Weekly Business Insights from Top Ten Business Magazines | Week 287 | Leading & Managing Section

Extractive summaries of and key takeaways from the articles curated from TOP TEN BUSINESS MAGAZINES to promote informed business decision-making | Week 287 | March 10-16, 2023

Fixing a Self-Sabotaging Team

By N. Anand and Jean-Louis Barsoux | Harvard Business Review Magazine | March–April 2023 Issue

Listen to the Extractive Summary of the Article

Any pack’s deepest concern is for its own survival, and work teams are no exception. In times of heightened stress, allaying that concern may override all else. When its collective anxiety becomes intolerable, the team must do something to counter it. But rather than address the situation rationally, it often attributes the source of its troubles to one person.  The four most common patterns into which overstressed  teams fall are:

1. The sole savior.  When a team is anxious about the future or is looking for direction or protection, it may surrender its autonomy to a savior—unconsciously replicating dependency relationships from childhood.  Strong dependency can be helpful for alignment and responsiveness in a crisis. But when casting someone in the role of savior, other members abandon their own initiative. And it creates a set-up-to-fail scenario for the savior.
2. The dynamic duo.  A related form of dependency occurs when two people are cast as saviors. The chief risk here is that the pair will get carried away with their power, increasingly losing touch with reality.
3. Fight mode.  Anxious teams sometimes pursue the opposite of dependency, developing unrealistic expectations of autonomy and unity. Individuals seek refuge within the powerful boundaries of the team, which closes in on itself and discusses only issues with which it is comfortable. It may become fixated on a common enemy, real or perceived, such as the head office, a partner organization, or a competitor. Instead of working to find a way out of its difficulties, it blames that party for its internal problems and mobilizes its forces accordingly.
4. Flight mode.  A team in flight mode also has outsize expectations of autonomy and unity, but it avoids its anxiety by trying to escape from a common enemy. Such teams are marked by resignation, fear, and withdrawal. Members become preoccupied with signs of organizational or ecosystem change, and important tasks are postponed or ignored.

Leaders typically struggle to recognize and deal with these pathological patterns, for three reasons. First, they are hard to avoid. Second, they are hard to spot. And third, they are hard to fix. Simply addressing the symptoms, through coaching, team building, experiential exercises, or training interventions, may temporarily improve attitudes and performance. But the root causes will most likely persist. To truly escape problematic patterns, teams must adopt new processes and new ways of thinking and behaving—which requires more than simple interventions.

3 key takeaways from the article

1. Any pack’s deepest concern is for its own survival, and work teams are no exception. In times of heightened stress, allaying that concern may override all else. When its collective anxiety becomes intolerable, the team must do something to counter it. But rather than address the situation rationally, it often attributes the source of its troubles to one person.  
2. The four most common patterns into which overstressed  teams fall are:  one, it may surrender its autonomy to a savior; two, two people are cast as saviors;  three, anxious teams sometimes pursue the opposite of dependency, developing unrealistic expectations of autonomy and unity; and finally a team has outsize expectations of autonomy and unity, but it avoids its anxiety by trying to escape from a common enemy.
3. To truly escape problematic patterns, teams must adopt new processes and new ways of thinking and behaving—which requires more than simple interventions.

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Topics:  Teams, Decision Making, Leadership