Team Coaching Experiment - Post#7 - Had I blown up the team?

Whilst I have been crafting ‘back to school’ and ‘new term’ messages for many of my clients in corporate systems my twenty-somethings have been on holidays, enjoying the warm autumnal weather and unfettered by school aged children.  This has meant a hiatus in the just-in-time team coaching experiment.  

This allowed me to take a long weekend mini-break to Lucca, Toscana.  Take advantage of living in central Europe I thought.  In retrospect, a 12 hour train journey each way was rather a long way to go for two nights and one day.  Revisiting Lucca, which I had been to only last summer, was a reminder that nothing has changed and yet everything has changed.  The old walled city looked the same as before and many sights I had visited before were immediately memorable.  Largely devoid of tourists the city was quiet.  Italians were mostly masked, even in the street, shops limited the numbers allowed in at any one time, and TrenItalia had decommissioned every other seat on the train.  The signs of Covid were everywhere.  Retailers had more time to engage in conversation about how the pandemic had affected Italy and the town in particular.  There was a mixture of stoicism laced with fear.  On hiring a bike to cycle atop the old city walls I saw joggers, pilates classes, the local football team, all using the wide walls for Saturday morning exercise.  This is a city that has stood for centuries, withstanding plague and war.  The sense of humanity’s ability to withstand was palpable, but still saddening.  

I was tired on Monday when I checked in with my team of software developers and product managers.  Whilst the product manager was back from leave, he was absent from the team meeting.  Struggling more than most weeks to really translate the rapid German quickly enough to understand, I could sense that several were exercised and agitated.  There was a degree of emotionality which had been previously missing.  I recapped on some of the practices we had covered in the past few weeks: to see more of the context, to ask different questions, to take multiple perspectives in an effort to reinforce what I hoped might be helpful.  Not being fully able to ascertain what was going on made it tricky to gauge an appropriate intervention.

The next day I was able to catch up with the team lead / product manager.  As we have been running the experiment for ten weeks I asked for his perception as to how things were going.  To my alarm he started by saying he’d noticed a degree of negativity on his return from holiday.  Some team members were being quite “aggressive” in voicing issues, seeing problems and not offering solutions.  I think it’s often a consultant’s fear when working with a client that mid-way through you’ve stirred something up and haven’t supported, as yet, the pieces coming back together.  Had I broken his team?

My client seemed quite relaxed however and we continued to explore what might going on.  He had noticed that most were taking a much wider perspective than they had previously, considering more of the landscape in which they were operating.  This had caused some to quite significantly reframe and expand how they saw their role.  The work we had been doing had bought many issues into the spotlight which was really making people think.  I felt a rush of relief when he offered “it’s had a much bigger impact than I had expected”.  Particularly pleasing, for him, was that people were acting more autonomously and were less reliant on him to fix things.  We had an interesting side conversation about how he saw his role – as a fixer – and how he might continue to move to facilitate the process of solutioneering without being the one to offer the actual solutions.  Now what was going on with this negativity and emotionality then?  

My client offered the following hypotheses.  This team of bright and “Calvinist” achievers were indeed seeing more.  But in doing so some were also becoming overwhelmed.  In my parlance they were seeing more of the mountain but overawed by its enormity. Faced with what seemed ever larger and more intractable issues they had experienced a cognitive and then an emotional overload.  I proffered that achievement-orientated people, faced with not being able to deliver, were feeling as if their identity or self-concept was on the line.  Faced with overload some were resolving the tough decisions by reverting to black and white thinking as a way of reducing the complexity.  One team member had enthusiastically engaged with users to seek out more perspectives and been blown away by the volume and strength of feeling she had encountered.  In connecting more with one another, and not through the team lead, this had led to more direct conflicts without the soothing facilitation of the team lead.  In retrospect my head is telling me we have created a ‘heat’ moment which we can now use to good effect.  In the moment my gut was saying ‘you’ve blown up these young people and caused them pain’.  The impact is not this stark, but I am struck by however much we can glibly say we can’t predict what will happen in complexity and experimentation we also have a duty of care.  We tread the tightrope between creating the catalysing conditions for change with the concern to do no harm.   

What we do now have is a platform for the next 3 – 4 weeks of activity, and a doorway into exploring more of the social-emotional field.  In growing the capacity to see more at a conceptual level we now need to do some work to bring the capacity for self-governance into balance.  The team lead seemed quite comfortable that we now engage in some practices to support resilience and even some breathing exercises.

Whilst on the way back from Lucca, in between gazing out of the window I had also taken in more than enough of what was going on the world.  Having overdosed on news and Twitter and taken in what feels like a large dose of toxicity, it’s time to get more self-referencing again, back into balance, and so now to spend the weekend on some long restorative hikes in the mountains.