Building a Dysfunctional Team - Team Series #2

The best way to measure if a team is dysfunctional is at the end of a meeting, do you feel invigorated or do you feel depleted?

Welcome to The Art of Accomplishment, where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease. I'm Brett Kistler, here today with my co-host Joe Hudson. Last week we talked about what makes a functional team and how to build a functional team. And today, let's do a little bit of the opposite. Let's talk about how to build the most dysfunctional team you possibly can.

Yeah, that sounds fun. Just to start off, there's this great— maybe we can put it in the show notes. There's a great— I don't know how much we'll talk on this, but there's this great thing that the CIA put out and had somebody in the CIA actually verify it. So I know that it's it's apparently true, but I think they put it out in the '40s or the '50s or something like that. And it was how to go into an organization and make it dysfunctional because they were trying to plant people inside of key organizations of what was considered an enemy at the time and make it dysfunctional. It's, it's a great document because when you see it, you see so many organizations are run the way that they tell you to corrupt an organization. So really cool stuff.

Yeah, what were some of the characteristics of how they would do that?

Defer decision-making, defer decision-making to groups, make sure that the groups that you're deferring the decision-making to are over 6. Always try to get everything in the hands of a committee. Take away the autonomy of people who know the work, stuff like that.

That sounds about right.

Exactly, yeah, when I see like, You know, oftentimes when I'm working with an executive for the first time, one of the first questions I'll ask them is how many direct reports you have. And if they have over 5, it's a red flag. If they have over 8, I just know there's no functionality happening, or not a great deal of functionality happening in that organization. To have that many direct reports is just, you can't make a decision, or incredibly hard to make a decision.

Yeah, the committee thing sounds like a lot of nonprofits and like a lot of government.

Yes, that happens in a lot of governments and nonprofits, exactly. But also happens in way more for-profit companies than you can imagine.

So this is how the CIA would make a dysfunctional team. How would Joe make a dysfunctional team?

Yeah, I might have some things to add there. But before I even begin, I want to tell you a story, because I think what happens with people is they think that it's a very binary thought process. I have a functional team or I have a dysfunctional team. And people don't even think about teamwork unless it's like an extreme pain point. And I'll give you an example of this. So I recently worked with some chapter of the Young Presidents' Organization, or some forum, I don't know all their technical terms. And I asked them all before I arrived, what does this group need to go to the next level? And it was a group of 8. And these guys were CEOs of companies that are probably market cap between $200-300 million to $2 or $3 billion, so it's that size of a company. And almost all of them answered with some version of nothing. Like, "We're good, everything's cool. I can't think of anything that we need." And if I would've asked those same people, "What does your company need to flourish and to take it to the next level?" They would've all had an answer. Whether it be better marketing or better people or more capital, whatever, they'd all have an answer. That they would be looking for. And it tells you the mentality behind teamwork that often happens, which is like, I either have a functional team or I don't. But it's not like, they don't look at it the way one would say look at revenue, which is there's always a way to grow the business, there's always a way to get to more revenue, there's always a way to increase my mission in the world. Those things seem to be, you know, kind of, in game theory they call it an endless game. Whereas oftentimes when people think about functionality of teams, it's like a game that has an end. It's functional or not functional, or it's very binary. And I think that that's the first thing that has to change in a leader's mind to really get the optimal team or get more and more optimal of a team, because there's always room for growth. There's always a way to take the team to the next level. There's always a place to get more functional. So even the idea of, a functional or dysfunctional team. I think it's more of a scale. It's just where are you on the scale? And the scale happens to be endless in both directions. So super dysfunction can be killing each other literally, and super function can endlessly go on.

Yeah, I could imagine it can be both and as well. You could have an extremely functional team that whenever a certain topic comes up, suddenly seizes up into dysfunction, and then that dysfunction might persist for a long time under the surface or block the functionality of an otherwise functional team.

That's right, that's right.

Unless it's addressed.

