This readable book includes astute analysis and practical tools developed by leading specialists with much experience of fixing teams. It is welcome and timely, especially as there are so many work teams that are dysfunctional. Fixing them would benefit all concerned.
— Professor Greg J. Bamber, Monash Business School, Monash University
In today’s busy workplace, the need to work productively and harmoniously with others is critical, but not always the reality. Fix Your Team explores the common dysfunctions that can derail your team’s effectiveness, and provides practical solutions to move your team dynamic from dysfunctional to functional. Make some time to Fix Your Team.
— Dermot Crowley, author of Smart Work and Smart Teams and founder of Adapt Productivity
Fix Your Team is a very well organized, step-by-step guide for anyone who wants to improve their workplace and team dynamics, regardless of the size of their organization. From toxic personalities and reluctant or abrasive managers, to downsizing and overtime, the authors tackle every imaginable issue and break them down into manageable bites of what to do. Rose Bryant-Smith and Grevis Beard pack decades of experience into this very practical guidebook.
— Bill Eddy, training director, High Conflict Institute, and author of 5 Types of People Who Can Ruin Your Life: Identifying and Dealing with Narcissists, Sociopaths and Other High-Conflict Personalities
A wonderfully practical and informative tool for leaders, with helpful examples and case studies that will really guide you through the difficult scenarios we see on a daily basis, not just the theory!
— Rebecca Fraser, Head of Human Resources, Energy, EnergyAustralia
Finally! A book that addresses the most commonplace issues impacting team dynamics and effectiveness … and delivered with logic and humour. Rose and Grevis are to be congratulated on clearly identifying both the problems AND the solutions.
— Cath Gillard, Executive Director, People & Culture, Australian Red Cross Blood Service
In today’s competitive environment, organisations need to bring out the best in everyone. Fix Your Team is a definitive guide for all those on the front line — managers, human resources, risk, legal and other internal advisors — to get employees working with, and not against, each other. With actionable guidance on building buy-in, executing the strategy and staying the course in tough times, Fix Your Team is an essential read.
— Christina Gillies, independent company director and Chair of the Victorian Council of the International Women’s Forum
There is a lot of preaching about the value of teams at work – but it’s not always backed up with practice. Here’s a book that locates the most common problems and helps you and your team fix them. A clearly written handbook that will help you and your colleagues realise their true potential.
— Rob Goffee, Emeritus Professor, Organisational Behaviour, London Business School
Fix Your Team offers a comprehensive guide to the problems faced by those managing a team. The authors’ experience and expertise are apparent in the detailed analysis of underlying problems and practical advice to resolve them. Every manager will find value in these pages.
— Nick Grant, Director of Human Resources, Australia, K&L Gates
This book will be a critical read for all managers and professionals looking to build a thriving team. It’s easy to find a book to tell you how to build a great team, but there are not many that so effectively and pragmatically help you to eliminate the dysfunction and barriers that will prevent you from even starting to thrive! Read it all, or dip into it when you see dysfunction — either way, you will find real and practical help.
— Aaron Lamers, Human Resources Director Northern Europe, General Mills
Managing your team has just become a whole lot easier with this book. Fix Your Team is a compelling guide to realising your team’s full potential. The authors advance specific team goals and offer a myriad of suggestions, including fun team activities, on how to achieve this. This book is a must-have reference for all team managers.
— Isabel Metz, Professor of Organisational Behaviour, Melbourne Business School
A must read for anyone despairing of the dysfunctional team they have joined, inherited or hired. Fix Your Team is the practical guide for leaders, managers and employees that provides realistic solutions to seemingly impossible team dysfunctionality. The Fix Your Team Toolkit will help you shift the dysfunction and build team morale, values and good behaviours.
— Kimberley Poynton, Head of Human Resources, Ivanhoe Grammar School
When teams work well, they work very very well, and when they don’t, they are horrid. If you ever need help with improving your team’s dynamics, then this book is the one for you. It is the ‘one stop shop’ for unearthing what’s going wrong, identifying the ways forward, and implementing the necessary solutions.
— Chris Roussos, Executive Director, People & Corporate Support, St Vincent’s Hospital, Melbourne
Fix Your Team is the tool that many team leaders have been wanting. For many years, I have written and spoken about organisational culture. Every team, no matter how big or small, has a culture. The team leader is pivotal in setting in that culture. Where can a team leader start in assessing and improving the team’s culture? Reading Fix Your Team is the ideal starting point.
