Team ground rules, and ‘going with the grain’
March 2020
A post for facilitators and team leaders ‘out there’. Have you ever observed a team meeting where there is no agenda, bad behaviours during the meeting, and a failure to achieve desired results at the end? Sound familiar?
In my work I've experienced brilliant use of ground rules to help a team move through the ‘storm’ into ‘perform’ phase. Ground rules are a simple written contract – perhaps laid out on a flipchart - agreed within the team, describing the sort of values and behaviours they want to model during team meetings.
I recall leading a team where initial behaviours were volatile and individual expectations were wildly misaligned. I brokered an honest, and very heated, conversation about behaviours and what the group wanted to see and experience in our meetings. We agreed to keep our target behaviours visible, on a flipchart, at every meeting. Going even further, we decided to give our collective selves a rating of between 1 to 10 at the end of each meeting in order to check how we’d performed relative to each behaviour. We’d pick the lowest one and take one action to improve for next time.
This approach surprised us all. Week by week we tracked an upward curve on team behaviour. This in turn, almost magically, led to improved conversation and collaboration. Despite early indications to the contrary, we were able to exceed our quality and performance targets.
But what happens when as a facilitator you are part of the team? When you are part of the system you are trying to influence it’s often difficult to really see what’s really going on.
A colleague of mine recently facilitated a team meeting where, even with agreed ground rules and expert facilitation, attendees were late and behaviours were dreadful. A delegate came up to my colleague at the end and said, “This is not your problem, it’s just the way it is.”
If you find yourself in this situation, perhaps you might try another, more daring and systems-oriented approach. First, breathe. Step back and observe the team and their behaviours during the day. With a flip chart on the wall, write down the behaviours and interactions that you see.
In this example, the first bullet point might be ‘Team lateness’. A second and third bullet point might capture ‘lack of listening’ and ‘talking over contributions’. A final killer bullet might be ‘on phones and laptops throughout the day’.
In doing this you might not have achieved meeting objectives – more of the same – but for the first time you would be able to describe HOW the team does ‘repeatedly fails to make progress’. This, in a sense, is their unwritten, unconscious, set of ground rules.
Another colleague of mine once said that ‘you are perfectly positioned for the results that you're getting’. So, with this principle in mind, a follow-up meeting could expand on the nature and rationale for ground rules and share the HOW of what they do now. At the very least it will foster a value-add conversation about what they want to do instead of being stuck in ground-hog day.
So, if you are struggling with team behaviours, try going with the grain. Observe and capture their current way of doing and being. Play back what they already do, and how that leads to the outcomes they are getting. Ask if that is what they want. And if not, get them marching to a different more positive beat.
Let me know how it goes.