Yeah, it's just like the transformational journey or the spiritual journey. There's just no end to it. There's just always ways to refine. Just, I would say like any journey, but something in our mind, you know, we have some sort of artificial limit on it. And when you can blow that, blow your mind on that, when you can say, oh, actually there might be like, this highly functional team might be able to get 3 times more functional, that's when some really creative and cool stuff happens.

And so, yeah, an interesting corollary there that you made to personal transformation. In the transformation process, if you stay the same, you will eventually encounter the reality that breaks your model, breaks your consciousness, your identity, and requires growth. And this must be true as a team as well, as a company grows or as a company Shrinks. And how do dysfunctional teams exist and stay in business?

Yeah, that's a great question. So, you know, a functional team is one component of making a successful company. You know, a great product is another component. How much— what your margins are is another component. Level of the talent in the room is another component. There's so many things that are components of a successful company. And then there's also momentum, meaning Oftentimes when companies get dysfunctional, like a big company, a Fortune 500 company, it can take years for them to recognize it in business results. And even when you have those business results, they can last for years before any actions. Poor business results can be there for years before an activist shareholder comes in or before you get crushed by your competition. So you have the momentum, and then you also have the forgiveness of the company base to the other strengths. And so both of those can allow for greater levels of function. So for instance, if you are in a low-margin business in a highly competitive space where there is a shrinking market, a total addressable market, then you are— if you're dysfunctional, you're going to be dead really, really quickly as a company. Whereas if you are in blue space where there's no real competition, where it's a super high-margin business and the total addressable market is growing, then you can be dysfunctional and still succeed. Or if you have, you know, a way to keep your competitors at bay, whether that be with patents, which are less useful these days, or trade secrets, or distribution monopolies, whatever that is, then you can be more dysfunctional and still survive.

How would scale factor into this? How do scale and dysfunction interact?

Yeah, well, I would say it's harder to hold a functional team —like to have a functional team the bigger that the company grows. So I think that's one correlation. It's just it's more difficult because people are creating functional teams are hard to replicate, and structures are hard just for people to operate in that kind of size. So there's companies like— I think it was Gore-Tex for a while— that every time they had part of the company that got over 150 people, they would Osmosis, and they'd break it into two at 75, and then they would grow them to 150 and break it into two to keep the number of people that they're interacting with to a, to a pretty limited number. So there's been a lot of people doing tricks like that, but it just gets challenging the bigger the company is. But it's definitely not impossible. But otherwise, the kind of dysfunction that can be allowed, or that can exist that doesn't disturb the business is not really based on scale as much as it is based on those other components like margin and product and what the market is doing and that kind of stuff.

So it's more based on the requirements of the space that the company's in, the requirements of the company's business to remain profitable and to exist. And the same dysfunction that might plague a family business might plague a large business all the same. Or not, depending on the differences of what's required for them to survive in the market.

Correct. Like, one of these ways of looking at it is like creativity. So some companies don't need to be creative to stay in business, and some companies really need to be creative to stay in business if your business is innovation. And dysfunction will kill innovation really, really quickly. It's why very few big businesses innovate effectively, and if they are, they're doing it through acquisition. And so you have to be highly functional to continue to iterate successfully and be innovative successfully, comparatively highly functional. So that's just an example. So if your business requires that, you're gonna have to stay functional. If your business doesn't require that at all, then functionality is less important to the maintenance of your business. But to the growth of your business, to the flourishing, to the rapid expansion, functionality is always helpful. And that's the thing that's interesting is, you know, for instance, you know, great marketing is always helpful for a business. Some businesses don't need the marketing, some businesses do need the marketing, but great marketing is always helpful for the business. It's the same with team. So if you're really looking to optimize your company, teamwork is one of the best levers to pull because it affects everything else. It's like the soil in which everything grows in is people's relationships and their dynamics. And if you have bad soil, it's hard for anything to grow.

So speaking of the dysfunction within a team and how most of what goes on in a company is some reflection of the consciousness of the leader or in a team, how can you relate what we're talking about with teams to the leaders of them? And what do you see in dysfunctional leaders?