— Neville Tiffen, specialist consultant in business integrity, corporate governance and compliance, member OECD Secretary-General’s high level advisory group on integrity and anti-corruption
Teams outperform individuals when they work well together! Fix Your Team identifies common team dysfunctions then offers 14 insightful, tailored and specific tools to overcome them. Anyone on any team would be well served by accessing these insights.
— Dave Ulrich, Rensis Likert Professor, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan
First published in 2018 by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd
42 McDougall St, Milton Qld 4064
Office also in Melbourne
© John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd 2018
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the Australian Copyright Act 1968 (for example, a fair dealing for the purposes of study, research, criticism or review), no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, communicated or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission. All inquiries should be made to the publisher at the address above.
Cover design by Wiley
Cover image and internal illustrations © Flipser/Shutterstock
Disclaimer
Although based on aspects of actual complaints, conflicts and team dysfunction we have resolved in our professional work, no character, situation or organisation described in this book represents any real person, situation or organisation. The contents of this book are provided as general information only. We recommend seeking advice from a qualified lawyer before acting on any matter with legal implications.
The material in this publication is of the nature of general comment only, and does not represent professional advice. It is not intended to provide specific guidance for particular circumstances and it should not be relied on as the basis for any decision to take action or not take action on any matter which it covers. Readers should obtain professional advice where appropriate, before making any such decision. To the maximum extent permitted by law, the authors and publisher disclaim all responsibility and liability to any person, arising directly or indirectly from any person taking or not taking action based on the information in this publication.
To the team at Worklogic. Every day you demonstrate accountability, integrity, confidence, wisdom and joy. Every day you innovate and collaborate to build happy, healthy, productive workplaces across Australia. Worklogic is the best team we know.
Rose Bryant-Smith is an in-demand workplace consultant and company director. With a background in employment law, ethics and leadership, she has a deep understanding of workplace dynamics and what makes people tick. Rose is passionate about building productive and happy workplaces, where everyone can thrive.
Grevis Beard’s career over the last twenty years has included legal, advocacy and consulting roles. His advice is sought on the full gamut of workplace behaviour issues, conundrums and conflicts. A self-diagnosed extrovert, Grevis is a popular speaker on the conference circuit.
Together Rose Bryant-Smith and Grevis Beard co-founded and lead Worklogic, a respected workplace advisory firm. Worklogic works with employers to prevent and minimise the impact of inappropriate conduct in the workplace, and to build a positive culture. Worklogic’s client list includes major companies, government departments, non-profits and other good employers across Australia.
For more information on Worklogic, visit www.worklogic.com.au
Our heartfelt gratitude goes to our incredible families, who support us to grow and to thrive. We also thank our clients — experienced managers, workplace relations advisers, law firm partners and other experts — who provided sage advice and helpful feedback on this manuscript.
Working in a dysfunctional team is frustrating and stressful. No one wants to show up every day to a team that is constantly distracted by in-fighting, dragging each other down, disrupting one another’s performance, performing poorly, or engaging in unethical behaviour. At Worklogic we hear story after story of employees who feel sick with dread when they arrive at work in the morning, who despair as the team’s productive efforts are undermined, and who feel like they spend more time working on the team’s issues than getting the real work done. This sort of dysfunction has an impact on team members, managers, leaders, and service functions such as human resources, risk, legal and compliance.
Team dysfunction quickly becomes visible to the broader organisation. Complaints, gossip, staff turnover and transfers out of the group are all signs that things are not going well. The team’s tangible results also suffer. This can reflect poorly on the manager of the team, whose reputation, fairly or unfairly, will inevitably be affected. This is not something the organisation can afford to ignore.
Team dysfunction can have a huge personal and psychological impact. Whatever your role, you may feel stressed, anxious and preoccupied, and confused about what is going on. You may be unsure how to go about fixing things and be worried that, even if you ‘do something’, team communication, behaviour and morale could keep getting worse.
If you’re working in, managing or advising a dysfunctional team, you will see firsthand the destructive impact of team dysfunction on productivity, cooperation, innovation, communication, output and morale, as well as the flow-on effects on profitability and customer satisfaction.
If this sounds familiar to you, you are not alone! From decades of experience in helping employers to identify and address team dysfunction, we know that managers and supervisors are often frustrated by a lack of time, experience, resources or good advice on how to deal with these problems. Meanwhile, employees working in the team feel powerless and fearful of the consequences for their job security if they speak up.
That’s why we wrote this book. Treat it like a workplace lifebuoy: keep it safe and always within reach.
