This is part three of a three part series by Raye Kass, assistant professor of Applied Human Sciences at Concordia.
Blog post
From the bad to the good: Making teams work in the digital age
Part three - The digital age: The good, the bad, and the ugly
This is part three of a three part series: The Digital Age: The Good, the bad, and the ugly by Raye Kass, Assistant Professor of Applied Human Sciences at Concordia University.
Balance of task and maintenance is difficult at the best of times, but is paramount when team members are working on an interdependent project and living in different geographic places. Understanding that task and maintenance are one unit with polarities that nourish the other rather than opposing forces is difficult, but it is even more difficult to understand and manage in a digital world.
Task and maintenance represent opposing but complementary forces in our lives. When the parts are in opposition, energy is not freely available to flow. The complementary is only manifested when the conflict disappears. The challenge is letting go of the tyranny of the “or” and learning how to integrate the poles in order to move forward and create an environment ready for decision making and supportive actions. In other words, to gain and maintain the benefits of one pole, one must also be able to pursue the benefits of the other and be able to embrace both extremes at the same time, instead of choosing between A and B. Team members must figure out a way to have both A and B and view these polarities as interdependent, something to be managed, not as a problem to be solved.
From the bad to the good: Putting pitfalls in their place
In the last installment of the blog, I listed some pitfalls of working in teams in the digital age. How can a team work to avoid these pitfalls you may ask? One method: building trust. While no one can program the development of trust in a team, trusting that what has been delegated will be undertaken with a search for excellence nurtures the development of a supportive atmosphere and helps to narrow the gap between what is expressed and what is wanted. This is not to say that everything that gets mandated will be done with a view to excellence, but what it does suggest is that trust with delegation paves the way for sharing relevant concerns and allows for data to flow, facilitating healthy decision making and sound choices.
The following action steps below are concrete ways that teams can trust and help put pitfalls in their place when working in the digital age:
| ACTION STEP 1: Establish maintenance norms |
Set up a prearranged structure that allows for three brief processing periods:
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| ACTION STEP 2: Agree on ground rules |
The team needs to agree and commit to ground rules for making decisions, resolving disagreements, debating issues, etc. Anyone overstepping these ground rules needs to be called on it by team members. |
| ACTION STEP 3: Assess and adjust your meeting process |
When necessary, reset goals and priorities as conditions and demands change.
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| ACTION STEP 4: Give opportunity to vent but not blame |
Encourage the team to vent and air their frustrations. However, you need to monitor when it slips into blame, gossip, and gets off tangent. |
| ACTION STEP 5: Redirect discussions not involving all team members |
When discussion involves some but not all team members, redirect and encourage those involved to discuss the issue at hand.
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Another way to help teams in the digital age?
E.Q essentials.
Emotional intelligence: The other side of being smart
"We're being judged by a new yardstick: not just by how smart we are, or by our training and expertise, but also by how well we handle ourselves and each other" (Goleman, 1998a).
Teams are cauldrons of bubbling emotions. Anyone who has worked in a team can note the inescapable influence of a group's emotional underworld. Anyone who has been a member of a task group has experienced the swing in shifts in the work level of a group when the emotional level of the group had not been taken care of.
On an average, we experience 27 emotions each waking hour. With nearly 17 waking hours in a day, we are likely to experience throughout the day about 459 emotional experiences. If one does the math, more than 3,200 emotions guide us through the week, and more than 170,000 each year. These are astonishing numbers and underscore the importance of building and nurturing a team's emotional intelligence, particularly as most of these emotions will occur during working hours. These are also indicative of the importance of developing and using the "portable skills" of emotional intelligence in work teams, digital or otherwise.
Why does EQ matter? Here is what we know.
Teams operate on two levels: work and emotional. Technology today colors most of our social interaction, shifting the basis and foundation of norm development within work teams. As a result, the quality of teamwork suffers when members lack emotional intelligence. Collective emotional intelligence is complicated, as a team needs to attend to both the relationship management of its members and the group as a whole. As team self-awareness does not automatically lead to team self- regulation, team suppression of discontent and frustration can often happened, and if it does, is counter to healthy team self-regulation.
Below are some norms (that use E.Q. essentials) that teams can employ to help foster individual and team awareness and regulation of emotions:
1. Interpersonal understanding and perspective taking
- Take time to understand a perspective that represents the opposite of your own.
- Check your understanding before stating your own. When you do so, share how you are feeling.
- Respect differences in perspective.
- Periodically ask quiet members what they are thinking.
- Check for understanding and commitment of decisions being considered.
- Acknowledge your disagreement with issues being discussed.
- Acknowledge your observations, if you sense unresolved undertones
2. Affirm, acknowledge, and reach out
- Acknowledge contributions, work efforts, and thoughtful interventions of others.
- Where possible, build on teammates' ideas, suggestions, and comments.
- Acknowledge feedback, even if you disagree with it.
- Acknowledge moments of caring.
- Provide emotional support, where needed
- Listen, listen, listen
3. Create a trusting and safe environment
- Take time to include new members and bring them up to speed.
- Exercise your discernment, integrity, and moral compass.
- Allow for conflict to surface.
- Acknowledge differences and misunderstandings.
- Admit your mistakes and move on. Avoid blaming, shaming, and/or gossiping about absent members.
- Focus on problem solving, not blaming.
4. Surface team members' skills, hidden talents, and resources
- Take time to understand the range of expertise in the group and, where possible, affirm and maximize these resources.
- Acknowledge when you can't comprehend what is going on or when you feel inadequate to the task.
- Follow through with commitments and responsibilities you have chosen to take on or that have been delegated to you.
- Do not say "yes" to doing something when you want to say "no", or when you have no intention of doing it.
- Ask for help when you need it.
Why do these norms work?
We are entering a new era in our world today, where emotional intelligence — the ability to get along with people and make good decisions — is more important to life's success than the academic intelligence measured in I.Q. tests. While an individual's E.Q (emotional quotient) cannot be underscored sufficiently, it is becoming apparent that a groups' E.Q. may be even more important when working in a team in the digital age. In fact, it is rare to see an organizational system today that does not rely on teams to accomplish its tasks and produce results. Work in isolation today is relatively rare, while work in relationship to others has become the norm. Perspective-taking nourishes the building of team emotional intelligence: structures that allow emotional dialogue to surface also increase participation and collaboration among members. Team performance also increases when members recognize and acknowledge the emotions that surface and influence their work. Teams that learn to function in emotionally intelligent ways remain vital and dynamic in the competitive marketplace of today: a team that recognizes that relationship management paves the way for healthy group communication with other workgroups within and outside of the organization is one that is set up for success.
Signing off… For now
My experience as a faculty member teaching about groups and leadership has taught me a few sobering lessons about technology and its impact on group functioning as well as the subtle, inherent dynamics of emotional intelligence and diversity in groups in the digital age.
What I have noticed is that when teams are formed on a spontaneous, voluntary, or involuntary basis, diversity issues play a subtle role: how a student is welcomed into a group that is already formed, how a group member is listened to, how a group member's ideas are given attention to, or even how a group member is given feedback. While there are a myriad of other dynamics underlying these responses, such as personality differences and willingness or ability to take on responsibility, unspoken elements of diversity (age, sex, status, culture, socio-economic background, education, etc.) play a role in influencing a team's cohesiveness, trust, flexibility, and/or capacity to leverage its resources and skills.
As educators, coaches, and consultants in the field of “Human Systems", we have a serious task ahead that may seem paradoxical, but in reality is not: preserving the human touch, whilst celebrating the magnificence of what technology and diversity have opened up for us and has in store for us.
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