So there's a couple like really big ones, like linchpins that if a leader shows these qualities, it's gonna be really, really hard for the team. One is, the easiest one to name is like being political or blame. And what this does is it makes it so people don't know how to succeed or how to win because it's really based on the mood of the leader. And blaming obviously just is a horrible way to motivate people. And it also doesn't solve anything. So that's like kind of the obvious one. The less obvious ones are indecisive leaders. Super, super, super bad for a team. Like, the team loses trust really quickly if somebody's indecisive. Indecisive doesn't mean that you make every decision in a split second. It means that you can make decisions easily or that you don't even notice there are decisions. You're not in that fear-based place of like, oh my God, what should I do? That you're taking the next iterative step. So that's another one. Conflict avoidant leaders is another huge, huge issue. We are people, we have conflict. Avoid the conflict, you avoid building trust, you avoid sorting out the problems, you avoid finding the inefficiencies, you avoid seeing the problems that you need to fix. All those things happen if you avoid conflict. And though on some level nobody wants the leader to come in and go, what the hell's going on here? But they also don't want a leader they can't trust to do that. So it's oftentimes you see the leaders trade the short-term discomfort for the long-term discomfort. And so if you're okay with the short-term discomfort, you have a lot less long-term discomfort. That's a critical piece as well. Another one is that they allow defense or they are defensive themselves. And there's a meeting and one of the people is really defensive. If a leader allows that to exist, that dynamic to exist, it'll definitely kill a team. Because what happens there is that if someone's getting defensive, then people on the team, if they're super functional, they'll be like, hey, you're defensive, like what's happening here? But if they're not, then people start being scared to say things to that person and then communication gets all gummed up. And so allowing defensive behavior is just super toxic for a team. And you can try to coach them out of it or you can be really direct and say, "Wow, we don't do defensiveness here. Like, can you please leave the meeting until you can come back in a non-defensive way and show up?" Lots of ways of handling defensiveness, but it's really critical to make it so that everybody feels safe and comfortable sharing whatever it is they need to share.

I think it might even be interesting to do an entire episode someday on defensiveness and allowing it and coaching it and just addressing that in a team. Because that's a really big one right there. And I can see how tricky it can be when, if somebody is defensive, it's because their nervous system is seizing up and they're detecting threat. It would be interesting to talk about how to approach and work with somebody who's already in threat without making that threat wrong. You know, to say, "We don't do defensiveness here," could be taken as to say, "You're not allowed to feel afraid right now." Correct, yeah.

Or you help them to say, "I am afraid right now," instead of being defensive. You know, "This thing is bothering me," or even ask the question is like, "Oh, am I being told that I've done something wrong?" What's happening? So there's all sorts of ways around it to not make it wrong, and it's like, and there's a huge difference between, we don't allow defensiveness here, which is in itself defensiveness, as compared to saying like, oh, hey, like, I see that you're being defensive. You know, this isn't something that we do here, so take a break, you know, get back to yourself, come on back, and we'll continue the conversation.

Okay, so is there anything else you wanted to touch on with regard to dysfunctional leaders? And then next, I'd love to talk about what do you look for in a team, what to observe when you're looking for dysfunction.

Yeah, I think the other thing to talk about is another thing, this is a more subtle thing, but leaders who don't lead or follow, either one of those can create super dysfunctional teams. So what I mean follow is that they're actually listening to the wisdom of their executives or the people that they're working with and letting them have authority and autonomy, super important. Also, leading, being the first in, taking the responsibility, having the quote unquote the buck stop with them, being the person who leads the charge in their own kind of vulnerability, not kind of, their own vulnerability, their own wonder, their own not knowing. Without that kind of leadership, it's really hard for a team to be functional. Not owning that role of, oh, I am the decision maker on these key components. It's less common, but it happens. That would be the other thing that I would really look for if I'm, you know, I get called into places often and say, can you assess this team? And those are, that's kind of the checklist of stuff I look for.

I guess my next question then has shifted a little bit then from, yes, from the signs of a dysfunctional leader. What do you see in a team that has a dysfunctional relationship with their leader? Yeah, it's a slightly different question.

