I was interested in Bernhard Zimmerman‘s post about the storming phase of team development. It made me think of a team I know where the members were recently discussing the reasons for their not working together as well as they would like.

The team has recently completed an important project and the members felt there were lots of areas where they could have performed better. Once they got to discussing it, they agreed that they are all far too polite with one another, and this results in problems in a few areas:

• when people regularly miss team meetings (albeit for perfectly legitimate reasons) nobody pulls them up on it, even though this means things don’t get done or discussions have to be reopened later for the person who wasn’t there first time round
• the decision-making process is entirely based on consensus, meaning that it is arduous, overly lengthy and sometimes decisions don’t get made at all
• if someone offers a view or makes a decision that the others don’t agree with nobody challenges it because they feel that it would be rude to do so, meaning that sometimes the wrong decisions get made simply because healthy debate is not part of the culture of the team

The team reached the conclusion that, in order to perform better, they should start a few fights! Well, maybe not fights exactly, but certainly healthy debates. Developing a culture where someone can call a spade a spade without fear of being seen as bossy and without the recipient taking it personally is key to a team’s high performance. High performing team members are focused entirely on the betterment of the team and achievement of its objectives, rather than the success of their own individual goals, ideas or agenda.

Look at your team: do you recognise any of the issues in my example? If so, take a chance and cultivate healthy conflict in your team to move to the next stage of your team’s development.