Chapter 7

The Royal Rumble Team

The minute I walked into the room for the strategy session with a high-tech company, I felt the buzz. It was a magical combination of intellectual and physical energy. The intellectual energy came from the thrill of cracking vexing technical challenges. They had recently made a big breakthrough on a technical design and they were charged by the attention they were getting from analysts. The physical energy came from the high-strung personalities. These men had probably been the boys who drove teachers to distraction with their fidgeting. The Diet Coke for breakfast and candy all day long probably didn't help.

We had a lot to tackle in our two-day strategy session. The team faced an incredibly difficult decision that's all too common in the tech sector: When is it time to stop investing in our cash cow business so we can throw the weight of the organization behind our disruptive new technology? The problem, described beautifully in Clayton Christensen's book, The Innovator's Dilemma, is that diverting resources away from the old product will hasten its demise, while revenue from the new product probably won't grow fast enough to bridge the gap. It's incredibly difficult to find the right moment to flip the switch, and the decision requires market data and analytics as well as intuition developed over years in the industry.

The conversation started getting louder and faster. Each person in the room led a division or department and they staunchly defended their teams and products. The sheer brainpower around the table was staggering. Things moved quickly and every argument was matched by a clever counterargument. It reminded me of those Greenwich Village chess matches where each player moves definitively and then slaps the timer to pass the play to their opponent. Click of the chess piece on the board. Thwap on the timer. Click. Thwap. Click. Thwap.

Tension started to build between the team member representing the old product line and the one responsible for the new. I could see it in how they were playing with the Silly Putty I'd put on the tables. Recent neuroscience research has found that giving people a tactile toy to play with can promote attention in long meetings—that's why I use it. But I have learned that it also gives me clues to the state of mind in the room because there is a telltale “snap” when tensions run high and team members start to take out their aggression on the putty.

Shortly after I noticed the rising emotional tenor of the room, one of the team members stood up and started pacing while talking; soon another followed suit. Before I got everyone refocused, there was yelling, table pounding, and plenty of swearing.

The discussion became increasingly polarized. They weren't talking about the timing of the anticipated drop-off in sales anymore. Instead, it was personal: “You've been saying it's going to drop off for years. You've been wrong over and over!” Some members of the team jumped in on one side or the other. A couple tried to share points that might open up the discussion. Others just pushed back from the table and rolled their eyes—they had heard this debate before.

For his part, the team leader wasn't fazed. He's a competitive guy and he saw these heightened emotions as a sign that everyone understood how urgent the problem was. He remained calm and rational. His judgment wasn't clouded by the emotions in the room. If only that were true of his team.

The two quarrelling team members, each of them senior leaders in the organization, were not making arguments about the best interest of the company; they were making arguments about the best interest of their pet projects. Their passion had so fully clouded their judgment that they couldn't even hear the merits of their teammate's case. It was no longer about what was right for the company—it was all about winning the pissing match.

This team had definitely become toxic. They had become a Royal Rumble team, fighting purely on emotion and letting all that intellectual firepower go to waste. When a team channels its passion into personal combat, they waste all their energy on fighting the competition inside rather than the competition outside. Sure, it can feel good to be engaged and vigorous, but no matter how high you rev the engine, if your wheels keep spinning, you're not going anywhere.

Royal Rumble Team: A team where passion and enthusiasm are misdirected into personal and unproductive conflict between members of the team.

Engagement

In the past several years, the topic of employee engagement has regularly appeared in the headlines. Engagement, we're told, is the secret to unlocking discretionary effort and improving productivity. Studies show that too many employees are checked out; they just show up to collect a paycheck and go home. Economists have even coined the term presenteeism to describe people who are physically at work, but mentally and emotionally absent.

I work with so many comatose teams that when I meet a highly engaged team, I'm thrilled to see people who are invested in their work. I'm relieved when people give a darn enough to fight for what they believe. I'd rather be in a room where people are hollering than where they're snoring. I am happy for you to talk all you want. You just can't forget to listen.

If you're engaged, but only with your project, your ideas, or your vision of the future, you are not listening to the information that would help you understand what's right for your team, your organization, and your customer. When what's right for you gets disconnected from what's right for your team, you start to disengage and get defensive. Once your back is up, you stop listening and start working at odds with your teammates.

