090 – Fix Your Team with Rose Bryant-Smith and Grevis Beard

Working in a team can be a great professional joy. It can be rewarding, exciting and caring. But too often, working in a team is not a utopian experience. For many working in a team is a nightmare. Difficult, stressful, confusing and bleak. And if you are or have been in a difficult team you know how much of an impact it can have on everything in your life. Being a part of a dysfunctional team brings with it stress and anxiety that doesn’t stay within the confines of the office. It follows us home and impacts our family and social life. Unhealthy teams crush productivity and creativity and they affect us personally.

Help is on the way. Rose Bryant-Smith and Grevis Beard are the authors of a new book Fix Your Team. The book is subtitled the tools you need to rebuild relationships, address conflict and stop destructive behaviours. It’s chock full of fantastic insights into the way teams work. And it reveals the common things that can go wrong – and the things we can do as leaders to fix them.

Lessons Learned

You’re not alone

I love talking about teams because they are such a fundamental part of our working lives. As Rose and Grevis point out, we take all of our human qualities into our team dynamics – the good and the bad. But for some reason – it makes it all the more manageable to know that these problems are no ours alone. They are shared by teams across all industries, at all levels.

12 things that poison teams

1. Gossip culture and cruel conversations

2. Unprofessional conduct and bad behaviour that goes unchecked

3. Toxic personalities. One bad apple can rot the whole barrel

4. Personal crisis where someone is struggling

5. Workplace romances

6. Family ties and the spectre of nepotism

7. Lack of diversity and inclusion and the risk of a white-bread workforce

8. Unresolved historical issues and skeletons in the closet

9. The managers style

10. Unhealthy competition where winners and losers are made obvious

11. No clarity and no accountability is the path to complete chaos

12. Overwork and stretching your team to the breaking point

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