Tag Archive for: Accountability

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team and How to Address Them

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five dysfunctions of a teamHigh performing teams, and the desire for them, is a common occurrence in corporations. While teams and groups are commonly used as synonyms, they are different from each other. Oxford Dictionary defines a team as a group of people who work together at a particular job while a group is defined as a number of people or things that are together in the same place. As common as teams are, it should come as no surprise that some work better than others. Dysfunction in teams is all around. Behnam Tabrizi found that nearly 75% of cross-functional teams were dysfunctional. In his book, The Five Dysfunctions of A Team, Patrick Lencioni describes the most common dysfunctions in a team. These dysfunctions are as follows:

  1. Absence of trust
  2. Fear of conflict
  3. Lack of commitment
  4. Avoidance of accountability
  5. Inattention to results

Lencioni argues that trust is foundational for teams. Without the basis of trust, dysfunctions will not be able to be resolved. Research from the Harvard Business Review found that people who work in places with high trust levels reported 106% more energy at work, 76% more engagement, 74% less stress, 40% less burnout, 50% higher productivity and 29% more satisfaction with their lives compared to those at a low trust workplace. Low trust workplaces often have to deal with, and navigate, office politics. Resolving the absence of trust dysfunction is crucial to resolving the later dysfunctions. Each dysfunction is based on the resolution of the previous dysfunction and cannot be mastered out of order. For example, if your team shows lack of commitment, it is likely that there is also a fear of conflict from some, if not all of your team members. When a member doesn’t feel as though they can disagree and create conflict with a coworker, they will not be fully committed to the solution proposed because they were never able to weigh in their own opinions.

So how can you tell which dysfunction your team is stuck at and what can you do to resolve it? Here are some examples for each level:

Dysfunction #1 – Absence of Trust

Teams with absence of trust may:

  • Not own up to mistakes made
  • Not admit that they can’t do something to hide their weaknesses from other team members
  • Be unwilling to go out of the realm of their job descriptions to help a coworker

What can you do to address it?

  • Have team members be vulnerable and tell the team something about themselves then discuss as a team what you learned. This increases vulnerability between the team and makes it easier to continue to be vulnerable.
  • Focus on everyone’s strengths. Doing this will help team members gain confidence in themselves and their work. This could inspire coworkers to appreciate the strengths and talents of their peers.

Addressing lack of trust can:

  • Lead to quicker reaction to issues, now that mistakes can be admitted more openly
  • Prevent mistakes before they happen if coworkers feel comfortable to ask for assistance on projects
Dysfunction #2 – Fear of Conflict

Teams that fear conflict may:

  • Not listen to understand during a disagreement, rather listen to win the disagreement and argue their point
  • Not converse with a coworker they disagree with and speak behind their backs
  • Let leaders dominate a meeting and leave the meeting
  • Display artificial harmony in which there is no conflict at all

What can you do to address it?

  • Suggest an obviously bad idea and see if anyone in your team argues. If they don’t, there is a blatant fear of conflict.
  • Show your team that having opposing views can be productive and helpful.
  • Have a “devil’s advocate” portion of the meeting in which an opposing view can be argued.
  • Thank team members for bringing up different points of view that may conflict with the consensus.

Addressing fear of conflict can:

  • Lead to quicker resolution of issues
  • Lessen the amount of office politics
  • Allow more diverse views and lead to innovation
Dysfunction #3 – Lack of Commitment

Teams that have a lack of commitment may:

  • Have members who don’t commit to an idea because it’s not their idea
  • Have the false impression everyone is on the same page after leaving a meeting
  • Mean members don’t contribute to the discussion because their ideas differ

What can you do to address it?

  • Ask members if they have anything to add, any other ideas or (especially) differing opinions on the topic at hand.
  • Encourage team members to ask questions for clarification.
  • Set a team goal and have objectives for everyone to commit to.

Addressing lack of commitment can:

  • Help the team understand why a goal is being addressed in a certain way
  • Help members commit to an idea after being heard out about their own
  • Show the main goal of the team and what is expected of team members
Dysfunction #4 – Avoidance of Accountability

Teams that have an avoidance of accountability may:

  • Have peers who won’t hold each other accountable on performance and behavioral aspects
  • Have leave leaders with the sole responsibility of discipline
  • Include members not performing to the best of their ability

What can you do to address it?

  • Start at the leadership level and call members out on their behavioral mistakes and let this trickle down to peer level.
  • Regularly review team members’ individual performance and remind the team of the high standards expected.
  • Have the team come together and share one thing for each member that could be improved to promote accountability between team members.

