4 tools to make your team more conscious
In last week’s post - Harness The Power Of Your Team’s Unconscious I introduced the idea of a team’s conscious and unconscious mind. Just as my psyche consists of a conscious mind which is actively aware of itself and an unconscious mind which is not, so too does your team.
The team’s conscious mind would be the things that are known among the whole team, for example the explicit documents (well, at least the ones that everyone knows about and uses), the team discussions, open decisions and explicit rules and standards of practice.
The team’s unconscious mind consists of those things which influence behaviour but are not known about explicitly and among the whole team-mind. They might include things like the way people privately feel about discussions and decision, the default way that processes happen that are habit but not explicitly codified or discussed, and implicit power dynamics or conflicts between team members.
In today’s post I’m going to share 4 ways that a team member, manager or coach can think about making some of these unconscious elements more conscious, to help the team be able to act on their plans more effectively. These are just 4 ways that I’ve thought about covering broadly 4 important areas. No doubt there are more, and I’d love to hear about them. Do share your own methods and ideas in the comments of this post. Please also take 2 minutes to share some feedback with me about this blog. It helps me make my content the best it can be.
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And now… the 4 ways of helping your team’s unconscious become more conscious.
Discuss Ways of Working
Ways of working are… the ways we work. Aren’t you glad you subscribe to this insightful blog. There are many many ways that a team can set themselves up to solve any particular problem, maybe even infinite ways. Often the approach to how our team gets stuff done comes about declaration by some senior person, by everyone’s best guess about how things are ‘supposed’ to be done around here or some other weird mutating evolution. It’s unlikely that ways of working the evolve from one of these methods will be the best approach to solving the problem. I’d call these ways of working unconscious.
Conscious ways of working are where the team experiments explicitly about what would help them to do their job well and chooses how to work. The teams doing the work are the ones living and breathing the problem, so they have the most important insights about how to solve it.
This isn’t to say the team knows *everything* and that no manager should ever share an opinion about what might help. It’s more about learning from the team’s lived experience of solving the problem to inform the way it could be solved better in future. If you apply the team’s lived experience and creative problem solving skills to the meta-problem of how to do the work, and give them the power to decide which options to try you will end up with a more conscious and effective team. An Intelligent Team.
A simple method you can use here is the KonMari Retrospective (you can view and copy my template for it here. It’s free!). Home organising professional Marie Kondo’s The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up had it’s moment a few years ago by helping people get on top of how to organise their homes. She challenges her followers to take all their possessions, dump them into the middle of the room. Then they hold them up one at a time and ask, does this ‘spark joy’?, does it need repair?, or is it time to thank it for its service and say goodbye to this item.
The KonMari retrospective asks the team to think of all their practices, artefacts, meetings and other ways of working and ‘dump them in the middle of the room’ (put them on post it notes).
The team then evaluates, which of them most spark joy, which are useful but in need of repair, and which should be thanked for their service and discarded. By the end of this session the team has a good view on what they want to change about their ways of working and understand more about how the rest of the team views the team’s process. The unconscious ways of working are made conscious.
Reveal Hidden Feelings
The way we feel about things affects our behaviour. This applies to pretty much every human - even the people who consider it a virtue to be super rational, straightforward and robot-like. This means that I will behave differently depending on whether I’m working on something that I love or I hate or am passionate about or feel cold indifference to. Even if it’s just in small ways, at a team-scale this can lead to big differences in how well we achieve our goals.
As a team if we can share just a bit about how we’re feeling - in general and about a particular issue - it can lead to effective action. If Horace hates a new meeting that his manager has put in the team calendar but keeps that hate to himself this becomes part of the team’s unconscious. It’s a missed opportunity because a) Horace probably isn’t going to be so useful in that meeting, sitting and silently fuming b) Other people might hate it too, and the manager may not even know c) if Horace really hates the meeting, there may be a legitimate reason for that hate that’s worth exploring for the team (eg we spend all of our goddam time in useless status update meetings and never get any work done, which is frustrating) d) Maybe Horace is missing some context and is blinded by his hate. If only he knew a and b he would understand why this meeting is important and hate it less, or at least be able to stomach it.
If we can surface Horace’s meeting hate constructively, we can change/remove/replace the meeting with something that works better, or at least we can be transparent about the fact that Horace hates this meeting but we have to do it because of reasons x, y and z, let’s at least try to make it as painless as possible for Horace. I reckon in a team that can have that kind of conversation it’s harder for Horace to hold onto his hate.
Tool Time. I love the Blob Tree check-in at the beginning of meetings. You show people this tree with blob-people in different situations and ask them to choose which one they are most identifying with at that moment.
