Team Work: Getting a Team Out of the Ditch

Over the last series of articles I put out ideas gleaned from psychology that identify things that help a team become high performing. The last article gave ideas of what to do when a great team starts to stumble. Today’s article is centering in on a systematic process to bring a team out of a ditch. I learned years ago that if a ditch collapse around a worker even if it is only knee deep those digging the person out have to be systematic and careful. One wrong move and the worker dies. What happens is, when the ditch collapse it restricts blood flow to the part of the body that is buried. If you restore the blood flow too quickly the person goes into shock and dies. Nothing that drastic will happen to the members of a team that gets stuck. However metaphorically you can snuff a team by being to hasty in moving to a remedy so below is a process that has proven successful.

A psychologist and researcher Kurt Lewin developed a three process model. Terms were given to each part of the process. The first is called unfreezing, the second moving and the third refreezing. Sounds like Lewin grew up in the North in coming up with those metaphors.

When “unfreezing” the members identify according to their impressions what forces are impeding or facilitating progress (i.e., what is really going on is getting them to see what is causing the stink). Then like good learners they simultaneously put their impressions to the test to see if their perceptions match what can be observed from historical qualitative and quantitative evidence. As a part of the “unfreezing” the team reexamines its vision and redefining it if necessary in order to clarify the vision. Lastly, goals and objectives are reviewed and perhaps made easier so the team can experience success and be motivated to continue on to other. In real daily life we do this constantly. We start something get into the project see that our vision is fine, but our goals a bit to ambitious so we break the goals down into smaller chunks. Where we have difficulty managing this is in the work place or academia. The push into these areas is for immediacy. Currently corporations owned by stock holders are pushed to improve quarterly returns; schools now are allowing politicians and talking heads push them into similar straights. More privately owned business think if the big boys are doing it then we ought to do it to. They do this without looking at whether the results justify it or not. Happily we are more sensible at home where doing it right is better than doing faster and more profitably than the last four months. I will bet you can guess my feelings about focusing on better investor results rather than on creating a better services and products. Or even better on aligning the mission, goals, and objectives so they express the visions and values of the business. This is more than my personal bias. Many of the businesses known for their longevity and profitability are family owned and focus first on their visions and values.

After “unfreezing” team leaders are to turn their attention to motivating the team to change, this is termed by Lewin as “moving.” Moving is accomplished primarily by the group seeing that the current behavior is not leading them to their goal. Like Dr. Phil asking them, “How is it working for you?” A catalyst he uses and others use to awake people up to considering a new way of acting will bring them to their desired end. Like Dr. Phil’s program prior to the question being posed there is a review of the poor results that have been common place and presenting of new behaviors that have a track record of lead to better results.

Step one and step two hopefully lead to “refreezing” where people are given evidence that indeed the new behavior are working. Having evidence increases the likelihood of the team then agreeing via consensus to adopt the new behaviors as their norms and values. As a recap the team is shown where the stink is, then they are shown means to neutralize the stink, they are then given evidence the stink is replaced with the sweet smell of success which leads to a culture that is no longer supportive of the behaviors that create stink. Once a team is “smelling like a rose” and liking the behaviors that got them there they are well on the way to high performance, if they are not already there, and so as before the leader should fade into a supportive role acting as a consultant or facilitator.