Co-Worker
& Team Stress -
What This Section Gives You
Many of us spend a large part of our time working with the same
group of people.
When we like these people and enjoy working
with them, our work can be deeply satisfying
and we can achieve a great deal. But if
we find our co-workers difficult to deal
with and teamwork is plagued with conflict,
work quickly becomes stressful and unpleasant.
Conflict within our teams can seriously
undermine our productivity and ultimately,
the success of our work.
This section introduces tools that can
help you solve problems with dysfunctional
teams and build better working relationships.
This helps you control what may be a serious
source of stress in your life.
Understanding Teams
For us to understand where teamwork can
go wrong, we first need to understand how
good teams are designed, and how they manage
to work well together.
Team Design - Teams Shouldn't Be Too Big...
The fundamental “design” of
the team has a big impact on its success.
By design, we mean the number of team members,
their mix of skills and experience, the
resources they have available, and the way
their organization supports them.
At first sight, it's natural to think that
the more people belong to a team, the more
likely it is to achieve its goal. There
is obviously some truth in this.
However, coordinating teamwork takes time, and the larger the
amount of co-ordination, the more time is
needed. Think of it this way: If only two
people are on a team, each person only needs
to co-ordinate activity with one other person.
If four people are on a team, each person
needs to co-ordinate with three others.
If six people are on the team, each person
needs to co-ordinate activities with five
others. The more people on a team, the more
productive time each person loses because
of the co-ordination activities needed to
produce a coherent team product.
Too Much Co-ordination, Too Difficult to Control,
Too Much Free-Riding...
More than this, two other factors come
into play as the team grows in size: first,
it becomes more difficult to keep all team
members fully occupied on the team task;
and second, it becomes much easier for less-committed
team members to "free-ride" on
their colleagues’ effort without being
noticed.
Because of this, teams are often at their
most efficient at a particular size –
while this obviously depends on the circumstances,
research has shown that the ideal size for
teams can be as small as five people.
Skills, Resources and Experience…
It's also important to make sure that teams
have the right mix of skills and experience.
It is obvious that the team needs all the
working skills needed to achieve its goal;
however, what is less obvious is that it
is better to bring together people with
different backgrounds and experience than
it is to build a team with similar people.
While people who are very different from
one another may take longer to bond as a
team, they have a much richer and more diverse
pool of experience to draw upon. By contrast,
teams of similar people can be quite uncreative
in the way they approach problems, reducing
effectiveness.
Equally obvious is the importance of teams having free access to
the resources needed to do the job. Appropriate
manpower, funding, time, coaching, information
and support must be available when needed.
It can be intensely frustrating and stressful
to be set challenging goals, but not to
have the resources needed to achieve them.
The final part of team design is ensuring that reward systems are
correctly aligned. It is unlikely that teams
will function well if bonuses are given
to people who succeed at the expense of
other team members. If good team behavior
is important to an organization’s
success, then rewards must follow this.
Badly aligned reward systems can destroy
teams.
Team Briefing - Well Briefed, But Not Over-Briefed
Once the team has been properly designed
and brought together, team members need
to be briefed clearly. They need to know
their mission, understand what they can
and can’t do, and understand what
they have to deliver. In doing this, there
are many parallels with the individual delegation
skills we discuss elsewhere
on the site.
This briefing needs to be done carefully
if the team is to realize its full potential.
While the person setting the objective may
have an idea of how the job could be achieved,
by the time of delivery a skilled and experienced
team should have deeper expertise in the
problem and its solution – even more
so than the person setting the objective.
If the method of delivery or the final product
is specified in too much detail, this will
prevent the team from using its expertise
to deliver a product that is even better
than the one expected.
The Measure of Success or Failure
On the other hand, the team's product needs
to be specified in enough detail for the
team to understand clearly what its client
wants. The team needs to understand that
its success or failure will be measured
by whether it achieves this delivery.
Set objectives should be clear and easily
understood. If possible, the meaning of
the work to other people should be explained,
so that all team members can understand
the value of the work they are doing. Objectives
should be sufficiently challenging to fully
engage team members and make full use of
their skills. Not only does this benefit
the client, it also makes work more interesting
and satisfying for team members.
Understanding its Boundaries
The team also needs to know what its boundaries
are: It needs to know what it can do and
what it cannot do. For example, it needs
to know whether it can bring more people
onto the team, how far it can adapt standard
working methods, and what power it has to
change things outside the team. If the team
does not know its boundaries, it risks either
not achieving its potential, or causing
political problems and turf wars.
