We all want a team where leaders trust each other, work well together, and are moving in the same direction. It’s much more productive, not to mention more enjoyable.
Most of us have also been on teams where two or more people couldn’t seem to work together, meetings were tense, and the friction affected everyone else.
How do we create a leadership team that gets along better?
One clarification: the goal is not a tension-free team. Healthy tension produces honest conversations, better decisions, and stronger commitment. A team can experience tension without losing trust or productivity. A team doesn’t even have to “get along” all the time. They do have to be cohesive and productive.
What we really want is to eliminate unhealthy tension: when it gets personal, two people just can’t seem to get along, and it’s pulling the whole team down.
With that out of the way, here are four steps to solve the problem:
- Set standards of behavior
Most teams haven’t clarified how they will act with each other. In my framework, we haven’t given the gift of clear truth, as the leader, to the people on our team. How can we expect them to behave when we haven’t set the standards of how we will behave?
An example of a standard is that we debate ideas but don’t attack people.
I worked with a leadership team at a real estate organization who laid down simple expectations of how they would behave in the room when they disagreed with each other, encapsulated in a team playbook. Just like the example above. That clarity and practical playbook began to change the team dynamic.
Often it’s the leader who needs to set these standards. I’m reminded of Alan Mulally, who turned around Ford Motor Company, creating a business card-sized short list of how they would interact with and treat each other, which turned around the culture of their leadership team.
- Get to know each other
It’s hard to extend grace to someone whose story you don’t know. That means we need to spend time knowing each other’s stories better.
One of my go-to tools was taught to me by Patrick Lencioni. It’s simply having team members answer three questions about themselves:
- Where did you grow up?
- How many siblings do you have and where do you fall in that order?
- Describe a unique or interesting challenge or experience from your childhood.
This creates a different type of conversation. It gives the gifts of Presence and Grace. The team slows down, listens to one another’s stories, and begins to understand each other differently.
- Work on individual target behaviors
We all have behaviors we need to work on. For example, we may need to pause and listen before reacting, address issues head on, or take time to build a personal connection with others.
Every person on the team needs to pick a behavior they are working on. We’re in this together, working on being better leaders together. We’re not singling anyone out or pointing fingers.
Then, you have to work on the behaviors, together, as a team. Set aside regular time to remind each other the behavior you are working on and share positive progress (not perfection).
Your team will start to have very different, positive conversations with each other, and behavior overall will begin to improve.
- Decide what’s next
Here’s what’s going to happen. The cohesion and productivity of the overall team will grow. And the team members who are creating the unhealthy tension will either buy-in to the standards and the process or they won’t. More often than not, they’ll buy in and the team will move in a healthier direction. Keep on with the process.
Sometimes people will refuse to engage in the process, at which point you have a choice: keep the person and sacrifice team cohesion or let the person go.
I hate to let someone go without going through the work, as a team, of improving behavior. Because sometimes the problem is that we just haven’t put an emphasis, as a team, on behaviors. So of course there would be unhealthy behavior.
At the same time, when we’ve given that chance, I’ve personally seen how much better teams become when the one person who refuses to change is no longer on the team.
Final thought: the number one factor in whether this works is whether you, as the leader, are committed to it. The leader must go first by setting the standard, engaging in a different type of conversation, working on your own behavior, and holding people accountable to working on theirs.
Teams don’t become cohesive by accident. They become cohesive because leaders intentionally create the conditions where trust can grow. Set the standard. Know each other. Grow together. Hold each other accountable. When teams consistently pass Presence, Truth, Grace, and Belief, people don’t just get along better, they become a team that can navigate tension while staying united, productive, and moving forward together.