If you are a manager, by applying the Fix Your Team Toolkit of interventions you will demonstrate leadership skills that will help you to cement (or if necessary salvage) the respect and trust of your reports and your colleagues. You’ll demonstrate that you are ‘on top of the problem’ and have the skills to handle tricky situations in your team. Rather than go to your own supervisor or to Human Resources with the problem (‘My team is a mess and I don’t know what to do about it’), you’ll demonstrate insight and good judgement by presenting the challenge, the solution and the business case for the remedial intervention in a professional and credible way.
If you work in a service function such as Human Resources or Risk and Compliance, a core part of your role is to advise on tricky workplace situations. You know that dysfunctional teams can create havoc in the organisation. Problem teams that are left to their own devices only become more problematic. Entrenched problems rarely solve themselves, and they have impacts that are far broader than the personal consequences for individual team members. The risks arising from bad behaviour and poor team functioning include:
Team members, meanwhile, deserve better than to have to tolerate dysfunction, disputes and disappointment affecting one-third of their waking hours (for full-time workers). Life is too short to spend it in a toxic work environment! One of the worst impacts for employees is a sense of hopelessness, the feeling that you are stuck: there is nothing you can do to change your situation, but you can’t afford to change jobs. Fix Your Team offers real, practical hope to team members, as well as team managers and advisers. Everyone can influence a team’s morale, values and behaviours, so they can all look forward to going to work again.
The guided approach we outline in this book can be applied by anyone who is working in, managing or advising a dysfunctional team. Whether you are a team member, in a service function, a team manager or a more senior executive with a dysfunctional team in your portfolio, this book will help. It will teach you how to identify dysfunction in your team, understand what is really going on, work out what to do about it and get everyone back to work. We will help you to:
There are incredible benefits to be gained for the team and the organisation in tackling head-on the problems that are holding your team back. Fix Your Team will help you to:
If you are a manager, you will also demonstrate your commitment to productivity, genuine care for your employees and a healthy working environment. You will earn greater respect from your direct reports and peers and from senior managers, and demonstrate that the company values are real and not just marketing spin.
This book is structured to be used flexibly and practically. Part I sets out 12 common situations that cause team dysfunction and identifies some of the key problems you may be dealing with. We have also provided you with case studies based on real-life scenarios from workplaces across the world to demonstrate what team dysfunctions look like. Once you have a better feel for what’s going on in your own workplace, read Part II to identify which tools you need to apply. These tools are arranged in themes, according to the outcome you are trying to achieve.
These tested strategies include practical exercises you can use to implement change in your team. In each case we provide a description of the tool, what you need to do to implement it, and tips and traps to be aware of as you do so. Some of the tools you can implement yourself; others may need the involvement of Human Resources or an external expert.
It can be tricky to navigate the politics of your organisation to gain the understanding, buy-in and resources you’ll need. Part III explains how to build a plan, a business case and support in your organisation for the interventions you have chosen.
Addressing team dysfunction can be tough. You will be implementing change, having difficult conversations and telling some people what they don’t want to hear. The final chapter, ‘Buckle up!’, sets out four strategies you can use to remain effective and stay sane as you set about fixing your team.
While your team is getting back on track, we’re here to help. Keep in touch and access additional help and advice by subscribing at www.fix-your-team.com.
Before you can apply the right tools to get your team back on track, you first need to identify what’s going wrong. You need to:
Don’t worry if you feel a little overwhelmed as you begin to diagnose the issues. The chapters in part I are designed to help you. We will set out the 12 most common dysfunctions that we have seen in workplaces across Australia and overseas over the past 20 years.
The Symptoms box at the start of each chapter in Part I lists the behaviours that commonly manifest when a team is in the grip of that particular dysfunction. Do any of those symptoms look familiar? You may very quickly recognise a dysfunction that you and your team are experiencing. Keep reading and you’ll learn how and why that problem arises, and how it affects team functioning.
Don’t stop when you identify one dysfunction your team is experiencing. There may be one or a variety of issues, which may be distinct or enmeshed together. In our experience, it’s rare that only one specific problem affects a team over a long period of time. Usually a team in crisis is facing two or three challenges, such as an unassertive manager, confusion over accountabilities and values, and a toxic personality who is taking advantage of the situation. Review all 12 dysfunctions to determine whether more than one is present in your team.
After identifying the problems your team is facing, Part II will guide you through some further thinking, as you progress towards choosing the right interventions for you.
It’s human to want to understand situations, read the play of social activity and recognise the motivations of others. We like to guess at what’s going on, and, in our less honourable moments, we may feel smug satisfaction when people we envy or dislike are struggling. Gossip exists in many workplaces, and it can be destructive.