And the Tools Available..
Finally, the team needs to know the resources it has available
to it, so that it knows what tools it can
use to do the job.
With good team design and clear briefing, it should be possible
for the team to make a good start. Having
made this start, the people who set the
team up should let the team perform without
detailed scrutiny up until the first checkpoint.
Coaching Where It's Needed
That is not to say that the team should
be abandoned during this time. People outside
the team should offer coaching to the team
where appropriate.
Coaching may be motivational, where it
concentrates on helping the team to commit
to its objectives. It may focus on helping
the team identify the strategies it will
use to achieve its goals. It may be educational,
in helping team members to develop the skills
and knowledge needed to reach the goal.
And it may focus on the team itself, helping
individuals within the team work together
effectively.
Good coaching from experienced outsiders
can help to eliminate many of the difficulties
and stresses that new teams experience as
members learn how to work together.
Introducing the Tools
We start the section by looking at what
can be the least emotionally charged solution
to team problems: Identifying problems with
the team’s design, briefing and support.
In doing this, we can work to make certain
these are not at the root of team problems.
Then, we move on to look at your own expectations
and attitudes so that you can be sure you
are not contributing to any stressful situation.
Finally, we look at tools you can use to
smooth relationships with your co-workers
while still defending your own rights.
Team Tools:
By now, you should broadly understand what
is needed for setting up, establishing and
supporting a good team. The Team
Diagnostic Checklist tool provides a
check list that you can work through to
identify problems in the design or support
of a team that may be causing stresses within
it.
This is the first thing to check where you are experiencing co-worker
or team stress – you may well find
that problems with working relationships
are just a symptom of poor team design or
of weak team support.
Checking Your Own Behavior:
Where we experience problems in working
with other people, it is possible that we
are contributing to these problems and to
the stress they cause. Problems with working
relationships are rarely and completely
clearly defined; often both parties are
contributing to the problem to a lesser
or greater extent.
If you are serious about sorting problems
out (and therefore reducing team stress),
then you owe it to yourself to consider
whether you are contributing to the problem.
If you do not, then you risk being severely
embarrassed when you raise the problem with
other team members. Check that you are being
reasonable in your expectations of other
people.
A second step can be to look at your own attitudes and the way
that you deal with and relate to people. These can be major contributors
to problems, stress, unhappiness and career failure. The difference
between good and bad team behavior often depends on the situation,
however the following factors are usually important:
- Customer and results focus: A key factor in judging whether
behavior is good or bad is looking at whether it contributes
to or harms
the team’s delivery to its customer.
- Effects on the team: A second factor to look at whether a
behavior promotes or damages the cohesion of the team and helps
or hinders
it in becoming more effective.
- Effects on individuals within the team: Good team behavior
should help individual team members to benefit by teamwork – perhaps
through enjoying working with other people, by learning
more about what they do or by earning an appropriate reward for
working as
a team. Bad team behavior can harm the interests of other
team members.
Once you have dealt with any of your own behaviors that might be
contributing to the situation, the next
thing to do is to look at how you can improve
relationships.
Improving Relations With Co-Workers:
Here, we look at a number of key techniques
that you can use to work more smoothly with
your co-workers, thereby reducing team stress.
First, we briefly recap some of what we
have already learned about assertiveness.
This helps you to discuss problems with
co-workers in a positive way that is likely
to achieve the desired effect. We then look
at negotiation
skills so that you understand the basics
of negotiating a fair compromise.
Finally, we look at negotiating formal
“Team
Rules.” By learning this approach,
you will be better equipped to agree a fair
set of behaviors with which all team members
agree to comply. Team Rules are useful in
that they give the team a fair benchmark
against which they can manage the behavior.
The process of negotiating Team Rules can
be useful for aligning team members’
expectations of one-another.
The Last Step:
It is quite possible that you may have already
taken all of the steps we have looked at
so far. If so, you may already have a well-founded
and supported team. You may be acting in
a perfectly reasonable and well adjusted
manner, and you and other members of your
team may have agreed clear Team Rules. In
short, you may have taken all reasonable
actions to ensure productive, smooth relationship
with co-workers.
Despite this, it may be that one team member is still
behaving unacceptably, and that this is
either threatening the team’s ability
to meet its objective, or causing intense
team stress.
In this case, it may be appropriate to
exclude this person from the team. This
is an unpleasant thing to have to do, but
the benefits of doing so may outweigh the
unpleasantness. If you have to do this,
make sure that you have managed
all stakeholders appropriately.
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