198Managing Teams
Rules inventory
RESPECT AND TRUST
• Keep conversations confi dential.
• Be punctual to work and to meetings.
• Avoid sarcasm, snide remarks, or melodramatic body language
(such as eye rolling) when conveying disagreement.
• Listen without interpreting people’s motives. Ask why they said,
did, or asked for something.
• Respect other people’s ways of accomplishing tasks; don’t redo
work or impose your way on others.
MEETING DISCUSSIONS AND DECISION MAKING
• Share “airtime,” listen, and don’t interrupt others.
• Invite quiet people to speak.
• Stop advocating for your position after a decision has been made.
• Support the team’s fi nal decision, even when it’s diff erent from the
one you proposed.
FEEDBACK AND REPORTING
• Give the team status updates according to the prescribed pro-
cesses (which the team determines).
• Give a heads-up and be responsible for the consequences if you
have to miss a deadline.
• When giving or receiving feedback, put it in the context of helping
the team move toward its goals. Give positive feedback frequently
and negative feedback constructively.
• Admit your own mistakes.
(continued)
Leading Teams199
the fi nance people have nothing to do with. For each goal, go through a
mental list of everyone on your team: How will each person contribute?
Step 4: Defi ne group norms
Diversity of thought and perspective is your best bet when developing a
high-functioning, high-achieving team, but it doesn’t come without its
challenges. That’s because difference breeds confl ict. If someone works
best under a fi xed plan, the colleague who insists on improvisation is going
to stress him out. Likewise, if someone is used to looking at a certain task
through a sales lens, she’s not going to appreciate it when a marketing ex-
pert waltzes in with his own way of doing things.
More insidious are confl icts that arise from cognitive biases about ra-
cial, gender, and ethnic differences. These biases can cause us to discount
the contributions of people who don’t mirror our way of thinking or our
sense of self. Lack of communication and mutual respect can ultimately
lead to intolerable frictions and even collective failure.
To preserve diversity and reconcile differences, everyone should have
a clear picture of what being a good team member looks like. These rules
“make team members’ behavior more predictable,” says Mary Shapiro, an
CONFLICT RESOLUTION
• Assume that every team member is working in good faith toward
the team’s goals.
• Discuss confl ict with the goal of identifying what is best for the
team’s future.
• Discuss the confl ict fi rst with the person involved; avoid talking
behind anyone’s back.
• Don’t yell, use profanity, make threats, or walk out of discussions.
Source: Adapted from Mary Shapiro, HBR Guide to Leading Teams. Boston: Harvard Business
Review Press, 2015.
200Managing Teams
expert on teams and professor at the Simmons School of Management.
Providing guidelines means that “you won’t have to play bad cop as often.”
Group norms also settle some of the social uncertainty that can accompany
diverse personalities coming together. An additional benefi t is that you’ll
spend less time talking about group processes, such as how to deliver sta-
tus updates. And you’ll have clear, uniform ways of handling diffi cult inter-
actions like giving feedback or resolving confl ict. These rules apply to you,
too, says Shapiro: they “clarify what others may expect of you as leader.”
Build this list in a group brainstorming session. Use the box “Rules
inventory” as a menu of options to get the conversation started.
Step 5: Build relationships within the team
Teams run on trust—in each other and in you. To overcome communica-
tion and coordination barriers, your team members need strong personal
relationships. If they see each other as human beings, they’re more likely to
reach out for help, share ideas, and assume good faith when confl ict does
arise. In particular, strong relationships will help you keep valued team
members who might otherwise feel marginalized by the group.
To build trust on your team, include social face time in all group inter-
actions, and dedicate a communication channel like group chat for casual
check-ins and banter. Encourage team members to set up weekly offi ce
hours, when their colleagues can swing by their offi ce or video chat them
without going through the hassle of making an appointment. Pair team
members on a rotating buddy system for regular one-on-one lunches. It’s
OK to do something cheesy—doing something silly together is sometimes
the best team-building exercise of all.
The work you do at the beginning of your tenure as team leader will
make a big difference to the group’s trajectory. By calibrating competencies
and adding structure to the group’s work, you can help your people work
together toward a shared goal and succeed because of their differences, not
in spite of them.
Leading Teams201
Managing cross-cultural teams
Cross-cultural teams allow you to call on the best specialists worldwide
and capture valuable insight into local markets, customer bases, manufac-
turing conditions, and more. But leading a team with people from different
nations and backgrounds comes with special challenges. Left unattended,
these differences can become major sources of confl ict. (For an example
of what can go wrong, read the box “Case study: Manager in the middle.”)
Even worse, your company can’t compete and grow globally if its employ-
ees are unable to collaborate across cultures. But you have more maneuver-
ing room in this situation than you may think.
Observe closely
Understand potential sources of confl ict before they erupt. Professors
Jeanne Brett (Northwestern), Kristin Behfar (University of California,
Irvine), and Mary C. Kern (Baruch College) identify four key areas you
should address in teams that span different cultures:
• Direct versus indirect communication. Some team members use
direct, explicit communication, while others are indirect, asking
questions instead of pointing out the problems with a project, for
example. When members see such differences as violations of their
culture’s communication norms, relationships can suffer.
•
Trouble with accents or fl uency. Members who aren’t fl uent in
the team’s dominant language may have diffi culty communicat-
ing their knowledge. This can prevent the team from using their
expertise and create frustration or perceptions of incompetence on
both sides.
•
Diff ering attitudes toward hierarchy. Team members from hier-
archical cultures expect to be treated differently according to their
status in the organization. Members from egalitarian cultures do
not. Failure of some members to honor those expectations can
cause humiliation or loss of stature and credibility.
202Managing Teams
• Confl icting decision-making norms. Members vary in how quickly
they make decisions and in how much analysis they require before-
hand. Someone who prefers making decisions quickly may grow
frustrated with those who need time.
To combat these issues:
Foster open-mindedness
Encourage your people to look at cultural confl icts from the other side’s per-
spective: “Why do you think [colleague] is doing that?” “Could there be a
cultural issue at play here? What might it be?” Where appropriate, use one of
the four cultural lenses just discussed to identify problems: “I wonder if this
is a communication problem. Here’s why . . .” If it’s not possible to hold a full
discussion on the topic, you can still push people to frame their problems as
cultural, and not personal, differences: “I understand why you’re frustrated.
But everyone on this team doesn’t share the same attitude toward authority,
and that’s a difference we have to work around if we’re going to succeed.”
The goal is for your team members to become self-aware enough to
manage their frustrations without forming implacable grudges. Ulti-
mately, you may decide that some cultural norms actually benefi t the group
in different circumstances. If so, these practices of open-mindedness may
help your team become psychologically nimble enough to bounce back and
forth between styles depending on the context.
Intervene judiciously
In general, it’s best if your team members learn to adapt to these differ-
ences on their own. But sometimes you may need to intervene directly to
resolve an issue or at least moderate its impact on the rest of the team.
If you’re in this situation, use the confl ict-resolution techniques discussed
later in this chapter. With cross-cultural teams, you may not always know
when confl ict is brewing, because team members may not feel comfortable
opening up to you (as in the “Manager in the middle” case). If you suspect
this is happening, talk to someone with fi rsthand experience of the culture
in question. Ask for their take on what might be happening and for advice
about how to approach the affected team members.
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