I’ve been thinking about this question a lot lately. At work, we use this term to describe any form of individuals who are grouped together regardless of if they are actually working together or not. And at times like now, when I’m part of a team / department / group of colleagues going through a lot of change, I wouldn’t necessarily call us a team. We don’t feel like a team – we feel more like a group of people who are coexisting and working next to each other in an office space.

But I guess I’ve always felt this way about my current department. I shifted positions about three and half years ago and while I was prepared for my new role, I was not prepared for the change in team structure. My old department functioned like a “team”. I had a manager who was really focused on bringing the group together to engage in work together. She asked probing, thoughtful questions to help move the discussion along and we rotated who led meetings. We collaborated on everything and we spent a lot of time discussing best practices and specific procedures. It could be frustratingly slow to reach a decision but at the end of the day, I always felt included in the work product even if I didn’t feel empowered to make a decision on my own.

When I shifted roles, it was a cultural shock that I wasn’t quite prepared for. Not only was my manager hands-off and not interested in my day to day work, but our team meetings were completely different. He led every meeting and our discussions were based on the assumption that a solution needed to be identified as quickly as possible. Staff members were asked to volunteer for projects and if no one volunteered, someone was assigned to implement the solution on behalf of the group. We rarely shared ideas or tactics in a group setting – these were gathered through individual conversations and one-off meetings. My colleagues and I functioned like six satellites operating autonomously, mostly empowered to make our own decisions and drive our own strategy with minimal collaboration from the rest of the group.

I had never been able to put my finger on why the two teams were so different. What specifically about their structure made them function so differently? I read an article recently, The Discipline of Teams by Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith which made me look at the structure of my current department and my past department from a different lens. My first group functioned and was structured like a team – we had collective work products; we engaged in a lot of discussions, decisions, and work together; and we shared leadership roles in meetings and projects. My current group functions and is structured like a working group – we have a definitive leader; we do individual work projects; and we discuss, decide, and delegate.

Reflecting on my two experiences, I don’t know which one is better. I liked aspects of working as part of a “team” but I also like the autonomy that I have in a “work group”. I feel like the ideal might be a combination of the two. I’m thankful for my experiences as part of my first team because I developed valuable leadership and collective decision making skills. And because of that experience, I now gravitate towards a more collaborative working style. But I wonder if that is always the best way. Being held accountable to individual goals and performance like you are in a working group can also be freeing. I feel like when I have the opportunity to build my own team, I’ll really consider what structure fits in the best with the overall strategy of the department and I’ll be sure to include a collaborative aspect to all our work.

I’m done with my wedding which means I have time again! And I finished up all the festivities just in time to start a year-long management fellowship. We’ve had our first few sessions already and the conversation has helped my mind shift into a bigger-picture format as opposed to focusing on the immediate present.

As a younger leader in the nonprofit sector, I found our first topic to be relevant to not where I am right now in my career but where I’d like to be. Currently, I manage a large number of volunteers. But because of the size of the group, my job design, and the culture of the region I support, I rarely have opportunities to partner with them. It’s even more infrequently that I work directly with leadership at the top of my organization. My organization is big and in my current role, there are a lot of layers of managers and directors above me. But as I move upwards and into a different nonprofit, I will need to be more of a partner to volunteers and leadership and less a “manager” of them.

This idea of partnering has me thinking about ways I can experiment in my current position to help develop some of the skills I’ll need in my next role. To be a good staff partner, I’ll need to be prepared to be authentic; I’ll need to be comfortable providing information; and I’ll need to be open to working with leadership. There are other things I’ll need to be as well but these are the top three that I think I need to work on.

So, what are some experiments I can try?

1. Be authentic: I’m a very private individual and early in my career, I was often told to hold my tongue in meetings and was chastised for letting my excitement for a project shine through. As a result, I struggle to voice my professional opinions to leadership and I really struggle with showing emotion around my work. I need to get better at this and one way I could do this is to try and connect more of my personal journey to my organizational story. I also need to let more of my passion show through and I need to develop greater confidence in meetings with leaders.
2. Comfortable providing information: with all the data privacy conversations happening right now, I’m always leery of providing donor information to volunteers. I also avoid sharing any sort of behind-the-scenes organizational management changes or issues with my volunteers. But, in order to be a good partner, I’ll need to develop my own guidelines around this second piece and think about ways I can be a conduit of information who provides the bigger picture while still staying within the law and my organizational norms.
3. Open to working with leadership: This is tricky – I like to think I’m open to working with my current leaders but I realize I am open to only working with those who I want to work with and who I like working with. As an organizational leader, I won’t always be able to pick the leaders I want to work with so I should start trying to figure out ways to develop new talent while I’m still in a role that has many opportunities to experiment with what that type of training plan looks like.

