Transcript—Team Dynamics and Culture Primer
Debra Zabloudil: Hi, everyone. This is Debra Zabloudil and I'm here today to introduce the Team Dynamics and Culture Series. As you know, from our previous installment of our micro learning series, we have four segments in this series. Today is the primer and then what follows is an interview that I do with three members of your community to talk about different aspects of team dynamics and culture. All very unique [00:00:30] and I think they'll help you understand how to best put those into the context of your work environment and your team environment. Let's start today by talking a little bit about a model from John Kotter, and many of you have probably heard of John Kotter. He is a leadership guru, he tends to be a guru on change. He's well known and highly regarded for all of his work around leading a team through change and managing change and all the things that go along [00:01:00] with change.
But he has a six part model here on how to build a thriving team, and they are broken down into two different areas. One is the head or task oriented drivers, and the other is the heart or relationship oriented drivers. And I love the way that he splits these out because I think so many leaders and managers are very good at the head or task oriented drivers of running a team, [00:01:30] and that is making sure that the work product gets out and that there's a to do list and we know what our deadlines are and we're answering questions and maybe clearing up confusion, but we're not talking necessarily enough about the relationship oriented drivers of a team, which are so important to creating, again, what he calls a thriving team and one where people really feel a sense of belonging.
So when we look at the task oriented drivers, we're talking about clarifying [00:02:00] opportunities, achievement and plans, we're aligning. So we're saying we're all here to do X together. This is this person's role, this is that person's role, let's align our expectations, our work, our thinking around this project. Then we are at the adaptation stage where we're testing what we've planned. We might have a team and we're actually putting some things into motion, we're learning along the way [00:02:30] and we're pivoting and adapting. So that might mean we have to go to plan B because this didn't work as well as we thought it would, or we need to back up and we need to re-look at a specific aspect of something that we've done.
And then we have the achievement piece of this task oriented list, and that is really creating, communicating and celebrating the wins. So how do we know when we're successful? And how do we make sure that everyone is [00:03:00] on board and happy and excited when we've achieved something? How do we have a sense of team camaraderie and a bit of a celebration?
Then we're talking about the heart oriented or the relationship oriented drivers, and I can't help but think of how much this relates to emotional intelligence which many of you are probably thinking about or putting into practice in your own work settings. And these are developing authentic and caring relationships, [00:03:30] this is the coherent aspect. So we are really thinking about how can we be authentic with each other? How can we, in many cases, be transparent with each other? How can we let our guard down? How can we really care about the relationships that we have on the team? And that is not just the team as a whole, but it's maybe myself and this person, myself and that person, so it's independent relationships and then it's the team relationships as a whole.
How do we create a sense of collective [00:04:00] identity or belonging? How do we give the team a purpose? How do we have that culture inculcated into everything that we do? And then how do we really define and build trust? It's by building confidence and psychological safety. There's a lot of discussion about psychological safety right now, and it really is about how do we create an environment where people can make mistakes, where [00:04:30] people can speak their mind and know that they won't be judged, where if something happens that is not according to plan, people feel safe enough to come forward and say I made a mistake or I did something that I really don't think I should have done? So that sense of psychological safety is so important for a team because without it, we will have teams that are operating in fear and maybe that aren't as forthcoming with themselves and the project and their [00:05:00] strengths and weakness as they could be.
So as we also look at establishing an effective team, we've got three very important components. Building the team, getting people onto the team, and that doesn't always mean we are hiring new people, but what it means is when anyone is new or whether it's an established team and you're coming on to lead that team, there's a bit of an onboarding process where, again, we're doing that cohere [00:05:30] piece that John Kotter talked about where we're getting everyone on the same page. We're communicating, we're making sure that people are connected to each other.
And then we have to be paying attention to culture, ongoing. It's an ongoing job that never stops when we have a team. So if it's a project team, that fostering that culture will be the responsibility of the team, but particularly its leader until that team is no longer in play. And if it's your [00:06:00] work team, your ongoing work team, it is something that needs care and feeding all the time.
I love this quote by Simon Sinek, who is another one of our leadership thought leaders and really someone who has put a lot of amazing work out into the world, probably in the past 10 years, and that is, he says, "A team is not a group of people who work together, it's a group of people who trust each other." If we don't trust [00:06:30] each other, we're probably just going through the motions of working together, and we can get to a higher level of team dynamic, we can get to a higher level of work and a higher level of thinking when we know we can trust each other and we can work well together.
So without belaboring this, I would like to say that we do have these three incredible components coming up. Strategically, building a team, [00:07:00] leading a team assigned to you and fostering a positive team culture. So be looking for those and I hope you enjoy them and get something out of them that you can bring back to your workplace. Thanks so much for being part of this today.