When you let your personal passions get the better of you, when you get too invested in ideas because they're yours, then you lose all the benefit of high engagement. Your team needs to channel its passion to beat the competition, not to beat up on one another.

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Origins of a Royal Rumble Team

People are usually surprised to learn that I spend more time trying to nurture conflicts than I do trying to extinguish them. But productive conflict focuses on issues, not individuals. How do you tell the difference? Unhealthy conflict sounds different. The word “you” gets used a lot—as in “you didn't” or “you should.” People talk a lot about the past—about “last time” or what “never” or “always” happens. The conversation gets quicker. The tone becomes more aggressive. Louder, deeper voices start asserting themselves over the rest of the team. Some people display aggressive body language, leaning in and pounding on the table, while others start to look defensive, leaning back, folding their arms, and avoiding eye contact.

Here are several factors that contribute to a Royal Rumble team. Recognize any?

Emotional Intelligence

Interestingly, Royal Rumble teams can emerge when you have either too little or too much emotional intelligence. The case of too little emotional intelligence is probably more common. Some people are smart and powerful, but are willing to use brute force to get their ideas adopted. I see this frequently in C-suite leaders and technical experts who can think circles around their teammates, but don't have the patience to help them understand. Are you ever guilty of trying to baffle or belittle your teammates into agreeing? How often do your teammates roll over? How often do they go the Royal Rumble route and fight fire with fire?

Or is the problem on your team too much emotional intelligence—shrewd and calculated attempts to push one another's buttons? Have you and your teammates learned that the right attack can render the opponent flustered, upset, and inarticulate? Do you use power to cut down someone who might have had a valid concern? Thinking of emotional intelligence as a uniformly positive force is naïve. Like most intelligence, emotional intelligence can be used for good or evil.

Bad Meeting Management

I'm not suggesting that you need to model your team meetings on the British House of Lords, but meetings lacking in some basic decorum go downhill quickly. For example, frequent interruptions mean you respond without hearing what your teammates are saying. Often, this means you're reacting based on incomplete information, which can lead to bad assumptions and misplaced aggression.

Getting away with making issues personal can also create a Royal Rumble problem. If you are attacked by a teammate and no one comes to your defense, you might feel that you need to counterattack to defend yourself. Let the games begin. If the meeting had been well managed, the person who lobbed the personal attack would have been corrected and you would not have felt the need to reciprocate. Even if your teammate was looking for a fight, it's hard to have a one-person rumble! If your team has a weak meeting chair, you are vulnerable to a Royal Rumble problem.

Individual Rewards and Recognition

It never fails. The organization that has plastered its walls with cheesy teamwork posters of rowers, mountain climbers, and jets flying in formation is the same organization that has a bonus and incentive scheme based solely on individual contribution. If you create a culture of heroes and zeros, you motivate team members to fight to win. Individual rewards and recognition remove the incentive to cooperate and increase the incentive to compete.

Working with the team in the opening story of this chapter, I really felt for the guy leading the legacy product line. He supported the tough call to divert resources away from his product line to fund the new projects, and then his teammates used his declining sales as ammunition against him. Seriously? The entire profit and loss structure made it more logical to fight against his teammates than to work with them. When organizations naïvely expect individual goodwill to be a more powerful motivator than their rewards systems, they get the Royal Rumble teams they deserve.

Impact of Being a Royal Rumble Team

Being a part of a Royal Rumble team is great if you're an adrenaline junkie. It can be invigorating to get so fully into your work. But if you get too invested in one side of the debate, you shut out different points of view and reduce the quality of the discussion. Unable to effectively harness the energy in the room, your Royal Rumble team faces several serious challenges, including:

Slow decision making. Royal Rumble teams take a really long time to make decisions. It's surprising they are so slow, because the energy in the room makes it look like things are happening. But all the action is back and forth and none of it is forward. A Royal Rumble dynamic leaves no room for compromise, so the universe of solutions is pretty much just Option A and Option B. If you're for Option A, you'd rather do nothing than endorse Option B, while all of your teammates supporting Option B feel the same about Option A. In the end, nothing is exactly what will happen.

