The Issue Is In The Room But No One’s Addressing It

Polite. Amiable. Avoiding. I did not add the word Trust into the mix, as this team’s concept of trust was, “I trust that my colleague will do what they say,” far different from vulnerability-based trust in which we are completely honest and open with our strengths and weaknesses. We can share with others AND accept truth from them.

Those 3 words describe the behavior of a client’s leadership team. We’ve worked together for 7 sessions. We recently had our first annual 2-day and started things off by using a tool to measure team health. Their rating was quite low. In fact, it’s one of the lowest team health ratings of any team I’ve worked with. They scored 5 out of 10, somewhere between totally dysfunctional and healthy and cohesive. They were surprised.

We went through the session, identified issues, worked through them, and solved them. Everyone was on the same plane. Enter…

The Doorknob Reveal. A fundamental issue that had been there was revealed on the way out the door. A major blow-up between 2 team members affected the rest of the team, but no one was willing to talk about it. Ignore it rather than deal with it was the Modus Operandi. Why? There was a lack of vulnerability-based trust. This team was unwilling to be raw and emotional with one another.

It was apparent that something else was going on, but no one would address it. One person said there was an issue but refused to say more. The elephant in the room grew bigger and bigger until it exploded. This team has been comfortable for too long; they were numb to dysfunction; they had gotten good at normalizing it.

We as individuals can think we are living the core values but we can miss them completely. After the session, I was surprised to get a note from someone on the team. As a result of the hail Mary reveal, he was removed from the leadership team. He was unable to see the disconnect between his actions and the core values of the organization.

His self-awareness was pretty low. When the issue was finally on the table, he attempted to deflect it to others and indicated that they had issues, not him. There was a potential opportunity here to work through the issue and have the team emerge on the other side, stronger and healthier, but instead, the leader was removed from the team. Perhaps it was easier to demote him than to deal with the problem.

The individual who was removed was upset and struggled to see beyond emotions. I told him that when it’s emotional and raw like this, we, as humans, are naturally defensive, we’re simply wired that way. The reality is that when people tell you something about yourself, you have to wade through the muck and get to the kernel of truth that’s there. It’s a gift. Even though it’s hard in the moment, we’re better off in the long run. We can choose to ignore it or learn from it and grow because of it.