Overcoming team’s dysfunctions

A team that intend to serve Rotary or through the Rotary Foundation either at the club, district or international levels may be suffering of some of the main dysfunctions that a group may experience while trying to be effective. They are: the absence of mutual trust, the fear of conflict, the lack of committment, avoidance of accountability and inattention to results.

Because team work is needed and at the same time difficult to be measured, we can propose some roads to an analysis of how to overcome some of its dysfunctions.

Even before we start any analysis, we must ask: “Are we really a team?” A team is generally composed by 3 to 12 persons that have common purposes and goals and that share results and responsibility.

From there we can start to analyze the inefficiencies and find ways to overcome them.

Developing common trust - For a team to develop an effective relation of common trust, its members must have the courage, beginning with the team leader to risk losing face in front of the team and demonstrate their vulnerabilities first. By sharing their vulnerabilities an empathy is developed between the members of the group, that starts to learn that when someone disagrees of one’s opinion, this may be a result of prior personal experiences and the consensual decisions become smoother to be taken.

Administering conflicts - The conflict, looked towards its positive side, is essential to build a strong team. On teams that there is

common trust the conflict is less feared. Strong and intense debates, when made in a constructive way, only makes the team stronger. This happens when the goals to be reached are collectives and not personal ones and if the arguments used are not just to win the debate, but to guarantee that all has been said.

Obtaining commitment - The well administered conflicts, allows the team to obtain the commitment of its members. Two interrelated and fundamental elements help this to happen: clarity and consensus. The consensus implies that all team members had their arguments understood and understand the arguments of the others, in a way that the team arrives in a majority way to a conclusion of the theme in debate, that from then on starts to be the group although that was not the original opinion of some of the members of the group. They must pay some effort in achieving buy-in and resist the lure of certainty. Clarity in its turn is obtained when the ambiguous premises are removed from a situation or a decision. One of the best tools to ensure commitment is to use clear deadlines.

Assuming accountability - It derives from the unwillingness by team members to tolerate a behavior or performance of any peer that will hurt in any moment the level of performance of the group because this can cause interpersonal discomfort. Allowing the team to serve as the first and primary accountability mechanism can be a good attitude of the team leader to install accountability on the team. The group leader must be a role model on accomplishing accountability by fulfilling the assumed responsibilities and permeate with his attitudes the group attitudes, winning the natural human resistance, so that all team members feel comfortable in offer positive feedback to the group.

Attention and focus on results - A strong team is that in which its members rely in each other, get involved in healthy debates, is

committed with the decisions taken and maintain each member accountable of them. But this team will fail if it loses sight of the fundamental metric of success: RESULTS. They must focus on results, maintain them alive and enhance them in the mind of people through visual references to them. A report that shows results and achievement of goals and also the time remaining to reach some of them are some visual metrics indispensible to maintain the group focused on results. This avoid distractions.

Make a quick examination of your team either of Rotary or of the Rotary Foundation on all levels (club, district, zone or internationally), analyze the occurrence of any of these possible dysfunctions and conduct the solution of those who still exist.

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