Fix Your Team

Chapter 8 UNRESOLVED HISTORICAL ISSUE: Skeletons in the closet

SYMPTOMS

• Resentments between team members continue to stem from something that happened long ago, rather than a current issue.
• There’s an ‘elephant in the room’ that the team doesn’t feel it can openly acknowledge or discuss.
• Some employees are fixated on ‘the way things were’ before a past issue occurred.
• Employees are still highly emotional, which some colleagues and managers believe they should have got over. Those emotions might include grief, resentment, lack of trust in each other or lack of respect for management.
• Recent employees may not understand the reason for all this emotion if they weren’t around when the past issue occurred. Those newer employees can’t work out why their colleagues seem distracted and worried when the current environment seems safe and harmonious.
• There’s a sense that certain issues are ‘no-go areas’ and shouldn’t be discussed. The impression is that the organisation wants to pretend everything is okay, while some members of the team clearly think otherwise.

WHAT’S GOING ON

A skeleton in the closet is relatively easy to identify if you’re aware of the recent history of the team. Simply put, there’s an issue from the past (say, in the past two years) from which the team hasn’t yet moved on.

Whatever the issue was, it was significant enough to rock the foundations of how the team worked together. It might have been:

• a serious complaint by one employee against another
• a critical ...