Coach's corner - December 2023

Julia Rowan answers your management, leadership and team development questions

I joined a new practice recently and now manage a team of six people. Everybody on the team is polite to me and each other. The work gets done, but there is little collaboration. Almost all communication is by email. Nobody speaks at team meetings. I have tried to find out what is wrong – but nobody will tell me. I find this exhausting.

I work from the perspective that ‘everything is feedback’. And feedback is coming your way, loud and clear. The behaviour you are experiencing suggests that trust has broken down somewhere – most likely between team members. 

Start to record what it is that you find exhausting about this situation. Do things take longer than they should? Are reasonable quality standards only being met with your input? You need to be able to be specific. 

You also need to take a dual approach. First, let the team know that you need something different from them. Be very careful about your language – make observations (“I notice I’m being included in emails”) rather than judgements (“this isn’t good enough”). 

Second, you need to start ‘calling out’ the tasks you find yourself doing that are not part of your job and handing each one back to the person who owns it. Conflicts like this can take a long time to get sorted, so it is especially important to be polite, patient and persistent. 

I moved from a large consultancy firm to a smaller practice for lifestyle reasons some years ago. It’s been a good move, but I miss the variety, intensity and impact of the work I used to do. The work I do here is much more humdrum than in my previous roles and I feel like the other partners haven’t accepted me. They have worked together for a long time and are of one mind. My ideas are rejected. 

I remember coaching a guy years ago who felt like an outsider on the team he managed and with his peers on the senior leadership team. He told me he was “very good at pretending to listen”. 

And therein lay his problem: there are some things we can’t fake. Relationships are built on sincerity. So, I wonder what it is like for this practice to have invited you in … a person who finds the work “humdrum”. Do they sense your judgement? 

I think the first thing you need to do is work out a way to engage with this practice sincerely. Write down the most honest observations you can make about your experience working there – to yourself, your peers and your team. 

Write about how you feel about the practice, your ambitions and what you have lost by joining. Then (and only if you are sincerely interested), find a way to engage with your peers about what they have built and how they built it. What were their hopes, challenges and successes? What are they proud of?  

It might also be helpful to look at your language. When stressed, we go to that very definite language (e.g. “they are all on the same page”). And the danger is that we start believing our thoughts. 

Might it be more truthful to say, “they are often on the same page” or “many of them are on the same page”?  While that may sound trivial, it can change our perspective. 
Once you’ve done this work, you should organise one-to-ones with your peers over lunch or coffee and try to connect with them genuinely. When people feel accepted, they find it easier to accept others.

Julia Rowan is Principal Consultant at Performance Matters Ltd, a leadership and 
team development consultancy. To send a question to Julia, email julia@performancematters.ie