The only thing that’s normal in the workplace now is that nothing is normal. The stresses and strains of growth, restructuring and churn, stiffening competition, major change initiatives, wider economic uncertainties and increased geostrategic risks are demanding. So far, nothing new. There are programmes in place in most organisations to support the resilience of the individual. What are we doing about the impact of stress on our teams? How are we helping our teams to adapt, to form and re-form quickly, to make the most of their diversity?
Stressful situations interfere with our ability to communicate effectively with each other. Poor communication leads to poor coordination, poor team cohesion, and ultimately to failures in delivery. Emotions are either suppressed or explode at the wrong moment. Problem solving is less effective, home lives deteriorate, creativity suffers, motivation plummets. Productivity slips. Trust is lost between colleagues, teams become isolated, and the leadership struggles to engage with the rest of the organisation. All of this puts the business at risk.
Here are some real examples from my personal experience of the strategic impact of poor communication:
Talent retention: “My boss kept giving me more work before I had even finished the last set of changes he’d asked for. I was frightened to say anything. Eventually I couldn’t take it any more, and I left the company. It’s a pity because otherwise I really liked working there”.
Personal performance: “I sometimes get home late and my partner is playing computer games. The house is a mess. We end up having an argument and then I can’t sleep. The next day, I’m not as effective as I might otherwise be”.
Problem solving and delivery: “One team member dominates the whole time. I’m quite new, and I don’t feel able to tell them to stop. On a number of occasions I have known what the problem was, but I just didn’t want to say anything. We lost days as a consequence”.
Organisational cohesion: “Our business objectives and the needs of our people are sometimes in conflict. It’s extremely hard to build sufficient trust with staff in order to explain the challenges that confront the leadership. They just don’t believe us, and so it’s really hard to bring about the organisational change we need to be successful.”
The key to a high performing team is strong personal relationships. These are dependent on trust. Trust is enabled, in part, by empathy. And empathy is enabled by better communication.
Our ability to communicate is what has made us so successful as a race. Reading, writing and conversing enables us to share and preserve information over time and distance. We send letters to each other, write books and read them, share news, influence, persuade, study. And yet we are still really bad at communicating, particularly when it comes to what’s really going on inside our heads. We shy away, deploying protective mechanisms. We say “I’m fine” when we’re not. We are elliptical with our feedback. We want to avoid conflict and vulnerability, and so we put on a smile and then protest in private, we consent and evade. Because we are angry, scared, or ashamed we don’t point out the glaring error, we don’t share the negative customer feedback, we hold back our discretionary effort. Or we let rip at the wrong moment, to the wrong people, about the wrong things. Occasionally, positions become entrenched, and then it’s hard enough just to be civil to each other, never mind collaborative.
Many of us shy away from our own internal "stuff". It’s not just that we struggle to talk about how we feel or what we really want, we don’t even know how to describe these truths. Our emotional vocabulary is underdeveloped, our needs unacknowledged. But this internal activity can bring real value to the workplace if properly handled. Our reactions are clues to faults in a product or a policy, hints for innovation and creativity, sparks of ideas for new avenues of business, the raw material for better collaboration.
A savvy business understands this and invests in helping its people communicate well with each other, particularly when things get stressful. That’s how teams are built, how problems are solved, how creativity is released, how damaging mistakes are avoided, and the future of the business is secured.
This is something I’ve been interested in for many years, both at small team and organisational level. There are many tools and techniques for dealing with our communication challenges. I’ve used MBTI, Belbin, games and activities of all shapes and sizes, inspirational speakers and so on. Each of these have their benefits, but they also have their limitations. Personality type indicators can feel like pigeon holes. They tell us why we irritate each other but not how to stop. Speakers, games and team building activities are fun and often instructive but their adhesive impact begins to evaporate as soon as we are back at our desks (wherever they may be). So, what works and what sticks, particularly in a world of hybrid working?
The first thing to recognise is that while resilient teams are dependent on the personality mix, just like in romance, the right mix isn’t an accident of fate. Humans are not static. We are dynamic beings, shifting and changing all the time. We create the right mix, or “the one”, for each other through continuous investment in good, two-way communication. We share and we listen (preferably in the reverse order). Interventions that really work are those that help us build that critical mutual understanding. This works. And because it works, it sticks.
There are four stages to this kind of intervention:
1. Identify what we are feeling and why we are feeling it.
2. Learn how to talk about it confidently, without provoking defensive responses in others.
3. Be interested in what others are feeling, and why.
4. Use the resulting empathy to build the trust that enables genuine collaboration.
If you are curious about how to facilitate and incentivise these three elements in your workplace, please get in touch with me at daniel.tarshish@geyik.co.uk
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