Addressing avoidance of accountability can:

  • Lead to quicker and higher quality performance from the whole team
  • Urge poor performers to improve performance
  • Take some of the strain off of leaders
Dysfunction #5 – Inattention to Results

Teams that have an Inattention to Results:

  • Don’t focus on the team as a whole when working on projects
  • Attain personal goals more often than team goals.
  • Fail to develop as a team

What can you do to address it?

  • Have regular meetings to review key metrics
  • Keep a scoreboard of some type that keeps the team updated on tasks that have been completed.

Addressing inattention to results can:

  • Increase the amount of team goals hit
  • Increase team work and minimize individualism in these settings
  • Increase development as a team

All of these dysfunctions take time and effort to resolve. You have to start at the beginning of the five dysfunctions and work your way through them all to create a truly functional team. If you find that your team is exhibiting dysfunctions of one stage and they can’t seem to be overcome, try taking a step back and looking at the dysfunction level before it. You may find that your team’s problem lies there. Sometimes moving backwards is the only way to avoid an obstacle (or dysfunction) and move forward. Use these tips and ideas to work on creating the trusting, highly functioning team that businesses should aim for and see if the research done by the Harvard Business Review rings true for you.

By Chloe Williams

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Increasing Accountability in Yourself and Others

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Guest contributed by Linda O’Neill, VP of Strategic Services at Vigilant

accountability

Image via Shutterstock

Almost every executive I talk with desires a more accountable organization. Many of them are running highly effective and profitable companies and it is their goal to keep the bar moving up and to the right.  There is room for improvement. In an accountable organization each employee understands his/her role and each employee can be counted on to do his/her job with no surprises. When a company’s culture embraces accountability, employees are self-motivated to contribute to the success of the organization.  It’s important to remember that accountability is voluntary – you can’t make employees (or anyone else) more accountable. There are, however, steps you can take to increase the likelihood your employees will choose to be accountable.

  1. Define it. It is important that everyone in your organization define accountability in the same way. Spend some time on this as a leadership team. Webster’s dictionary uses words like “answerable” and “explainable” to define accountability. To me, the most important element of accountability is the obligation to answer for our actions. It’s not just completing the actions.  It’s being responsible for the consequences of our actions in addition to completing them. It involves taking ownership of your job. There is no room for blaming others. What’s more important than the way I define accountability, however, is the way you define it for your organization. There is no right or wrong answer.
  2. Communicate it. Communicate the company’s expectations around accountability – broadly, consistently and frequently. You will be the most successful when you communicate accountability in context with the company’s mission, values and goals. When each employee understands that the way his/her job is done affects the company’s performance, you will experience greater individual and collective accountability. Put more control in the hands of employees for how they meet the expectations of their job/role. Employees who feel responsibility will also more willingly embrace accountability.
  3. Reward it. Just as you spent time defining accountability, spend equal time understanding how you will measure and then reward it. As the company makes progress toward its goals, share the information broadly. “The Carrot Principle” by Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton is a great book to gather ideas about rewards. The authors stress that rewards must be deliberate. Create a system for yourself. You won’t just “remember” to reward employees. Tie the rewards to company goals and the employees’ role in meeting those goals. Communicate how the employees’ accountability (obligation to answer for actions) affected the goals.

Wanting more clarity around measuring accountability

It is important for every employee at every level in the organization to have a document articulating his/her accountabilities (similar to a S.M.A.R.T. goal document). I like calling this document simply “<Name> <Year> Accountabilities” (i.e., mine would be “Linda O’Neill’s 2017 Accountabilities”). Identify the categories important to your business, such as financial performance, customer service, team leadership and executive maturity. Clearly articulate the accountabilities in each area. Once you have a complete list of an employee’s accountabilities, define how you will measure success. For example, an employee may be accountable for bringing in $15 million in service billings for the fiscal year. The employee would record the results achieved at the end of the period.

Wanting greater accountability to self

Accountability comes from the inside out; it is a choice. Let me say that again: Accountability comes from the inside out; it is a choice. As a result, it makes sense that learning greater accountability to self enhances accountability on the job. Positive change begins with individuals changing themselves. You can translate the same strategies listed in the “wanting more accountability from others” to yourself. First, define what accountability means to you. Do you take an “owners” mentality to the commitments you make to yourself as well as the commitments you make to others? Next, spend some time noticing how your actions compare to your definition of accountability. You might want to write down every commitment you make to yourself or someone else for a week and then notice what supported or what got in the way of your accountability. What conclusions can you draw about you learned? What small change will you make to increase your satisfaction with your accountability to self? How will this enhance the way you model accountability for others?

Conclusion

Accountability means being doing what you said you would do, and being answerable for all of your actions –those that influence others and those that affect only you. When there is little accountability in an organization, stress levels tend to rise, communication is reduced, and territorialism is pervasive. When accountability is strong, employees are engaged, performance is high and company goals are met. What choice will you make to improve accountability both within your organization and within yourself today?