Ask them to share a sentence or two and then pass on to the next person. If they share something particularly intense the facilitator may want to change tack for the conversation or ask if there is anything that person might need to be able to participate.
Other tools exist but they absolutely must be well suited to the team. I remember the frosty glares when a well-meaning Delivery Manager I worked with once asked her deeply technical and stoic team to start filling in a daily feelings calendar. If your team hates the blob tree or the feelings calendar, find a way for people to say how they are doing that works for them. Which of these pictures of Beyonce/Dogs/Nicolas Cage most resonates with you? On a 1-4 battery scale, how drained are you? Check in with one word? Whatever works. Whatever allows the unconscious to be made conscious.
Share Differing Perspectives
Sometimes we need a deeper conversation about how the team is working as a system and a 2 minute blob tree conversation doesn’t cut it. For this I like an activity Constellations derived from the world of systems coaching.
Constellations is an activity where a group of people standing in room are given a statement and asked to position themselves spatially depending on how much they agree with the statement; closer I agree, further away I disagree. An object in the room represents the centre of the universe or similar metaphor, at which sits a statement e.g. ‘I enjoy working in this team’, ‘I get enough time to focus away from meetings’, or ‘pie is delicious'. Participants who agree stand near the object, those who disagree move further away. This creates a ‘constellation’ of people around the room which you can then get curious about. You can run it easily online on a Miro board with everyones initials or face on a shape.
For example, if after some warm up the statement is ‘I always get to speak my mind in meetings’, those who agree stand near the chair in the middle and those who feel more reserved stand further away. The facilitator asks the people in different positions to say a bit about why they are standing in their chosen positions.
The facilitator can ask the people close to the chair to stand further away and see how it feels to be in another perspective. This approach can offer up insights and potential direction for how to steer the team in the esired direction. You can also use whatever prompts you want to as the facilitator, depending on the team’s needs.
Give Feedback
If Horace sits in the aforementioned meeting grumpily harrumphing and giving curt short answers to his team-mate Li, that might lead to Li getting annoyed in turn, or getting embarrassed and not sharing her ideas. The team then gets less of the whole team’s insight into a problem and makes poorer decisions as a result.
You might think this situation is Horace’s problem (and it partly is), but let’s be generous to Horace and assume that he doesn’t have the self-awareness to see quite how grumpy he is feeling and abrasively he is acting. If Li is impacted negatively by Horace and doesn’t share that with him, it’s Li who is holding something in the team’s unconscious that should be made conscious. Li needs to give Horace some feedback.
Feedback isn’t the same as advice or an opinion. Feedback is about giving someone information that they otherwise would not have about their actions. Li telling Horace to not be such a grumpy bastard is not feedback. Li telling Horace that she was hurt by the way he spoke to her and therefore decided to not contribute again in the meeting is feedback.
Good feedback should be direct, kind, informative and unarguable. Bad feedback is ‘Horace you didn’t like what I said so you acted like a dick’, because there’s a million ways that that might be wrong and Horace can disagree.
Teacher of the Stamford ‘Touchy Feely’ course Carol Robin describes three realities in regards to feedback.
the other person’s intention and inner world
the other’s observable behaviour
my inner world and intentions
Robin advises to ‘stay in your lane’ and only comment on things that sit in reality 2 or 3. I can’t know about someone else’s inner thoughts or intentions, so I can’t offer feedback about it. I can share about realities 2 and 3 which I have access to.
I like to use the SBI model as a guide for giving clear, specific feedback. SBI stands for Situation, Behaviour, Impact. Here’s how Li can use SBI to give Horace some much needed feedback
Situation: When did this thing happen, what was the situation. ‘Horace, when we were in the planning meeting yesterday…’
Behaviour: What was the unarguable facts about what happened. Remember to stick to reality 2, you only know what happened, you can’t possible know Horace’s motivation. So stick to the observable behaviour ‘…you interrupted me twice and gave very short answers to my questions’. There shouldn’t be anything in this bit that Horace can disagree about.
Impact: What was the resulting impact of the behaviour. If this bit is done well, there is still nothing that Horace can argue about. ‘I felt frustrated and disrespected, so I decided to not talk again in the meeting’.
Whether or not this then leads to a request - ‘Please don’t talk to me like that’, or ‘Please try to be aware of how your words might impact my feelings in future’ - Horace has his feedback. Li cannot control how he reacts, but if he isn’t giving an understanding response she can ask ‘what did you hear me just say’. Good feedback brings the unintended impact of people’s behaviour (both good and bad!) into their awareness. It makes the unconscious conscious.
Try these out with your team, see what they offer. Let me know if you have any luck. And on the topic of feedback, please do share yours with me