In my monthly leadership class, we’ve talked about various different topics: an introduction to the adaptive leadership process and how to diagnose a situation.

The topic for this month was Manage Self and the timing was perfect as there are a few professional challenges that are causing me to do some deep self-reflecting. My boss was recently promoted which has led to a lot of uncertainty and anxiety among my team; I have been struggling with how to work with a difficult colleague for a few months; and I had just finished a volunteer event that unexpectedly took a wrong turn. As I was going through the readings before class, I found myself highlighting over and over various points to remember and come back to. Questions about what were my vulnerabilities, what are my strengths, what triggers me, what is my preferred approach to conversations and meetings

I feel that we are frequently encouraged to focus solely on our strengths and not usually encouraged to explore the places of our personalities or our work that maybe aren’t as strong as we would like them to be. Everyone has weaknesses and part of being a good leader is being aware of what your personal blind spots, trigger points, and vulnerabilities may be. The book we are reading for the class shared a lot of ideas for possible experiments to try or questions that you could ask yourself where you could gather information about these different areas of your leadership style.

While I was going through the text, the section that spoke to me the most was about “triggers”. Having completed the volunteer event a week before our class, I was still feeling a bit dazed by the feedback I had received and the general discontent shared by attendees. I was feeling very sensitive because I realized all of my triggers had been pulled and all of my vulnerabilities were poked at during the event. This was a great opportunity for me to analyze my reactions during the meeting and think about what my next steps could be.

What became very obvious during my analysis is that one of my vulnerabilities is feeling as if my professional expertise or my abilities are being questioned. In the moment, it feels very personal and I default to a state of semi-disbelief. I am usually able, after the moment has passed, to step back and see the different tensions and points of view. But it’s very difficult for me to do that in the moment and it’s something I know I need to work on. This realization caused me to think about my challenge with my colleague – am I upset with him because I feel like he’s personally attacking my expertise? If so, what are some different experiments I could try that would shorten my initial reaction to her comments and move to the reflective stage faster?

In class, we further explored the idea of experimenting by doing an experiment. We were put into groups and each of us was encouraged to try stepping out of our comfort zone and not engage in our usual group behavior. My modus operandi is to fill a perceived leadership gap or to slip into a support role. I like to feel needed in group settings. This time, I forced myself to sit back and ask a question about how I could help out instead of just assuming what needed to be done. I felt different at the end of the activity and I’m looking forward to “experimenting” more.

The whole idea that you can learn more about yourself by experimenting is something that has never occurred to me before. I want to try stepping, just a little bit, outside of my comfort zone over the next few months. This will let me test my limits and explore what I feel I’ve learned about myself. Some of the experiments I want to try are:

• Asking clarifying questions about a colleagues idea or a specific situation
• Sitting back in meetings and not being the first person to offer an opinion or thought
• Take a stand on something important to either myself or to a colleague

I think it is so important for leaders to be comfortable trying new things that explore their boundaries and what they know about themselves. It helps you grow and be a better leader. I’m looking forward to our next class and to trying out some of these experiments.

In an earlier post, I mentioned that I was taking an Adaptive Leadership class with Forefront. The class has been going well and I’m learning a lot about myself and the practice of adaptive leadership.

The past few leadership classes have felt a bit uncomfortable. We’ve been doing group exercises where one person presents a personal challenge they are facing to a small group. We aren’t allowed to interrupt the person when they are speaking and when they are done our group spends eleven minutes diagnosing the challenge.