Often your team will just postpone the decision, hoping some external force will change things and suddenly make the right decision more obvious. Imagine how easily a Royal Rumble team can develop a Crisis Junkie problem if a crisis is the easiest way to force the hand of one side or the other. Royal Rumble to Crisis Junkie is the modus operandi of the U.S. Congress.

False choices. When you fight over who's right and who's wrong, you force a choice that's probably not the right choice or even a necessary choice. When you get entrenched in opposing points of view, you can't see that some combination of solutions is possible. Particularly in strategic discussions, this false dichotomy can really limit thinking. Many great strategic breakthroughs have come from accomplishing seemingly opposing goals. If the Southwest Airlines team had been a Royal Rumble team, they never would have thought it possible to be the cheapest airline and the airline with the highest customer satisfaction ratings. One side would still be fighting for cheapest and the other for friendliest, like the guys in those old Chunky Soup ads who spent years fighting over the right utensil to use: “Fork!”“Spoon!”

Turnover. There is only so much abuse you can take before you decide it's not getting better. At some point, you or your teammates will give up and leave a Royal Rumble team. The aggressors leave because bullying isn't working. Perhaps there are easier opponents somewhere else. The bullied leave because they're tired of being punching bags. Even the witnesses get fed up and leave because they're sick of getting nothing done. With any luck (and a better selection system), the replacements might be a little more open minded. But if the replacements just take up the vacated posts as leaders of Camp A and Camp B, you're going to find yourself right back in the middle of the ring. The Royal Rumble team is bad for your organization and it's bad for you, too.

Embarrassing behavior. If you get sucked into a Royal Rumble dynamic, you had better hope that no one is using their smartphone to record you. If your fight-or-flight switch lands in the fight position, you'll spew lines that would be really embarrassing to relive later. People say things that are silly, hurtful, or downright inane because they think they will sink their opponents. Once you get a reputation for this kind of behavior, it will precede you. Not only that, but you will find it difficult to look yourself in the mirror. Barroom brawling is bad enough. Don't embarrass yourself with boardroom brawling.

Diagnostic

It doesn't exactly take sensitive instruments to detect a full-fledged Royal Rumble problem on your team. In fact, a decibel meter in the room would probably do the trick. But if your problem is just starting to brew, you might pick it up with some of the warning signs in the diagnostic test in Figure 7.1.

Figure 7.1 Royal Rumble Team Diagnostic Test

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Triage and Emergency Medicine

If your team has started to show signs of a Royal Rumble problem, you might still have time to reverse the trend before the only solution is a public battle to the death in the front lobby. The approach you take depends on who on your team is willing to take off the gloves.

If you are the team leader or your team leader is on board:

1. Set the rules of engagement A good first step toward improving a Royal Rumble team is to develop a set of rules that will govern your behavior. The basic idea is to start listening to one another. Stipulate that only one person talks at a time. Make a rule that before starting a new point, each team member has to paraphrase what the previous speaker said. Until the first person agrees that their ideas have been appropriately summarized, the second person is not allowed to move on. I watched two members of a team go back and forth three times before the first person was really heard. Immediately team members realized how poorly they were listening and slowed down.
More advanced tactics focus on how to handle major differences of opinion. You can require that everyone weigh in on where they are—take a straw vote to see how far you are from a decision. You can set time allowances for how long the debate will continue before you make a decision. And you'll need to set decision rules in advance so that at the end of the debate period, you know whether the team leader will be making a decision or whether a vote will be taken.
2. Hold people accountable There is no point in setting rules of engagement if no one is going to follow them. Your team leader needs to be prepared to hold you accountable when you and your teammates break the rules. Minor infractions should be met with a reminder about the team's commitment to not interrupt or to keep the discussion focused on issues rather than individuals, such as, “I realize that this is a really important and contentious discussion—all the more reason for us to listen to one another carefully.” More significant missteps need to be called out in the meeting and also addressed privately after the session. If the team leader ignores indiscretions and fails to enforce the rules, they'll become moot.
I like to use humor to set and enforce rules of engagement. If your team has a few bad habits, try giving them a name. One team I worked with referred to their tendency to rapidly volley back and forth with increasing intensity and decreasing courtesy as their “Ping-Pong problem.” They found a red Ping-Pong paddle that any member of the team could raise to call out this behavior. The use of the silly term and the relatively gentle rebuke of the paddle made it easy and even kind of fun to enforce the rules. What is your team's bad habit, and how can a little levity help you wrestle it to the ground?