Disclaimer: Opinions and views of guest contributors are not necessarily those of the glasshammer.com

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Accountability, Leadership Responsibility, and Common Sense: Leaders Share What Makes Diversity Initiatives Work

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Professional WomenGender diversity and inclusion doesn’t just happen, as Catalyst shows every year at its awards conference. A sustained improvement in the percentage of women in corporate workforces and leadership comes from hard work by companies to achieve and maintain set goals. It also requires a visibly demonstrated commitment to diversity by those in charge.

Honorees at this year’s Catalyst Awards Conference shared their companies’ secrets to success in increasing the percentage of women in leadership levels and throughout their companies’ workforces. The winning programs at Chevron Corporation and Proctor & Gamble combined three tried and true ingredients for advancing women at work: accountability, common sense, and leaders who took personal responsibility for improving diversity and inclusion at their companies.

“How we are behaving in any interaction speaks louder than any company effort,” said Melody Boone Meyer, president of Chevron Asia Pacific Exploration and Production Company. “Your behavior is how people read what’s real or not. The communication is there, but much more important is whether you’re living that.”

“Your behavior is how people read what’s real or not. The communication is there, but much more important is whether you’re living that.”

At the conference in March, Meyer, along with Mike Wirth, executive vice president of downstream and chemicals at Chevron; William P. Gipson, chief diversity officer and senior vice president of research and development at Proctor & Gamble; and Colleen Jay, president of global hair care and color at Proctor & Gamble, took to the stage to describe not only how their companies changed their approach to improving gender diversity, but also their personal journeys with taking responsibility for diversity as well.

As Meyer said, “Leaders need to live it.”

Accountability

Leaders from both companies detailed how they were held accountable for meeting corporate gender diversity goals.

Wirth explained that, at Chevron, leaders have to answer for their diversity action plans as part of their performance reviews. He also described an exercise the company’s CEO had leaders undertake: “The CEO said I want you to go out and spend time with three people who are very different from you and I expect you to respond,” he recalled.

“Accountability is nothing unless you have goals,” Gipson agreed. “Targets change everything.”

Proctor & Gamble ties diversity goals to executives’ stock options, he said. But the goals aren’t easy to meet and they aren’t merely window dressing to placate investors who care about diversity – they’re stretch goals.

“To really move the needle, you need to have some stretching,” Gipson said.

Indeed, Wirth commented, Chevron even employed reverse inventives at one point. “If you didn’t make progress, the bonus would be affected for everyone in that group,” he said, explaining that Chevron’s leaders wanted to make sure executives understood that diversity was a shared responsibility.

Common Sense

Diversity initiatives wouldn’t work without a heavy dose of common sense, as well. For example, Gipson explained that a few years ago, leaders at Proctor & Gamble realized women were leaving the company at a disproportionate rate. The company undertook a workforce survey to figure out why.

One of the reasons, P&G discovered, was that the company’s flex work program just wasn’t working. Offering employees the ability to work flexibly is one way companies can help their entire workforce meet their personal responsibilities. Since women as a group bear the brunt of child- and elder-care disproportionately compared to men, flex programs have been identified as a way for companies to retain female employees.

It turned out, Gipson said, that P&G’s flexible work program wasn’t flexible enough.

“We were trying to mandate when and where to work flexibly, but life is not really that way,” he explained. The company amended its program based on the survey results.

Leadership Responsibility

Finally, the panelists described what is possibly the most important part of an effective gender diversity initiative. Leaders have to internalize the value of diversity and demonstrate that value in their personal actions.

For example, Johnson said she and other P&G executives help each other keep track of blind spots.

“We help keep everyone sharp so we can role model that going forward,” she explained.

Similarly, Wirth described how he had to face his own personal blind spots a few years ago when Chevron undertook a dramatic restructuring. He picked all white men to lead his new team.

“I got a lot of feedback from the CEO, my kids, and women in my organization,” he said. “I had to do a lot of reflection on myself. I genuinely believed I had the right beliefs and behavior, but that’s not good enough. People need to see action.”

“I got a lot of feedback from the CEO, my kids, and women in my organization,”

He continued, “As a white male, I’ve got an extra responsibility to catalyze the discussion [on diversity], and create an environment where everyone is supported and everyone understands the expectations.”

Gipson described how, as an R&D executive, he had to learn to “embrace the soft stuff.”

“It’s the hardest stuff,” he said. “But no matter how much progress we’ve made, we can always get better.”

That attitude – that we can always get better – is an important one in diversity and inclusion. Simply meeting the numbers isn’t good enough. True inclusion will require everyone in the workforce – especially leaders – to keep pushing themselves harder to identify and change their own personal weaknesses when it comes to diversity and working to change their companies for the better.

By Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)

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