Unwinding Negative Team Tensions
Two quotes this week caught my attention. Both were deeply insightful into why there is team tension and providing tools to improve understanding and harmony.
Tension in teams is as synonymous as McDonald's and fries! Tension can be both good and bad. When there is healthy tension, team members are challenged to be the best that they can be and to create a team that performs to the highest levels under whatever pressures are present.
Unhealthy tension comes in a variety of guises. There is the obvious backbiting, silo-creating politics that is easy to see. Sometimes it looks like disengaged team members, doing the job and getting through the day with minimal additional effort. Sometimes it dissolves into team members being catty and looking for the worst in each other, creating an environment that permeates mistrust and wasted time with distracted focus on power plays, positioning and aiming to keep oneself safe. Negative team tension tends to bring out the worst in people. It creates an environment where people become attuned to all that is wrong, creating the inevitable self-fulfilling prophecy cycle. Focusing on what is lacking confirms poverty mindset, life position and perpetuates the negativity: creating an ever increasing tension. This steals people's mental, emotional and physical health, producing low job satisfaction and productivity. Team scores then drop, reflecting the dissatisfied workforce.
The first quote was an Instagram post from @the.holistic.psychologist:
“Children who learned denial become adults who invalidate the experiences and emotions of others.”
She goes on to explain. “Denial is a coping mechanism. Parents that use denial are struggling with their own shame + in an attempt to protect themselves, they deny reality. As children, we are learning that we cannot trust our own intuition about what we experience. And, we learn to cope by engaging in the same pattern of denial we witnessed.
In our adult relationships this looks like denying the experiences of others. Most of us are doing this unconsciously, not understanding that we are invalidating other people’s experiences. The core of denial is an inability to cope with + process emotions. When we’re uncomfortable emotionally, we invalidate rather that acknowledge. This leads to the same disconnect in our relationships we had in our childhoods. We feel not seen, heard, or validated.
It’s a cycle that takes conscious work to break.”
Following this I then came across a talk given by Oprah when she spoke on career, life, and leadership at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. She touched on this noting that all your arguments come down to three questions, and three questions only:
Did you hear me?
Did you see me?
Did what I say mean anything to you?
In training I often share the formula: “Happiness equals our expectations minus our reality.” People need to be seen and heard. Knowing this, work with your team to practise being present, equip them with skills to listen and help team members to feel heard and validated. When we feel like we are a valued and important part of a team we want to give more, do more and be more.
Heres to your success