Most team leaders understand that their meeting rooms shouldn't be free-for-alls. But if your boss really is less Bruce Banner and more Incredible Hulk, appealing to the Hulk's better judgment isn't going to work. If you can't get your team leader to behave like a grownup, there is a good chance that your teammates are fed up and ready for more mature behavior.

If your teammates are on board:

1. Break the stalemate The biggest problem on a Royal Rumble team is that you're working with limited or even binary options. You have blinders on. It's black or white, yes or no. Encourage your teammates to contribute more options and nuance to the discussion to reduce this us-versus-them atmosphere. Try to understand the benefits of each option and reflect them in a hybrid solution. If each combatant feels like some part of their idea is reflected in a third option, they might feel more comfortable endorsing that solution.
2. Return to the problem A really bad fight takes on a life of its own, straying farther and farther from the original issue. Eventually you can't even remember where you got started. If your team starts getting embroiled in a two-sided argument, try reframing the problem you are trying to solve: “We're going back and forth on which solution makes sense; let's go back to the problem we're trying to solve. How would you describe the issue?” Going back to basics might show you that different members of the team were trying to solve different things. Once you agree on the problem, the solution may be easier to see.
You can also try taking some time to talk about how you will make the decision. What are the criteria that you will use to evaluate different options? Can you rank your stakeholders in terms of priority? Is a solution you can implement quickly more valuable than one that takes longer? How much risk is the team willing to tolerate? Sometimes these conversations reveal that one solution is optimal but another solution is acceptable because it works better given the constraints of the situation. In this case, the teammate who proposed the first solution can take solace in the fact that you valued their idea—it might just have been the Cadillac solution when you only needed a Chevy.

Most teams want to behave more maturely; they just need a little help to put old gripes behind them and start over. Most teams. Of course, you might be on one of those teams where ego and machismo rule the day. In that case, you are going to have to model grownup behavior in the midst of the madness. First, swap your Diet Coke for a chamomile tea and then try these techniques to stay calm, cool, and collected.

If you're on your own:

1. Focus on the issue The most important thing you can do to counteract the effects of a Royal Rumble team is get the discussion focused on the issues and away from personal criticisms and insults. Each time a teammate points an accusatory finger at someone or makes a personal attack, reframe the discussion around the issue. When someone makes an angry statement like “You think everything is about your precious sales force!” try restating it more appropriately: “We need to think about other key stakeholders in addition to the sales team. Who do we need to factor into the equation?” That way, the person talking feels heard but the target of the criticism doesn't feel attacked. If you do this each time, you'll show your teammates they can resolve their issues without resorting to personal attacks.
2. Be empathetic Any plan for rehabilitating a Royal Rumble team needs to start with genuine empathy for the people around the table. It can be very, very difficult to conjure up empathy for the guy who is continually beating his chest or the woman who is always launching into tirades, but that is exactly what you need to do. Aggressive, unseemly behavior is almost always a protective mechanism against some perceived threat. What is the threat? Can you be curious, kind, and empathetic about what has made your teammates feel so defensive?
If you sleuth out the real issues, you'll be in a much better position to solve the real problem, rather than continually addressing side issues. Does the proposed action threaten your teammate's power or control? Is he secretly worried about being less capable or less successful in the new world? It is truly amazing what a little empathy and curiosity can do to reduce hostility and improve listening around a table. Once you understand the real issue, you can find a solution that moves the team forward without leaving individual team members behind.

Dissent and disagreement can be good for team performance. After all, too much agreement can lead to groupthink. But Royal Rumble teams can't build anything together because their members are too busy tearing one another down. Conflict is too personal and too focused on old wounds. Sure, some of you might prefer this type of outright aggression to the buried conflict of a passive-aggressive team. Some people prefer to be stabbed in the front than in the back. But if you're stabbing one another, no matter where you're doing it, the only people who will be better off are your competition.

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