Chapter 8
The You in Team
At this point you're probably watching for signs of the different Toxic Team patterns in every team meeting. Maybe you've found one predominant style on your team; you're Crisis Junkies or Bobble Heads. Or maybe you slide into different types of dysfunction depending on the situation. Many people describe their teams as majoring in one dysfunction with a minor in another.
Regardless of exactly how your team is getting it wrong, the second half of this book will show you a clear path to make it better. In each of the Toxic Team chapters, I helped you triage the situation and prescribed some emergency medicine to help you cope in the short term. The rest of this book provides the long-term cure.
You should be cynical right about now. Your team has probably tried a lot of things, spent a lot of time, and wasted a lot of money in a quest to improve your performance. Unfortunately, there haven't been many good answers for you, have there? The team effectiveness landscape has offered you superficial solutions that don't actually target team dysfunction at a level that can create real change. At best, you've been applying Band-Aids.
Team Building
The most common answer to a team in need is a team-building session. In these sessions, you put the entire team on a bus, drive until you see trees, and proceed to (a) increase alignment by beating drums rhythmically, (b) foster connection by dividing into sub-teams to race to build something, or (c) increase trust ...
