How To Get Your Team Unstuck From The Past To Form A United Identity

The Challenge

Just talking to the client and just wanted to share this with you really briefly.

Here’s a problem I had. They’ve got a single team within a big business, this team a creative team, and they make amazing technology.

The challenge they’ve got is they basically got three teams within a team, and what’s happening is that instead of working together as one, they are working against one another because they’re all stuck in the past, in terms of how things used to be.

The impact of this is their stakeholders, the people they serve, the people that count on them, both their clients but also their internal stakeholders, they don’t know what to expect from them. And there’s no single vision for this group, and they see all these different types of behaviours.

What I want to share with you is my thinking around how you turn this team around. How you make them united and you kind of get them focused on a single way of working in a single identity.

Different Backgrounds To Work In Different Teams

I want you to think about your team. I want you to think about the organisation you work in and usually it’s made of groups of people that come from planning from different backgrounds. So you know you might have people that are from technical backgrounds, you may have people from business backgrounds and you may have people from credit backgrounds.

These guys may have joined the team because they think you are going to build amazing things. The business guys may join the team and think that the team is all about making lots of dollars. And the creative guys may join the team because they think the team is about creating beautiful things. 

And when you’ve got this often happens, you know when you’ve got a merger and acquisition activity or with the way things work now many people, companies because of diversity and the positive impacts of diversity hiring people from different backgrounds to work in different teams.

Now, what happens here is that because the team thinks the team is three different things, there is no single identity and where this matters is the point of view of the stakeholders to the team, the people that rely on this team to deliver and solve problems for them. 

United and Focused

There’s a big question mark as to what this is and what is it going to do for me? So eventually this team will get a bad brand. So, if that’s you or if you know a team like this, I want you to think about what you would do. What would you do if you were the leader of the team? What would you do if you’re the leader of an organisation? What would you do if you were running the change process and trying to make this happen? Let’s talk through the three ideas that I think are really important in getting a team unstuck from the past and focus on the future.

1. The first one is this. I’m at this long ago that the reason I never used to be a past guy to be honest. I was always now and into the future, focused on work right now to get to where I want to get to. And I realised that when you’re like that you’re actually close to learning. You’re actually close to the lessons.
2. So the point around this is I think instead of being annoyed, frustrated or angry about the fact that people are coming from three different perspectives. I think you got to come across that on some level the team honour past and learn from it. There are a lot of cases, there is kind of a symbolic letting go of the past so that we can learn from it and let it go so we can move in the present and the future.
3. Third thing is, I’m thinking about this team, and thinking about the fact that I have got to make the future more desirable than how things were. So, a brilliant book on change, won’t go into the book now, but talks about the fact that there’s got to be an ending to a little bit like letting go before there’s a beginning.

So what needs to finish before we can wrap that up, put in the past and then there’s the  future and what I’m conscious of is from the perspective of their stakeholders from the outside? What’s a gap and opportunity or thing they want to make together? What’s the work that they can do together that they can’t do a part, that is more desirable than things have been?

And I want to work that out with them, and you could do that with your team.

And the third thing with this framework is the idea that I want people to be instead of thinking about the past. I want to be really present with one another. So that’s usually when they’re speaking with one another, I want them to be in the room, in the session listening, contributing and engaging. Not in the past, not in the future but being with another and how you can encourage that is by modelling  it yourself.

Summary

Here is the thing, many teams struggle with having a single identity. Because they all come from different perspectives, different personalities, different backgrounds, and from a stakeholder’s point of view there’s no single vision. No single set of goals. No single proposition that says this team stands for something. So eventually their value gets undermined.  

I think there’s value in the past, and I think you gotta respect it and learn from it. But eventually it’s going to be some symbolic letting go and ending before they can be a beginning and moving into the future to create something with this team together and while doing that I could encourage it by modelling them being in the present with one another, to work with each other, build relationships and build trust.

Leave me a comment or Get in Touch

Whether you see me on Facebook, whether you see this on my website. What I’d love you to do is  leave me a comment. Comment, share it with anyone that you know who has got a team, a leadership team,any team that would value this. 

Second, leave me a comment down underneath. When you use this, what does it mean for what you need to do to get your team unstuck and move to the future and what part of this can you take and apply.

Third is, If you know a team that needs help, they need to get unstuck, just private message me on my site or on Facebook and we had a chat and see if we’re a good fit.

I hope that’s been awesome and useful for you.

Have a lovely day wherever you are and talk to you soon.