Tip #1

Start a dialogue with your team about the use of technology during meetings:

Many work cultures have unconsciously normalized multitasking during meetings, making it easy to avoid direct communication. Ask your team what works about multitasking during meetings, and what are the costs? What guidelines does the team want to make for technology use during meetings?

Tip #2

Before every meeting, clarify the expectations for using technology while in the meeting:

Some sample requests:

• “This is a meeting where many will be taking notes on their laptops. Can we agree that we will only take notes and not perform other computer tasks during this meeting?”
• “Please put your phones on vibrate and refrain from e-mailing or texting during the meeting.”
• “Please be courteous and let team members know ahead of time if you have a really important call (e.g. sick child) that you need to take during today’s meeting.”

Tip #3

Set up specific Team Agreements or Guidelines about how to respond to intra-office e-mails, voicemails, IMs, texts, etc:

Some examples:

• “The Management Team agrees to reply to e-mails from fellow team members within 24 hours.”
• “Team members agree to check their work phone messages at least two times a day.”
• “Please make urgent requests with a directed phone call.”

Tip #4

Reward and celebrate it when your team follows the Team Agreements:

Some examples:

• Verbally acknowledge staff during weekly meetings.
• Give a “Communication Champion Award” each month, where the winner gets to proudly display a gold spray-painted, recycled cell phone on his/her desk.
• Consider implementing a “Caught You At Your Best” card to be exchanged between staff members right at the moment when agreements are upheld.

It’s no wonder that teams are struggling with communication issues in such a quickly changing environment. Our norms of how we communicate and when we communicate have yet to be established using many newer technologies. There’s no “one size fits all” fix for addressing appropriate use of technology in the workplace. However, a fresh perspective and curiosity about technology and your team will uncover the solutions that facilitate clear and effective communication.

When you have low conflict, you often also have little trust. That doesn’t mean there’s no one within the organization who’s trustworthy. It just means no one has had the opportunity to earn or gain trust. With the organization described in Part 1 of this post, things had been so casual and conflict-free that they hadn’t struggled through tough decisions in a way that builds trust among team members. So, that’s part of what we did with leadership and staff: build trust. As a result of that work, their trust level for one another was ultimately much higher, which was much more healthy for the organization.

Sometimes all it takes is having a leadership dinner together or non-working lunches. Often companies place such high value on “producing” that they devalue relationship-building. Remember, just because things in the workplace are cordial doesn’t mean you know one another well, how you each think or what kinds of ideas you best bring to the table. In the vacuum of that actual solid information, people are left making a lot of assumptions about one another—many of which are inaccurate.

It’s important to take the time to hear each other’s stories—to hear where you’ve each had struggles and where you’ve each had triumphs. So we challenge groups to extend the timelines for their retreats and to make the lunch a full hour of sitting and talking and eating together. It’s often an incredible shift to do something so simple, but people are quick to really claim it. Soon they’ll expect to have dinner together in preparation for a big meeting. Soon they’ll expect to have time to just sit and connect with one another without an agenda.

It’s a real cultural shift, especially for extremely busy leaders. But these strong interpersonal relationships are necessary for sustainability because it’s through those conversations and free discussions that trust is instilled. That was certainly true in the case of the “conflict-free” organization described earlier.

We were able to bring them specific tools and insights about relational skills that really resonated such as deep democracy and humor. They were able to embody those values and skills and talk about their intentions. Moving forward, they’re able to use those skills in communicating with each other.

The true poignancy is that in their field, they give voices to those who have been marginalized and create new dialogues … yet those values had not showed up inside the organization itself. We were there to say, “Those values you have, let’s bring them in here.” Connecting the external to the internal worked immediately, but they needed a little outside help to see it that way.

When an organizational culture puts agreement and harmony above all else, there is a clear dampening effect on minority voices and divergent viewpoints. People want to be positive and productive so much that they keep their mouth shut to ensure they’re not a “downer” or “causing too much trouble.” That seems thoughtful, but it actually does the organization a serious disservice; the first idea isn’t always the best one. The practices in place are often outdated and in need of fresh interpretation. Team cohesiveness isn’t always as important as individual ingenuity (gasp!).

This is the shadow side of agreement. Respectful-yet-dissenting voices are essential to the healthy evolution of an organization. So, the people within that organization must feel comfortable speaking up, even if it does rock the boat. It’s up to those in leadership roles to create a system of permission that will best serve the organization.

