Why your team eats itself and what to do about it
It can be one of the most frustrating things in the workplace. You've built a dream team. Between them, they have all the competencies, skills and experience they need to perform. Individually, they're at the top of their games. And when working together, they're incredible most of the time too.
Except when it really matters.
When they're up against it, they crumble. They bicker, they fight, they disintegrate into cliques, and they become defensive. In fact, they seem to do pretty much everything they can to avoid achieving the thing they need to achieve. They're all aware of it and always look back on each episode of collective madness with a mix of disbelief, shame and denial, but they seem unable to help themselves when push comes to shove. The team building and discussions and commitments don't seem to help either. You're at a loss. You're also taking a lot of heat from your boss who can't work out why you can't get things working.
One way of understanding - and addressing - this conundrum lies in the field of group dynamics. One of the key principles in the field is that group behaviour is more than just the sum of the behaviour of the individuals in it. The group itself has a set of properties that, whilst they emerge out of its constituent parts, take on a life of their own; interrelated and yet somehow in addition to.
One of the reasons for this is that groups have a huge emotional significance for us humans, and for our wellbeing and survival over time. Given this, we have a natural and unconscious concern to preserve the integrity of any group we find ourselves in. This concern is heightened when our group is under threat. In those contexts, we may impulsively deploy defensive behaviours that would once have been called for, but which are now over the top.
Teams at work are no different, and when the pressure's on - particularly in high-stakes or high-accountability contexts - the people in them can find themselves behaving in what look like very strange, irrational and counterproductive ways, completely unsuited to the context. These might include collectively blaming someone or something for all of their ills (scapegoating) or pinning all of their hopes and dreams on one person or on a fantasy future in which all will be well.
The trouble with this, of course, is that it all directs time and attention away from the work that needs to be done, offloading the emotional energy and putting it somewhere else rather than using it productively or creatively. This process is the group equivalent of what the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein called 'projection', where an individual disowns and 'splits off' the unwanted aspects of their self and assigns them elsewhere. When the projection takes place within a team, people can suddenly find that they start playing a role without really thinking about it or that they've been ascribed a role which comes heavily weighted with the group's expectations, and which is therefore very hard to resist.
The compulsion to comply with a group's collective unconscious needs can be extremely powerful and so the behaviour one sees can be quite exaggerated, whether it involves someone taking control, offering solutions, playing the clown or acting like a martyr. My own predisposition in a group under pressure is to become 'the dependable one', perhaps representing a need for predictability, reliability and order, or because of my attributes. In any case, the sense of relief in a group when its anxiety has been lifted by this sort of unconscious offloading can also be very compelling and correspondingly difficult to challenge. But because the new set of assumptions are in service of the group's need to avoid disintegration rather than to achieve the task in hand, this challenge is vital. Because when a team gets stuck in a state of avoidance, their patterns of behaviour can become pathological and 'anti-task'. Without realising it, the team can find itself not just failing to achieve what it needs to achieve, but actually achieving its opposite.
Based on his work with shell-shocked soldiers returning to the UK from the horrors of the second world war, another psychoanalyst, Wilfred Bion, became intrigued by what might be happening when groups acted in this way. It seemed to him as if people were working on the basis of some unspoken assumptions about what the group was there for, and that these were mainly to do with the need to preserve the group. In fact, he saw that the wishes, fears, impulses, fantasies, defences and projections became the very thing that held the group together, rather than the task. Even individual wellbeing seemed to become secondary to this urge to maintain the group.
Bion classified three patterns of behaviour characterised by these assumptions and suggested that groups can fluctuate between them.
In some scenarios, a group will behave as if their task is to gain security and protection from a saviour; an individual leader within the group or a group member. In placing their collective hopes in this fantasy figure, the members of a team can unconsciously repeat patterns of dependency learned in early childhood, abandoning their own initiative and authority and acting as if they are helpless or incompetent.
In other scenarios, a group's behaviour will appear driven by the need to preserve itself through action, either fighting or fleeing. Groups caught up in this collective mentality will engage in either active aggression, scapegoating or attack or, if in flight mode, withdrawal, passivity, avoidance or excessive reflection. Leadership is assigned to the person who seems best suited to mobilise the group's aggression and helps avoid the actual task.
In Bion's third model of dysfunctional group behaviour, people appear to give up finding a solution in the hope that one will be born from the magical pairing of two parties. Teams that are caught up in this pattern can often appear completely preoccupied with the future, and invest a huge amount of energy in their chosen pair, planning and creating the congenial, positive culture which they hope will enable the desired procreation.
Others in the field of group dynamics have subsequently classified two more assumptions that underlie anti-task group behaviour. In the 1970s, Pierre Turquet suggested that some groups work to create a state of undifferentiated wholeness in which the urge is to surrender to passive participation in the whole group, with no room for individuality. And then in the 1990s, Gordon Lawrence, Alastair Bain and Laurence Gould proposed a fifth pattern of behaviour - perhaps arising out of the cultural shift in the west towards individualism - in which the members of a group act as if the group doesn't exist or matter at all, and that individualism has primacy.
So how can one work with groups caught up in these assumptions and help them avoid the self-sabotaging behaviours that arise?
The first thing is to acknowledge that the challenge is significant.
The processes described above are part and parcel of the work of leading humans in interaction in organisations. Group dynamics are unavoidable. They are also hard to spot when they arise, both because one is often caught up in the mess oneself or because the psychodynamic root cause is masked by other more palatable explanations. Finally, they are very hard to fix. Coaching, team building, experiential groups and training all have a part to play, but if one acknowledges that the source of the anxiety that derails a team lies within the team and its 'teamishness' rather than outside of it, then it becomes clearer that the work has to be done there too.
Bion contrasted his dysfunctional groups with what he called the 'work group', where the prevailing collective mindset was focused on the group's real purpose and the achievement of its aims. In these groups, people have clarity about the overall purpose of the group's work and the specific role they play in that. The group is open to input from outside and to critical reviews of its performance and activity. Relationships are managed carefully and people are mindful of differences in personality, needs and motivations. Failure is welcomed as a valuable opportunity to learn and conflict is acknowledged as an important opportunity to communicate.
Any team development programme or activity that focuses on building the group's capacity for these characteristics - a sense of purpose, clarity about roles, openness and awareness, relatedness and healthy ways of working - is likely to have a far greater and more sustainable impact on productivity and effectiveness than 'traditional' team building interventions.
This is particularly the case where the programme aims to develop habits within the team that enable it to be self-sustaining. As outlined usefully by Renewal Associates, these include:
encouraging full engagement from all team members
promoting active listening
engaging collectively in generative dialogue and creative conflict, where differences are welcomed and worked through
working to avoid personal antagonism and being intentional about drawing together and aligning opposing views (without compromising)
having regular feedback horizontal feedback between team members as well as vertical feedback from team leader to members.
For more, see this article, which also outlines fifteen steps towards what Renewal call 'psychological maturity', but which - I suggest - also relate to Bion's 'work group' mentality.
One of the approaches I take in my Synergi team development programme involves the use of sociograms to help a team discover the patterns of behaviour that may be limiting their effectiveness. Each member sketches a map of how they perceive the relationships between people in the team, showing closeness (proximity), groupings, relational intensity and the direction of influence. This is followed by a facilitated discussion of each sketch that always reveals a number of surprises, many of which provide genuine enlightenment and provoke meaningful change. Critically, the team is left with a set of resources to repeat the process and are encouraged to make a commitment to do so at least once a year, or whenever they feel the need.