I mean, I recall this time that I was asked to sit, a CEO asked me to come in and sit with the executive team. And the CEO introduced me for 5 minutes. I don't know if I've told this story on the podcast. They introduced me for 5 minutes, and then when they handed it over to me, I said, so my first question is, what makes it that you're not listening to the CEO? I just watched all of you guys check out while the CEO was talking, so what's happening there? And then I asked the CEO what made that acceptable. How is it that he's living with that level of not being heard? So that's one example of it, but a lot of fear is another example of it. You definitely see a lot of fear reactions, a lot of self-protection in reaction to leaders who are indecisive or not leading or following or are political or indecisive. You just see a lot of people start protecting themselves. Because without that trust, you don't have people willing to put themselves out there. You don't have people willing to throw in their lot with the team's lot.

Instead, they start saying, "Wait, this team's not gonna be successful," or, "I don't trust it, and therefore I'm gonna throw in my lot with my lot and take care of myself." Then continuing here, what are some other examples of just when you're walking into a team, you're looking at whether it's the leader communicating with the team or just the team having a meeting, what are the things that you look for to find areas of dysfunction that can be improved upon and addressed?

Yeah, so if I hear people talking without listening to each other, like the one I just described, that's a huge sign. A conversation requires both somebody who wants to talk and somebody who wants to listen. So that's a huge sign.

Generally both and both, you know, not just one person. Yeah, that's right.

And then also I'd look for who's participating and who's not and how many people are not participating and kind of what's the distribution of participation in the conversation. I look for people doing rabbit holes where everybody gets lost in the example instead of the higher topic that's being talked about. That kind of level of distraction is sometimes incredibly useful in certain kinds of conversations, but in execution conversations, really not useful. I look for unclear roles and responsibilities. Any time that I see something where at the end of the meeting, people don't know what they're supposed to do at the end of it, if it's a meeting about execution, that's another example of it. Means that they either— there's no accountability, or people don't know what they're supposed to be doing. And I also look for context switching where like if one person is talking about this and they're arguing with someone who's talking about that and they're not even talking about the same thing and they don't even recognize that they're not talking about the same thing. Happens all the time. So that's another one. Teams that prefer talk to action, especially in bigger organizations, but not only where people like to hear themselves talk, but they're not interested in like making it all happen, and they can get lost in the thought instead of in the doing. Oh, where being right is important. That's a huge one. So if I see it so that, you know, like people are defending themselves because they need to be right, that means that they think being right has something to do with their value to the business, and that's a horrible thought process.

Yeah, that's an interesting one to zoom in on a little bit more too, 'cause I can see Being right is a personality characteristic that people bring to a team, and it can also become the culture of the team. Correct. Yes, yes, that's right.

It's the same way if you look at us like a soccer team, if somebody has to be the guy getting the goal, or a woman has to be the woman getting the goal in the soccer team, instead of making sure that the soccer team gets the goals, that's pretty much the same thing as being right. In a business where it's about ideas and relationships. And also, being right really hurts— having to be right really hurts relationships because it's a zero-sum win-lose. It means one person gets it, one person doesn't. And it's also just super ineffective in the fact that nobody is 100% right. No, nobody, nobody, nobody is 100% right. So if two people disagree on something, there's some sliver of wisdom in both things at least. And if you can combine those two, you've got a better solution than either one of them alone. And so being right, needing to be right, totally prevents those greater solutions from coming to the surface.

Yeah, you're 100% right on that.

No, I'm not. So what else do we have here then? I mean, the defensive discussions that we talked about with the leader, the blame that we talked about with the leader. I think the other thing that's a more subtle thing that you can see is people don't feel accountable for the team. They feel oppressed by or controlled by the team dynamic. So super functional teams, you'll hear somebody say on occasion, wow, this meeting's really not working for me. How do we make this meeting work better? You'll hear people say, oh, the way this conversation's going doesn't feel optimal. They're all taking responsibility for the dynamic in which the team interacts rather than thinking that the leader is responsible for it. You'll also see this in accountability where the team holds themselves accountable instead of the leader being the only person to hold people accountable, that the team takes responsibility for their dynamics instead of just the leader taking responsibility for the team dynamics. And if I don't see that, then there's lots of very easy room for growth.