In Summer 2007, Leading Spirit began to help a board of directors with team coaching and training. In addition, we also provided organizational development consulting in support of their transition from a fiscally sponsored entity to a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.

They looked to us to help formulate the organization’s trajectory and help them become more conscious of, and more aligned around, what the organization needed from them as leaders. They needed to clearly know what roles and responsibilities each of them would have moving forward, what kinds of conversations were necessary and worthwhile and how to deal with conflicts or differences of opinion.

We recognized their high positivity, productivity and hard work but showed them how their lack of conflict (and lack of skills around conflict) hurt them in the long run. This hadn’t been done in a conscious way before. No one really had clear permission to “step out of line” and express an individual viewpoint.

So, together we designed the organizational culture in an intentional way that would leave room for free expression and allow everyone to really know what’s going on when making decisions. They learned that what creates sustainability is the ability to speak the truth—that careful behavior actually erodes sustainability because you’re not having the conversations you need to have.

And through the course of our coaching together, they realized the importance of all their voices to informing the larger system. That now extends to the staff as well, as we’ve been able to facilitate retreats with the board and the staff all together. They’ve recognized the importance of those diverse opinions and voices in shaping and strengthening the organization as a whole. There was a level of carefulness that’s now been replaced by full trust and full permission to speak your mind, and they’re a much better organization for it.

In agreement-based organizations, creativity is stifled and fear of “breaking the rules” or “rocking the boat” runs rampant. Staffers play it safe around conflict, which can be just as damaging as tearing each other’s eyes out. Teams, departments and staffers don’t work together well, and the organization as a whole suffers greatly.

The choice seems pretty obvious, so how do you create and sustain an alignment-based organization?

Often when there’s conflict within teams (or whole organizations), it’s because people with strongly held positions are trying to force one another to agree with them—to get the opposition to drop that position, “see the light” and adopt a new opinion. That’s a difficult feat to pull off, and it usually results in resentment among both parties and the losing party “shutting down.”

So the key in team coaching is to move away from the opinions and positions of “agreement” into the shared interests and shared intentions of “alignment.” That’s how teams get unstuck and on the same page.

People will tend to agree with each other about what’s important while disagreeing with each other about what to do about it. So, what alignment is all about is focusing on the underlying values, purpose and mission that team members have in common.

Say, for example, I think we should put out a monthly newsletter, while my colleague feels strongly it should be a quarterly offering. We simply don’t agree, and we’re not even very close to consensus. But if you look underneath the surface to why we hold our positions, my colleague feels it’s important, in this economy, to control overhead costs and send out marketing materials of the highest quality. Meanwhile, I think it’s important we stay in touch with our members frequently and sustain and regularly reinforce that message.

So if you work at that level underneath the positions, you start to see that it’s ALL important. We can both get on the same page that it’s important to honor our budget and have well-written materials, while it’s also important to be in frequent enough contact with our members that they remember who we are and what we stand for.

At its essence, we both just want what’s best for the organization and can work on a solution that honors all those key points at once. It doesn’t have to be one way or the other; we can try to plan our newsletter in a way that will be timely, high quality and within budget restrictions.

When people are at loggerheads, if you go beneath the surface to the intention behind the desired course of action, there tends to be a lot more in alignment than they think. When that’s uncovered, it’s possible to construct avenues from which to proceed where both parties are satisfied and the organization is best served. It aligns both behind a common purpose, where rather than a problem in between them, they can stand shoulder-to-shoulder looking at the problem and explore options and answers.

Utilizing Coaching to Achieve Alignment

One of the most powerful times to use team training, coaching and facilitation is at the start of a new project or program. That way, you have help to ensure all the planning begins from a place of alignment. What happens more frequently, though, is we get called in when a team is in conflict or has “gone flat” and is lacking in productivity. In these cases, it’s more like an intervention. You might also consider using a team-building retreat or workshop as an opportunity to shift your organization’s culture.

And once people become familiar and comfortable with the alignment-based concept, they start to ask very different questions of one another. They start to naturally look beneath the surface for that common purpose or common values so they can join forces. They literally hear one another differently in the search for shared intentions.

So, the next time you hear someone within your organization say, “No, I’m right …”, you know there’s room for an alignment-based shift. If you’re not clear where your organization lies on the scale, we have diagnostic tools that measure alignment (among many other things), within your system. Just know if you need support or guidance, we’re here to help.