Step One: Take responsibility for your own state of mind.

Check in before you check on.

Checking in means having a meaningful conversation.

Uncertainty tends to breed anxiety, and for most people, uncertainty is the only certainty there is at the moment.

We all thrive on a bit of uncertainty; it spices up our lives. But it needs to come as just that—a spicy addition to an otherwise solid foundation of certainty.

When there is more uncertainty than certainty, it’s easy to drift into victim mode—which is what we also call going below the line. If we do, it tends to spread as we suck others into our drama triangles.

If you have two or more people reporting to you, you’re a team leader. As a team leader, you need to think about what you can do to keep yourself mentally fit and above the line because the last thing you need now is for a victim atmosphere to spread to your surroundings.

The only thing more contagious than COVID-19 is a negative emotion. It spreads...

Is your management team a team?

The system favors the pseudo team.

Culture eats the system for breakfast.

Characteristics of the Pseudo Team

Is your management team a team?

This probably depends on how you have chosen to define the word team. If your definition is that we all have a common goal or purpose, then, in all probability, you consider yourselves a team.

But if you think more closely about that definition, then you could say that everyone running the Berlin Marathon is a team because they have the common goal of finishing the marathon in the fastest possible time.

Obviously, they are not a team.

A more purist approach to the definition of a team, and the one I prefer, is that a team is a group of people who have a common goal and who hold themselves mutually responsible for reaching it.

Ah, now that changes the picture a bit.

Do you feel mutually responsible for reaching the overall business goals of your company? Meaning, if you notice that I am in difficulty with some...

Post Emergency Apathy

Refocus your way out of the regressive phase.

Did you notice anything peculiar with your colleagues lately?

In the sense that they are sort of—well, how can I put it—regressing, not showing up at their level of maturity as constantly as they normally do.

From a developmental point of view, regression is mostly something we notice in smaller children. Here they were, doing so well at going to sleep, eating their porridge or whatever, and now suddenly they are back to behaving in a much more immature version of themselves.

But if you think about it, we all regress from time to time—probably more often that we would like to admit.

Essentially, we have three levels of functionality:

• Our normal way of being (The way we operate most of the time);
• A higher level (A peak level something we are trying to learn or aspire to and that we experience from time to time, but not on a consistent basis); and
• A dysfunctional level (A less...

Team development does not need to be a massive event.

Learning and development is not an event.

Why does it not happen?

It rained cats and dogs for the four days we were together. I can’t recall ever having been so wet for so long. Eight people who had never met each other before crammed into a small tent. We cooked our food from rations and made audacious strategic plans by candlelight while trying to keep the coffee grains out of the rain puddles. We had paid to do this—serious money, in fact. It was a hardcore 4-day leadership training that we had signed up for.

The training consisted of solving a number of outdoor challenges in competition with other teams. The challenges to be solved where not the training as such—collaboration under adverse circumstances was the point of it all.

It's a long time ago—more than 25 years to be honest—but I can still recall lots of details. More than anything I can distinctly recall the other team members, despite...

I don't mean developing vision and strategies by setting Big Hairy Audacious Goals—because none of that makes much sense just now.

In the current climate, the key to your leadership is how well you are able to hold the space.

Let me explain:

Operating in a complex environment per definition means that the core challenge is uncertainty.

Depending on our personal temperament, we handle uncertainty differently. For most of us, a bit of uncertainty is thrilling. It spices up our life. The butterflies in one’s stomach on a first date—who would have been without that? But, the will I have food on the table tomorrow feeling—if you have ever tried it—is not something you are ever eager to repeat.

When we are overwhelmed by too much uncertainty, it triggers fear, as well as our fight-flight-freeze response. As a consequence, only vital functions are operational. There are no resources left for creativity, problem solving and all that good stuff that we...

Adaptive Action is as Powerful as it is Simple.

You Can’t Do This Alone.

I see quite a few posts on social media that express the hope that this will soon be over and that we can return to normal—so do I, of course.

But the problem is that hope is not a strategy for coping with the complex issue that we all face: What to do next?

Most of us in our managerial  and team leader roles are used to navigating in a relatively ordered environment. Things are generally simple or complicated. But even when things are complicated, there are principles, with the causes and effects more or less mapped and understood.

If it gets overwhelmingly complicated, we call in experts, consultants and other good people to help us understand whatever it is that we are struggling with, but we are still navigating in a relatively ordered and predictable environment.

Now, that has all changed.

Collectively, we have taken a step into deeper uncertainty in the direction of chaos—that...

Why We Do What We Do

How Do We Accelerate That Process?

A Note on Personality Profiles

When we are faced with a new situation, we automatically run through a quick inner checklist that has four questions:

Why, who, what and how.

The sequence of the four questions is always the same. We need answers to them in that order. It’s hard for us to totally focus on the next one if we are missing answers to the previous questions.

It's not as if we speak these questions out loud, especially not the first two. We sense them—our radar scans for answers.

The classic beginner’s error managers make is that they jump in and show team members how they want something done, totally skipping the first three questions. Then, they scratch their head in frustration as they realize the job is not getting done the way they hoped. “How many times do I have to tell them this?”

Slightly more experienced managers will skip just the first two questions and go straight to what and...

What is the difference between complicated and complex?

We need disagreement.

“Why all this fuss about relationships?”

“Yes, Mike, I do understand we need to get on with each other, but honestly, work is work, and these are not my friends. Can we move on now, please?”

That attitude works well when the world is simple and orderly. We develop best practices, manuals and SOPs. Who needs relationships? Just work to the script. The instructions are clear.

The problem is the world is probably not as simple as it used to be.

Here is a great model from Ralph Stacey:

As you can see, as long as the world is predictable and we agree on what is going on, things are simple. Simple things can be managed.

But moving out along that path where things get more uncertain and we agree less and less on what is going on, we discover that things get complicated, eventually complex, and ultimately become totally chaotic.

What is the difference between complicated and complex?

...

A few years ago, Google published their studies on how teams with a high degree of psychological safety outperform teams that have lesser degrees of safety.

This led to many learned articles on what psychological safety entails and how to achieve it. Often, it sounds quite complicated, but not always. I wrote a simple version here.

The research breaks psychological safety down into four key components:

• Tribe (A sense of belonging)
• Expectations (Are they clear?)
• Hierarchy (Can I say what I think?)
• Autonomy (How much influence do I have on “how” I do my job?)

In simple terms, that means it's important that everyone feels included, that you set clear expectations, and that you try and limit the surprises. There shouldn't be an excessive focus on authority and positions. Finally, the ultimate motivator for your team is if they get to have a say in how they do their work, not what they do—that's a management decision—but how they do it.

But we can actually...

For a team to truly perform well, there must be excellent relationships among all team members. We covered that in the previous issue.

On a five-person team, there are 59,048 other possible relationship combinations. Person A gets on with Person B, but not with Persons C, D and E. Person B gets on well with Persons C and E, but not so much with the rest, and so on. With weak connections, the team under-performs.

My key point here is to make you more aware of how important the quality of individual relationships are in delivering a top performance.

I mentioned previously that mechanical systems are per definition stable and organic systems are per definition unstable. By unstable, we mean that the system is in a constant flux—always in transition from one state to another.

One aspect of the instability in a five-person team is the quantity and quality of connections—the relationships—between team members.

Two people can have three types of relationships—good,...