I can see there being dynamics where a number of members within a team identify some dysfunction within the team and then they decide, I'm in a dysfunctional team. There's nothing I can do. And that contributes to the dysfunction further.

Yeah, the more accurate thing is I am participating in the dysfunction and the thing that, the idea that I can't do anything about it is a great part of the dysfunction. And I don't, you never blame people for that 'cause nobody's given us the toolbox, right? It's like, okay, you're in a dysfunctional organization and you're the administrative assistant to the, you're low level on this team, nobody's told us, like, here are the 5 moves you can make to help that team become more functional, right? And when they find out what those 5 moves are, let's use a couple of examples there, like say out loud, wow, this meeting doesn't feel productive, or to say out loud, wow, I notice that people seem to be interested in getting it right instead of getting to the best solution? Or to say, who are the people in the meeting that should be here and who are the people in the meeting that shouldn't be here? It's not like a good use of their time. Or to say, is this meeting a decision-making meeting or is it an execution meeting or is it a discovery meeting? What is our intention? What's the goal of the meeting? Those kinds of things, some less, some more scary, are once scary, and most people don't know that that will make a huge difference. So once they've done it a couple of times, it's a lot less scary 'cause it's like, oh crap, that works. And everybody now respects me even more. But most people are scared to say it and/or just don't know to say it.

Yeah, and often when you're in that space where you're scared to say something and then you get yourself to say it anyway, it often comes out a little sideways and then triggers people into defense. And then it proves that it wasn't a good idea to say, and then it proves that this is a dysfunctional team that I can't do anything about. And there you are again.

And there you are again. That's right, yeah. If you're saying it, if you built it up so much and then you say it with harshness or you say it with a lack of confidence, you have a good chance of getting a suboptimal result. Yeah.

Yeah. And so you could actually see a lot of these characteristics as, you know, like the rabbit hole where somebody wants to be seen in a certain feeling And maybe they're going down a rabbit hole into an example to hide in that example and hope that the example can prove what they want to say without them having to fully own it. Or the blame, which is really saying that I'm seeing something going on in this team, you know, that, that's not working for me, or that's not, that, that I see as dysfunction. And maybe there's a dynamic in the team that I'm not allowed to be the one who wears that. So it's gotta be someone else's fault. A lot of these things that are dysfunctions are actually at their core, they're attempts, if partially occluded attempts, at actually bringing the team into function.

Some of them are for sure. I would say the other thing that's happening is people, like I can watch a team and the way that I see a team operate, it's like, what emotions are they avoiding and what emotions are they embracing? And how are they, what are the strategies that people are using to embrace or avoid the emotion or to bring teamwork together or create conflict? And those strategies really will tell you a tremendous amount about where the dysfunction lies and what the root cause of the dysfunction is.

Yeah, which points back to our emotion series where the impulse in the emotion, which is the room in a dysfunctional team and a dysfunctional meeting will be dripping with emotion. Yes. That is unowned. Somewhere in that emotion is always— And suppressed. Usually suppressed. Yeah. Yeah, and somewhere in that emotion is the entire, all the ingredients to bring the team into functionality. Yeah. And to the extent that they're suppressed, that's how you see this dysfunctional dynamic show up.

