Trading Persona for Trust

One thing that has been on my mind lately is how to coach a team in order to help it reach the Performing stage in Tuckman’s group development model. Even if a team does incorporate all competences that are required to fulfill the team’s mission, I find it common that the team gets stuck in a stage where everyone stays in his or her comfort zone. Cooperation within the team is realized through handover between competences (or even worse: roles), which is of course a local optimization. Ergo, this is a team with a lot of I:s - contrary to the well-known saying.

My experience is that this type of environment is not a fertile ground for collaboration. To me, collaboration is a high-energy state where the team acts as one and where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. When this type of team is iterating over a new design or hunting down a performancy issue, you often don’t know which of its members that came up with an ingenious breakthrough. This is because the team can somehow collaborate to the extent of becoming one mind. Therefore, who came up with an idea is both impossible to know and irrelevant to ask. This type of team is an example of the Lean principle Optimize the whole.

Teams that have reached this nirvana-ish stage consist of people who are comfortable both with themselves and with each other. And I’m not saying that they are complacent. I am not saying that they always agree and that there are no conflicts. Because there are always conflicts and that is actually a good thing - this would be material for a blog post on Agile and Hegelian dialectics. What I am saying is that the comfort zone has grown to incorporate the entire team.

As of late I have become interested in Jungian psychology and its theories on personality. Now, I might inadvertently prove the Dunning-Kruger effect by posting this, but please bear with me. As a layman, what really caught my eye in my first introduction to Jungian psychology was the concept of the Persona. The persona is essentially a mask we wear in order to be able to function socially. The persona makes sure that we follow social rules and don’t generally misbehave. Anyhow, I believe that in order to function as a collaborative team, the team members need to - at least partially - lay down their personas and instead cultivate their true selves. Why is that? Because this builds honesty and trust. This rids the team of competitiveness and alienation. And a team with honesty and trust is a team where collaboration techniques will work extremely well, very easily!

From my personal experience, this type of team is usually the outcome of a small group of very competent people that have had to work very hard closely together in order to reach a goal. If the group is too large, it is much harder to reach this stage. (This is one of the reasons for my being a proponent of micro teams.) The same thing applies for a team that is not forced to work closely together in order to reach a goal.  

So back to the original question: How do I coach a team in order to help it reach this stage? I believe that I should stop trying to control the team. Instead I should take a step back and hold space. I should open my heart and let go of judgement. I should walk alongside the team and provide support. This will rid the team of fear and build trust. Without fear and full of trust, the team members will start shaving off their personas. And right there, might we not have found a shortcut to Performing?