I’m not talking about withholding information related to the task and context. Without doubt, that will damage a team. I’m talking about information regarding your internal state .
A Story
Let me tell you a story about a team I coached. They’d asked me to observe them solving a problem, help them see their process and offer advice. Ten minutes into the task things started to go awry.
The team members stood around a whiteboard, generating a list of possible solutions to the problem. They’d started filtering the options, testing them against solution criteria, and adding notes. As they eliminated options the guy with the marker, Jon, crossed off the options. Until he got to Harry’s idea. The board filled up with notes and cross-outs and additions. When Harry’s idea didn’t pass the tests, Jon erased it.
A Team Member Withdraws
Harry tilted his chin down. Then he crossed his arms over his chest, and took two steps back from the group. Given their intense focus on the task at hand, they didn’t see Harry withdraw.
When he didn’t rejoin the group within a few minutes, I approached him. I touched his elbow and asked “What’s happening for you?”
“They rejected my idea,” he said. “Wiped it right off the board, like I’m nothing.”
Notice that Harry equated rejecting his idea with rejecting him. Easy for us to say that’s not the case. You have to start where people are, not where you think they should be.
“You have to tell the team,” I said.
He shook his head. “No one even notices that I’m not participating anymore.”
“All the more reason to let them know. They’re engrossed in the task, and they’re missing some important information about what’s happening to the team.”
Harry gave me a blank stare. “You are withholding information that the team needs to function well,” I explained. “They need to know that one of their members has just checked out. Will you tell them?”
Restoring the Whole
He nodded. “Hey, guys,” he said. When he had the attention of the group, he said his piece.
As Harry noted, the team missed the fact that Harry checked out. Jon expressed surprise that his erasure had affected Harry so. But he didn’t try to talk Harry out of his feeling or get defensive. “Gosh, Harry, ” he said, “I didn’t mean it that way.”
Harry rejoined the group.
Leaving Team Members Behind
This sort of thing happens all the time. One member of the team feels unheard or unvalued, and withdraws.
The rest of the group goes on, discusses, makes decisions, starts to act. The team is missing out on the intelligence, creativity and participation of that member. They won’t have his buy-in for decisions, and won’t have his full-hearted support for action. When such withdrawals go unaddressed,, relationship fracture and trust drains away. By withholding information about what’s going on, the team is deprived of a chance to course-correct.
If you’re part of team, you need to be willing to say what’s going on for you. When team attend to team members, they stay healthy and connected.
I anticipate some readers will judge Harry as thin skinned. Someone will assert that people need to “man up” and stop being so sensitive.
What I’ve noticed is that some people talk that way until they feel rejected. Then they act pretty much the way Harry did–though sometime less grown up.
When we do retrospectives, we put sticky notes on the board and at that point they become team ideas, and not an individual’s idea. But if the idea gets rejected, we can’t control how that person is initially going to feel if the idea is rejected. As you say, “you have to start where people are, not where you think they should be”.
We can at least address how the group dynamics can change and whether someone withdraws suddenly. Good for you for noticing it and encouraging the individual and team to address it. Something for anyone who is facilitating (or even just participating in) a meeting to be mindful of.
Thanks for the post
Great post. Some team members are insecure and/or often feel under-appreciated. Sometimes teams give less credit where it is due. Withdrawal is one response, but also apathy and even vengefulness are other responses at the more extreme end.
But I’ve come across team members who insist on directly/indirectly ‘chest-beating’ when their ideas are accepted and conversely get visibly upset and ask the team to re-consider when their ideas get rejected. This is the reverse of withdrawal, and can be annoying to team members who find the attention-grabbing distracting from the task.
Sometimes things go wrong right from the oft-mentioned ‘storming’ and ‘norming’ stages of team formation itself. Some team members do not get sufficient ‘personality exposure’ at this stage, and this can lead to hiccups later during the performance stage.
The significance of soft skills and inter-personal team relationships cannot be underestimated!