Yeah, so great example of this would say, let's say you have a leader who yells at their team as an example, right? Which I guess is another sign of dysfunction that people don't usually do that in front of me. But let's say you have that. The emotion that is usually being suppressed is fear or hurt and aloneness, as an example. And they feel that way because there's a stagnation happening that they know will hurt the company. And so the suppression of that emotion creates the frustration, and the frustration often drives some sort of movement. The anger drives some sort of movement, which is a surrogate for the best kind of movement, but at least it's movement. And so that's a great example of how the unfelt emotion turns into a strategy that is less functional. Whereas the more functional approach is, wow, I noticed that I have very little confidence that we're gonna succeed and that scares me. And the reason that I have no confidence that we're gonna succeed is because I don't see movement happening. And I don't wanna be a part of a team where there's no movement happening. So how do we get to movement? And how do we all take responsibility and ownership for that? Because I don't want to be the only person driving this team. That's a completely ineffective use of my time and it disempowers you guys. That would be the more effective approach if you can actually be in the emotion, see what's happening with you and speak to it.

Yeah, so that brings me into just one final question for this episode. What's the most poignant example of when you saw a team in utter dysfunction begin a transformation into function? Oh, that happens like every day.

Well, not every day, but every day I'm in a team, that's what happens. I think maybe Ant on his episode, which is coming up, I think he might have told the story, but I can't remember exactly. But it's a good poignant one where we're in an offsite, we're doing something, and I was supposed to trigger him on something. And I said, I said, "Your anxiety is gonna kill the company, and everybody in this room knows it." That's a poignant moment, and I'm doing it with a tremendous amount of love and just a deep truth that allows everybody to go, "Oh," and relieve, including Ant in that moment. There's a sense of relief because it's like, "Oh, the thing has been called out. Now we can actually address it and look at it." and it's not being considered wrong. It's not being blamed. It's not something that, you know, makes anybody more or less than one another. So that would be an example. Another example, let's see where I've seen that. Yeah, there's this great little thing that I do with executives where I say, I want your goal for the, Your goal is within a month have 2 weeks in a row where every meeting that you attend, you consider it a 5-star meeting. Like, you rank your meetings 1 to 5 stars, and every one is a 5-star meeting. And that means you feel inspired, invigorated, and energized by the meeting. And you have to do whatever it takes to do that, whatever you need to do, like whether it's telling your, you know, the chairman of the board you're not coming to a meeting, or whether it means walking out of meetings or whether it means saying, this meeting sucks, how do we fix it? Whatever you need to do to get to that place. And if a CEO or a leader commits to that, man, within a month that organization is completely different. It's like a beautiful little hack to totally transform that thing because it's basically saying, I'm not gonna put up with dysfunction. Because dysfunction does not, I mean, that's the best way to measure it. The best way to measure if a team is dysfunctional is at the end of a meeting, do you feel invigorated or do you feel depleted? How invigorated do you feel? How depleted do you feel? Is a great mark of the dysfunction. It just hits it right where it lives.

Yeah, I guess my question in that example is if you have a leader in that situation who's avoiding a certain set of emotions, what stops them from avoiding those having particular meetings and having a lot of other meetings and saying, great, I got my 5-star meetings, and we're now not paying attention to a significant issue in the business.

That's why I do it for 2 weeks, because eventually the thing they're avoiding is going to be put onto their lap, and they're going to have to deal with it. That's exactly why.

With the goal of a 5-star meeting.

You can't have all happy meetings and avoid. It's just you can't have all happy meetings and blame. You can't have all happy meetings or productive and invigorating meetings if you are political. It just doesn't allow for it. So the avoidance is kind of the last thing that gets caught, but it definitely gets caught. The other thing that happens is when they realize how to— the techniques of creating a 5-star meeting for themselves, they're less likely to avoid. Because they realize it's not the issue that they're avoiding, it's the conflict that arises around the issue that they're avoiding. Right.

Well, I think this is excellent foreshadowing for a future episode in this series on 5-star meetings and meeting culture. Awesome.

All right, a pleasure as always. And I do wanna make a call-out. There's a book called "Five Dysfunctions of a Team," which I think is an excellent book. There's the 5 dysfunctions, but they all, I encourage you to see that all is, the first dysfunction, which is a lack of trust. So they talk about things like accountability and not paying attention to results and avoiding conflict, but all of that is ways to deteriorate trust. But it's, it's told in some— in a very, very beautiful way. It's like a story. It's easy to read. So I highly recommend the book if you want to dig deeper in this topic.

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