How Your Team Dynamics are Holding Your Company Back
When you become a leader inside an organization, there is enormous pressure for you to succeed. After all, your success translates into success for your company. So, you start investing in yourself. You consider your leadership style: fine tune your strengths and manage your weaknesses. You bring a vision and plan for success to the company, making sure that each stage is communicated thoroughly to your team and to the company at large. You solicit feedback, you check in with your colleagues. And yet, you still sense that morale is low. Team dynamics are not what they once were. While everyone knows what to do, they somehow aren’t able to execute the plan. And slowly, the sense that your plan will finally be able to put your company on track for success fades.
What Happened to Your Team Cohesiveness?
This is one instance where looking within to identify the problem is not necessarily going to lead to greater insight. Instead, it’s time to look at the group dynamics at play within your organization and to understand how people in the middle level of your organization can be so powerful in holding your plan back.
The Role of Team Compatibility
So how does team compatibility affect outcomes so dramatically? To better understand this, we have to do some myth busting. There are two common misconceptions that must be addressed:
1. Strategic planning is the same as strategic execution of the plan
2. Everyone in your organization is already in their best-fit job
The first misconception is not easy to tackle. Just because you come up with a plan, doesn’t mean everyone knows how to make it happen or is even on board with it. It boils down to this: planning does not equal execution. You have to put as much effort into making sure the execution happens on every level of your organization as you put into your strategic planning. It’s common sense, but it often gets forgotten. Remember, just because your team knows what to do, doesn’t mean they know how to do it or even can do it.
The second misconception is an uncomfortable truth: not everyone who is currently on your team is the best fit for your team. When momentum stalls during a turnaround phase, the culprit can usually be found within those who didn’t necessarily come up with the plan but do have a hand in how the plan is executed. If those people are not on board, you have a problem.
For starters, they can become insidious voices in meetings and around colleagues. They shut the people around them down and in doing so, shut down execution of the plan. It’s at this point that you start to see morale dip. Additionally, if you are doing the work of making sure your employees know how to execute the plan, you need to make sure you are not expending precious resources on people who are more invested in seeing the plan fail than seeing it succeed.
How to Handle “Roadblock Employees”
It’s time to consider how these roadblock employees fit into the larger picture of how your company will function moving forward. Will they help create transformational change or will they be a barrier for those above and below them? There are no easy answers, and its questions like this that require courage and perseverance from a leader.
If you’re looking for more information about how team dynamics are holding back your organization, contact us or check out our blog post on Emotional Intelligence.
