How to Make or Break Your Team’s Performance
Whenever an ambitious leader starts enthusiastically listing all the ways they plan to transform their team or organization, I gently caution them not to ‘flood the zone.’
Flooding the zone is a tactical approach some leaders use to apply extreme pressure, overwhelm objections, and hit performance targets as quickly as possible, but it invariably breaks teams and leaves organizations more vulnerable.
To illustrate my point, I sometimes use the metaphor of a military blitz, when an army invades on foot, drops bombs from the air, and damages basic infrastructure. First, the locals get confused and upset, but quickly, they become overwhelmed and either freeze or flee to safer territory.
In modern organizations, ‘flooding the zone’ looks different (thank goodness), but the effects are essentially the same. Leaders roll out new policies, reporting structures, processes, and requirements in a condensed period of time, and their simultaneous deployment creates debilitating cognitive overload for employees. They lose focus, trust, motivation, and productivity, and eventually start looking for the exits!
Fortunately, there are many other brilliant change management methodologies that will give your team a fighting chance, but choosing a smarter one will not automatically turn your team into a group of resilient change experts! To do this, you will also need to create the invisible conditions that elevate team performance.
Creating Conditions that Elevate Team Performance
If you intend to transform your team and build capabilities that will serve you for years to come, creating a culture of high psychological safety, psychological ownership, and progressive innovation will be mission-critical.
High psychological safety is created when leaders communicate transparently, curiously, and consistently about changes, challenges, and missteps. This means leading meetings with confidence and humility and not punishing team members as they struggle to make sense of all the change. When you facilitate open and nonjudgmental dialogue, team members will tell you what they need to feel safe, motivated, and committed to your vision.
Psychological ownership is created when leaders emphasize the desired end state and let team members influence how and why certain changes will be implemented. This means proactively soliciting and integrating details that align with your team’s stated interests. When you regularly invite their input on process, pacing, sequencing, etc, and incorporate their best ideas into the evolving approach, team members will (ironically) respect you more as their leader and be more inclined to invest their time and energy.
Progressive innovation is created when leaders celebrate progress toward the desired end state rather than demand immediate and mindless compliance. This means spending less time debating what is good or bad, right or wrong, and more time challenging the team to get things ‘righter and righter’ over time. When you continually elevate team conversations to honor a few strategic values (customer-centricity, problem-solving, long-term viability, etc.), team members will learn to leave their emotional trauma at the door and collaborate on things that actually move the needle!
Creating these team performance conditions takes commitment and patience - especially if your organization has previously experienced the trauma of flooding! - but leaders who take time to combine brilliant change strategy and human psychology are far more likely to win over resistors and accelerate performance.
Katharine Smith, MA, CPCC, ACC