The first time we did this exercise, eleven minutes felt like an eternity. The second time we did the exercise, we began to feel more comfortable in this space where we weren’t allowed to make judgements and were encouraged to explore many different interpretations. By the third time, all of us in the class were animatedly coming up with possible interpretations. You’ll notice I use the word “interpretation”, not solution or suggestion. An interpretation is an explanation for what is going on – it often needs to be an explanation outside of the one you first considered and everyone has a different explanation for most situations. 

I’m learning that taking the time to diagnose a situation and identify as many different interpretations as you can is important to help you gain perspective. If a leader doesn’t take the time to understand all the different angles, to consider different unique viewpoints, or to listen to the voices in the room who aren’t in agreement with everyone else, then you won’t be able to move forward on an adaptive solution.

The part I’ve struggled with this most in diagnosing mode is taking the temperature. A habit of mine is to try and make peace in a room when I sense that the heat, or the emotions of all the individuals in the room, is getting too high. But I’ve learned that it is not always bad for people to be passionate about an issue or a concept and that sometimes, you need to leave that heat high in order to further the discussion. I’ve been challenging myself lately to do the following:

• Taking the time to ask open-ended questions that cause individuals in the conversation to pause and analyze the problem in a different way.
• Paying attention to body language and tone.
• Presenting an interpretation that may be difficult for everyone in the room to hear or different than what the group is discussing.
• Recognizing and internally acknowledging all the outside baggage that may be getting in the way.

It’s been interesting to see the reactions of my colleagues – some of them are genuinely uncomfortable, as my class was when we first began diagnosing challenges, and struggle to engage in different thought paths. Others are excited and start to come up with their own ideas which are different. I’m looking forward to practicing using these diagnosis tools in the future!

The class started with all of us feeling a bit uncomfortable. The instructor asked us what we expected from her. Silence. She had to do a lot of pulling to get the group to start giving suggestions. But once we started, we couldn’t stop. She had to cut us off.

Approaching problems from an adaptive viewpoint as opposed to a technical viewpoint requires a person to feel uncomfortable. To ask questions without knowing the answer. To be okay with the messy and the hard and the difficult and the unexpected. My first class in the Lead Right Now series offered by Forefront really introduced us to this process.

I took this class because I recently decided that in my career, I wanted to add more tools to my leadership toolbox so that I can pull out more than just a technical approach. I have an image in my mind of what a leader is – they are usually “in-charge” and have a lot of authority. But recently, I started to realize that this image is incongruous and out of step with who a leader really is. A leader can be anyone – it can be me, it can be my big boss, and it can be the lowliest volunteer. You don’t have to have a fancy title in order to be considered a leader. What you do need is authority – both informal and formal and a deep toolbox full of leadership skills.

I’ve been wrestling with this internal image that I have a of a leader for a while because I am currently working under someone who struggles with leadership. And I feel like I’ve been filling in some of the gaps which is an awkward place for me to be. I also manage volunteers and I feel like I need to do a better job of modeling the types of leadership behavior that I expect from them.

My biggest takeaway from our first class is that our American culture really pushes our leaders to come up with a technical solution for all problems. We expect our leaders outline a solution that achieves quick results and “fixes” the short-term pain of the problem. And then we heap blame on our leaders when the results aren’t as expected or the problem persists.  As I was reviewing the case, I found myself slipping into these thought patterns and wanting to point fingers. It was much easier and more comfortable than trying to examine all the facts and identify the root of the problem. We as Americans don’t like to spend time feeling uncomfortable. We’re direct, to the point, and we like to take action.

Applying adaptive leadership practices to solve a problem requires a leader to take time to learn new things and not rely on tried and true knowledge or technique. We went through several exercises in class where we thought of a leadership challenge we are currently facing and we asked questions of ourselves:

• What is my concern for the future?
• What are my aspirations for the future?
• What is in the gap between those two?
• Where is it appropriate to use authority? Where should I exercise leadership?
• What part of the challenge requires an adaptive approach?
• What part requires a technical approach?

These questions were difficult for me to answer – they made me realize that my challenge wasn’t going to be solved overnight. I was going to need to be patient and recognize that this was going to be a process. There wasn’t a technical solution, no matter how much I wished there was. The gap between my concerns and my aspirations felt very daunting. But once I realized I could “learn” my way through the process, I felt better. I’m excited to add adaptive leadership practices to my leadership toolbox!