads up.  This could mean letting him know how his actions are being taken by the group, and suggesting ways to ease in more smoothly.

Photo by .A.A.

In working with teams, I often ask the members to agree on a set of rules they will use to govern themselves.  After an hour or so of discussion, the group usually is able to agree on 4-8 rules it wants to adopt.  Each person promises to live by the agreement.

Sometimes I get called back to work with the team several months later.  One thing I like to do is ask the members to rank their adherence to the rules they established.  First I ask them to rank the group’s performance.  Then I ask each member to rank his or her personal performance.

It’s all done on a confidential survey.  When I tally the vote, it never fails that team members all think they are doing better at following the rules than the team as a whole is doing.

Garrison Keillor likes to talk about Lake Wobegon as a place where “All the kids are above average.”  Apparently when it comes to teamwork, the same phenomenon exists.

Groups need to learn how to identify problems.  Individuals need to be willing to accept their contributions to those problems.  If they can’t or won’t take ownership for part of the team’s struggle, it’s going to be nearly impossible to do anything about it.