16 ◾ Transforming Teams
With a sense of clarity and control that she had not
possessed 20 minutes prior, Eliza was able to objec-
tively reect on the events of the morning. After a few
moments of thought, she leaned forward and wrote the
following words down on her notepad:
Eliza’s List of Concerns
1. Conflict between
sales
customer service,
sales
operations
2. Throwing peers under the bus
3. Lack of trust
4. Poor communication
5. Mismatched sense of urgency
6. Inability to see the other’s
point of view or perspective
As she reected on her list and all of the items on
it, she circled the second item: Throwing peers under
the bus. She knew she had to tackle this one as soon
as possible. It was a clear violation of one of her
“golden nuggets.”
Eliza had been lucky to have two important mentors
in her professional development: a manager early in her
career and her most recent manager, the one who rec-
ommended her for the position of president and CEO to
Golden Nuggets ◾ 17
HDS Tech’s board of directors. Through her mentors she
learned many of the tools that had helped her become
successful. In addition to all of these solid business skills,
they also frequently imparted words of wisdom that she
collected and organized into what she called her “golden
nuggets.” These were nonnegotiable truths that Eliza
viewed as critical to any highly functioning professional
or highly functioning team. Never throw peers under the
bus was one of them.
Never throw
peers under
the bus
She knew it happened often in organizations. By
placing the blame on someone else, an employee
attempts to deect some sort of blame away from her
own conduct. It infuriated Eliza when she witnessed
this happening, but she had come to understand the
phenomenon better. She realized that often people
would undermine a peer not to deect some sort of
blame, but out of an attempt to gain favor with a client
18 ◾ Transforming Teams
or person in a position of power. The hope was that
if the employee made another employee look bad,
she would look better by comparison, more reliable or
competent than her peer.
Eliza just couldn’t understand why people didn’t
realize that undermining a peer doesn’t harm just the
peer, it harms the entire organization as a whole. Today
was a perfect example of that. By throwing Dave under
the bus, Claire undermined Cynsis’ condence not just
in Dave, but in HDS Tech as a whole.
Having cleared her emotions and with a better
understanding of what she needed to do, Eliza walked
down the hall to Claire’s ofce. She found Claire hud-
dled with a couple of members of her team, going over
some client spec sheets.
“May I speak with you for a moment?” Eliza asked.
“Sure,” responded Claire.
Once they were alone in Claire’s ofce, Eliza turned
to her and said, “I want you to know that I’m committed
to working through the issues from this morning. But I
also want to see if we can x some of the larger com-
munication and trust issues that we seem to be having.
“That will come later. But in the meantime, I want
to tell you that while I do understand your frustration,
I also was disappointed to hear that you told the client
that you thought Dave had made a mistake,” Eliza said.
Claire immediately became agitated. “But I
thought he had! Would you prefer that I lie to the cli-
ent?” she demanded.
“Of course not! I would never want you to lie. But
there was a better way to handle that situation. You
Golden Nuggets ◾ 19
could have said, ‘I don’t want to jump to any conclu-
sions as to why it doesn’t work without discussing it
with Dave and Kirby.’ Or ‘Dave is very thorough and
good at what he does. Let’s talk with him before we get
too far ahead of ourselves.’
“You see, Claire, instead of throwing Dave under
the bus, you could have expressed condence in him,
which would have instilled condence for the client as
well. If your approach had been to not undermine any-
one, you would have, by default, avoided this situation
with the client. I’m not blaming you alone for it, but
you could have handled it much better by simply not
undermining Dave.”
“Well, I didn’t think that was what I was doing,”
responded Claire.
“And that’s what I want you to reect on. Will you
do that much for me? Will you just spend some time
tonight or this week reecting on how the situation
would have been different if you had responded by
supporting Dave instead of presuming the worst, and
doing so in front of the client?” asked Eliza.
“Yes, okay, I will,” said Claire somewhat reluctantly.
“And I will make sure Dave understands this same
point and how he needs to communicate with you
more clearly about client issues going forward,” said
Eliza as she walked out the door.
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