Latest / The Science of Leading / Regression Is the Signal

Transcript

Regression Is the Signal · The Science of Leading

• 0:00
  Welcome to the show everybody!
• 0:01
  I'm Claire Monroe, here with Edwin Carrington.
• 0:04
  Edwin, today I want to take on a model that almost every manager has seen on a slide
• 0:08
  at some point: forming, storming, norming, performing.
• 0:12
  Bruce Tuckman introduced it in 1965 in a paper called Developmental Sequence in
• 0:17
  Small Groups, and in 1977 he and Mary Ann Jensen added a fifth stage,
• 0:23
  adjourning.
• 0:23
  It's probably the most famous team model in management.
• 0:26
  And I think most of us use it wrong.
• 0:28
  I agree, Claire.
• 0:29
  The model itself holds up well.
• 0:32
  The mistake is how leaders picture it.
• 0:34
  They picture a staircase.
• 0:35
  You climb from forming to performing, you arrive, and you stay there.
• 0:40
  So when a performing team suddenly starts arguing again, the leader concludes
• 0:44
  something has broken.
• 0:45
  And hasn't it?
• 0:46
  If my team was humming along and now there's friction in every meeting,
• 0:49
  that feels like going backwards.
• 0:51
  It is going backwards.
• 0:53
  That's the point.
• 0:54
  Teams don't move through the stages in a straight line.
• 0:57
  They move in loops.
• 0:59
  A new hire, a new leader, a change in goals, and even a team that was performing
• 1:04
  beautifully will drop back into storming.
• 1:07
  The regression isn't the failure.
• 1:09
  The regression is information.
• 1:10
  Let me push on that a little, because the research isn't completely kind to Tuckman.
• 1:14
  Connie Gersick published a study in the Academy of Management Journal in 1988 where
• 1:19
  she followed real project teams, and she didn't find a neat sequence at all.
• 1:23
  What she found was that teams tended to settle into a pattern early,
• 1:27
  stick with it, and then go through a burst of change right around the midpoint of
• 1:31
  their deadline.
• 1:32
  Gersick's work is a good challenge, and I'd say it strengthens the point rather than
• 1:36
  weakening it.
• 1:37
  Whether you use Tuckman's language or Gersick's, the conclusion is the same: team
• 1:42
  development is not a one-time climb.
• 1:44
  Teams shift when something forces them to renegotiate how they work.
• 1:49
  The stages are states a team moves in and out of, not steps it completes.
• 1:53
  So the useful question isn't what stage are we in.
• 1:56
  It's what just changed.
• 1:57
  That's exactly the question.
• 1:59
  Regression always has a cause.
• 2:01
  Find the cause and you've found the thing you need to lead.
• 2:05
  Let's take the most common trigger.
• 2:07
  You add one person to a team of six that's performing well.
• 2:10
  Why would one hire pull the whole group back into storming?
• 2:13
  Because a performing team runs on agreements nobody wrote down.
• 2:17
  Who speaks first in a meeting.
• 2:19
  How fast decisions get made.
• 2:21
  How much detail someone needs before they'll commit.
• 2:24
  Those norms were negotiated over months, mostly without anyone noticing.
• 2:28
  A new person hasn't agreed to any of them.
• 2:31
  So the team has to renegotiate, out loud this time, and that renegotiation looks
• 2:36
  like conflict.
• 2:37
  And the new person often gets blamed for it.
• 2:39
  Almost always.
• 2:41
  The leader sees friction start the week the new hire arrives and draws the obvious
• 2:45
  conclusion.
• 2:47
  Sometimes that's right.
• 2:49
  But often the new person is simply wired differently from the rest of the group,
• 2:53
  and that difference was always going to surface.
• 2:56
  The mistake is either blaming the individual or telling everyone to be nice and move
• 3:00
  on.
• 3:01
  What's wrong with telling everyone to move on?
• 3:03
  That sounds like normal management.
• 3:05
  Suppressed conflict doesn't disappear, Claire.
• 3:08
  It resurfaces later as resistance or as turnover.
• 3:11
  Storming is where a team works out how it will actually operate.
• 3:15
  If you skip it, you haven't avoided the conflict.
