Teams - learning to survive

There has never been a greater need for mastering team learning in organizations than there is today.’ (Senge- The Fifth Discipline).

As a Masters Practitioner Systemic Team Coach for the last decade, I have been consistently surprised by the lack of time that executive teams give themselves to learn. As a starting process to my work, interviews and surveys are carried out, not just with the team members, but their wider ecosystem.

Consistently, the team’s ability to learn comes back as the weakest score. When you investigate, there is amazing scarcity in the time teams themselves take to get to the balcony, have a good look around and understand the patterns of what is going on, not just within their business, but beyond, that could have fundamental impacts on their performance and strategies. Learning by, and for the team, is truly a forgotten discipline. Let us be clear - it is not book learning that is lacking - on average East African leaders have a high score compared to the global Hogan Assessment norms on Learning Approach - but that speaks to their desire to better themselves academically. The learning teams need today is not theoretical; it is adaptive and experiential.

Team members can be individually successful, busy doing their day jobs, being functionally focused, dealing with the innate tension of the internal competition of being an executive team made up of competing team leads who are highly interdependent, but are often appraised independently of each other, through functional KPIs. My role as a systemic team coach is to challenge the team on what they can only deliver when working together, to focus on key strategic deliverables as a whole. To ensure that they create the space and time to pause occasionally and reflect on what is really going on, not just within the team’s dynamics, but beyond, will dictate whether the team will deliver, or derail. This is learning they can only do together as ‘Teams must learn how to tap into the potential for many minds to be more intelligent than one mind’  (Senge- The Fifth Discipline).

In an environment where business is increasingly complex, accelerating in pace and demanding of systemic engagement and agility, a team can only survive if it gives itself time for reflective learning. Working with teams that set ambitious strategies that will demand audacious innovation, challenging the status quo and a great deal more psychological safety and collaboration than is currently available within the system, this time together becomes critical. I have worked with global executive teams that lament that they have missed business opportunities, or feel they are making the same mistakes repeatedly, and that points to not taking the time to learn from what is working, and what has not worked. Teams will often throw around phrases like we have to ‘fail fast’, but failing fast repeatedly would surely be the definition of insanity, according to Einstein? ‘Failing fast’, and ‘failing forward’ can only happen constructively when the team gives itself the time to transfer learning from successes or failings to adapt accordingly and responsively.

It is evident that when the pressure is on, a team often becomes extremely internally focused, provoking a whirlwind environment where being ‘too busy’ or ‘burnt out’ warpedly become status symbols. Those teams are failing to pick up the patterns of what is happening to them and why - they are becoming victims of forces they have not attempted to understand. Forcing the team to stop is often an awakening moment.

One of the often overlooked learning resources that every team can tap into is feedback from its critical stakeholders. Encouraging the team members to engage with a variety of internal and external stakeholders who are critical to their success, to understand what the stakeholders need of them, and how to better respond to those needs, often brings focus to the team that they can turn into concrete actions - if only they spend the time to listen, unpack and decide. This learning is not always comfortable, pointing to things the team may have subconsciously avoided addressing, but are critical for the team to hear and be given space to address: “Nobody can stand the truth if it is told to him. Truth can be tolerated only if you discover it yourself because then the pride of discover makes the truth palatable,” Fritz Perls(Whittington, 2020).

In order to coach the system, I have to bring those relationships into the room, as a catalyst for greater partnership possibilities. Learning runs through all my engagements with teams - encouraging to reflect and integrate learning - and if I have fulfilled my role to facilitate discussion, dialogue, debate, used creativity and challenge, there will be reflective learning. I cannot do the learning for the team, but I do challenge the team to consider the wider impact of their inertia. As Heffernan writes in Wilful Blindness:  

“In burying our heads in the sand, we are trying to pretend the threat doesn’t exist and that we don’t have to change… A preference for the status quo, combined with an aversion to conflict, compels us to turn a blind eye to conflicts and problems.”

Teams have to realise that by the nature of capitalism and competition for impact they are constantly under threat for their survival. Otto Sharma in Theory U talks about the importance of sensing journeys; that only when a team is willing to be vulnerable and open itself up to feedback, not always positive, can it really understand what is happening in its wider system and how best to respond. Instead, teams fill their diaries with endless meetings just to update each other on the past, whereas ensuring there is time to reflect and learn from what is happening in the now allows them to better anticipate and proactively create the future.

Madeleine Dunford is the founder of Career Connections, head of AoEC East Africa, an ICF PCC Level coach, Masters Practitioner in Systemic Team Coaching and global faculty member for the Academy of Executive Coaching on its Team Coaching Fundamentals and Systemic Team Coaching® Certificate (Practitioner) programmes.