The positive sharing of information can be healthy. Constructive speculation about what’s going on in the company, “building social connections with colleagues, discussion of who might get that sought-after promotion — these conversations are quite natural. As humans, we try to make sense of what’s happening around us, even when we have little information on which to base our understanding. Whether out of competition, curiosity or a genuine wish to see our colleagues succeed, we’re inherently interested in what other people are doing.
If the speculation is negative and seeks to drag someone else down, that’s a very different story. This is gossip: nasty, inflammatory and potentially embarrassing to the target.
Gossiping employees select isolated pieces of information (facts) and turn them into something bigger (speculation). We’ve all heard it: exaggeration, embellishment and rumours. Will our co-worker get fired? Who did what to whom at the end-of-year party? What’s really happening in this or that colleague’s life? Many of us have overheard sensational and salacious tales about who has a drinking problem, who is having an affair, drug addiction, financial trouble, and what questionable leverage Kaylene must have with the CEO to have won that promotion.
The problem is that such reality TV–style dramas are often embellished, unreliable and disruptive. Gossips who fabricate juicy tales when they should be working are often incredibly distracting to their co-workers. Sharing personal, private information, whether or not it is true, is inappropriate and potentially destructive.
Gossips can be driven by social ambition, self-worth issues, jealousy, spite, mischief or plain old boredom. Some gossips spread rumours to fill the void of a quiet period at work, while others spread gossip deliberately and strategically to gain an advantage over others.
One consequence of gossiping (that the gossips themselves usually don’t seem to understand or care about) is that gossips are never trusted. Only other gossips and clueless hangers-on will share information with such people.
At its heart, gossip is a power play used to harm and disempower others. Far from ‘harmless’, it often amounts to bullying others. Under Australian workplace laws, bullying at work occurs when a person or a group of people repeatedly behaves unreasonably towards a worker or a group of workers, and the behaviour creates a risk to health and safety. Bullying can involve, for example: aggressive or intimidating conduct; belittling or humiliating comments; spreading malicious rumours; teasing, practical jokes or ‘initiation ceremonies’; exclusion from work-related events; unreasonable work expectations, including too much work, or work beyond a worker’s skill level; displaying offensive material; or pressure to behave in an inappropriate manner.
Negative, targeted and ongoing gossip is, at its heart, a pattern of unreasonable conduct towards a colleague. Gossips use information and misinformation to harm, disempower and exclude others.
Sometimes, gossip includes sexual content and innuendo, or maligning colleagues for engaging in sexual conduct (actual or invented). This can contribute to a sexualised culture and can even amount to sexual harassment: unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature.
Gossip can be a symptom or tool of resistance to change, or rejection of accountability. Malicious rumours can be used to undermine, deter or marginalise the manager who is trying to effect change. Gossip can also be about fear or suspicion of outsiders — for example, false statements being made about the beliefs, practices or lifestyle of a stakeholder from a different cultural background (see chapter 7).
Aristotle famously said that nature abhors a vacuum, postulating that any space or void would immediately fill with life. Gossip loves silence, filling it with vague information and speculation. Misinformation will thrive when no one in the workplace really knows what’s going on. Employees who don’t trust their manager or who lack information will make things up to fill in the blanks. A false answer, to them, is better than no answer at all.
This means that in times of change or upheaval, such as during restructures, gossip can run riot. In these circumstances, employees quite naturally feel fearful and insecure and seek answers, while the organisation’s leaders cannot answer every question, perhaps because not all the information is available yet. Gossips then step in to fill the information void.
Gossip can disrupt and damage:
If the gossip spreads to social media platforms, the negativity and criticisms are even more public. These forums are less controlled and far more visible to the outside world, which ramps up the potential risks to the individuals and the employer. Social media creates the perfect environment for gossip to flourish, as the following case study illustrates.
You can see from this example how easily gossip can spread. Complaints of sexual harassment and bullying have arisen when gossips have speculated about an affair, that an employee ‘slept their way to the top’ or that a team member ‘got fired from their last job for fraud’.
In these ways gossip creates a toxic culture of distrust in:
Of course, the people who are most affected by gossip are the targets themselves. Gossip can tear down their reputations, disrupt their careers and distract them from the tasks at hand. It causes anger, embarrassment and shame. They waste their time focusing on social dynamics rather than on productive work. Rumours and fabrications can be so inflammatory that they push a person to quit.
A gossip culture within a team is hard for the supervisor to manage, as it’s difficult to intervene in one-on-one ‘social’ conversations, so they can spend enormous amounts of time trying to manage the fallout.