• 3:18
  You've postponed it and made it more expensive.
• 3:21
  So what does a leader do differently in each stage?
• 3:23
  In forming, give structure: purpose, roles, a working charter and a meeting rhythm.
• 3:30
  Don't assume a new group will organize itself.
• 3:33
  In storming, give the conflict a process, a clear way to make decisions and regular
• 3:38
  retrospectives, so disagreement has somewhere productive to go.
• 3:42
  In norming, revisit the agreements the team has made, and protect the quieter voices
• 3:47
  so the loudest person doesn't set every norm.
• 3:50
  And in performing, delegate and protect the team's focus.
• 3:54
  The part I find hard is seeing the clash coming.
• 3:56
  By the time you notice storming, it's already in the standup.
• 3:59
  That's where behavioral data earns its place.
• 4:02
  OAD measures behavioral drive across five dimensions: Drive,
• 4:07
  Influence, Resilience, Structure and Leadership.
• 4:11
  When you can see how each person is wired to operate under pressure,
• 4:15
  you can see where two working styles are likely to clash before the storming starts.
• 4:21
  It also gives a team a shared vocabulary for why someone works the way they do,
• 4:25
  which makes norming faster and far less personal.
• 4:29
  OAD's Team Variance Report turns that into a team-level view instead of an
• 4:33
  individual one.
• 4:35
  So instead of the new hire being the problem, the team can say,
• 4:38
  we're high on Structure, she's high on Drive, and that's why this handoff feels
• 4:41
  tense.
• 4:42
  Exactly.
• 4:43
  A named difference can be managed.
• 4:45
  An unnamed one gets turned into a story about someone's character.
• 4:49
  And what about performing teams?
• 4:50
  How do you know one is slipping?
• 4:52
  Drift shows up in engagement before it shows up in a missed deadline.
• 4:56
  People go quieter, handoffs get slower, fewer ideas come up in meetings.
• 5:01
  By the time the number is missed, the team has usually been drifting for a while.
• 5:06
  OAD's Performance Drift Detection, which is coming to the platform,
• 5:10
  is built to catch that window.
• 5:12
  I want to come back to that fifth stage, adjourning, because I think it's the one
• 5:16
  nobody actually does.
• 5:18
  The project ships, everyone is exhausted, and the team just dissolves into the next
• 5:22
  thing.
• 5:22
  It is the most skipped stage, and one of the most costly to skip.
• 5:27
  Adjourning means three things: run a real retrospective, document the decisions and
• 5:32
  why you made them, and publicly recognize the work.
• 5:36
  Skip those and the next team pays for it.
• 5:39
  They make the same mistakes, rediscover the same shortcuts and rebuild knowledge
• 5:43
  that walked out the door.
• 5:45
  And it's not only project teams, right?
• 5:46
  When a key person leaves a permanent team, that's a kind of adjourning too.
• 5:50
  That's a sharp connection, Claire.
• 5:52
  Every departure is a small adjourning, and every arrival is a small forming.
• 5:57
  Put those together and you see the full loop.
• 5:59
  A performing team loses one person and gains another, and it's back in storming.
• 6:04
  The leaders who handle this well don't fight the loop.
• 6:07
  They expect it, name it and lead each stage on purpose.
• 6:11
  So the real skill isn't getting a team to performing.
• 6:14
  It's getting it back there, again and again, faster each time.
• 6:17
  That's the whole job.
• 6:19
  Regression isn't a sign you've failed as a leader.
• 6:22
  Being surprised by it is.
• 6:23
  If you want to see how your own people are wired before the next change hits your
• 6:27
  team, start with the person you trust most.
• 6:30
  OAD's free Top Performer Profile takes seven minutes, results come back in
• 6:34
  twenty-four hours, and there's no credit card.
• 6:36
  That's O-A-D dot A-I.
• 6:38
  A team is never finished, Claire.
• 6:40
  The good ones simply learn to find their way back.
• 6:43
  Perfect place to leave it.
• 6:44
  Thanks for the wisdom, Edwin.
• 6:46
  Always a pleasure, Claire.