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Some thoughts on teams and teamwork at the table
24 October 2010
In a municipal election, you don't elect a team. You elect individuals. Teams and teamwork may come later, and will coalesce around the mayor - if, of course, the mayor sets the appropriate tone. The mayor needs to set the example that encourages and nurtures a culture of teamwork. That didn't happen this term.
Municipal politics are the closest thing to actual democracy we have in this country. Anyone eligible to vote can run for a council position, no party membership or nomination process is required. In provincial and federal politics, you don't really elect a team, either: you elect a single party representative. It is up to the premier or prime minister to build his or her group of elected representatives into a party-oriented team. This is usually done by a combination of varying degrees of bullying, coercion, cooperation and seduction. But in general, all the members toe the party line and follow the leader along that proscribed path.
And remember, leadership is not just management. Leaders have followers, managers have subordinates. Leaders inspire, managers tell others what to do.*
In municipal politics, especially at this small-town level, party politics do not come into play (although some have attempted to interject them into their term). You elect independents: people who vote according to their individual conscience and their beliefs, and not (usually) according to a party platform. Individual members of council, not parties, rise and fall in public opinion and the polls based on their own actions and decisions, not on the policies or legislation decreed by the party or its leader. Incumbents reap from an election what they have personally sown during their term.
The mayor, if he or she is to be a leader, has the burden of creating a team from a group of individuals with often disparate and conflicting ideals, goals and beliefs, without the benefit of a commonly-shared party platform. That's a challenge that only the best can rise to.
And creating a team doesn't mean using a clique of your own supporters to bulldoze your personal policies and goals through council. It means bringing everyone on board to work together and finding shared goals. Good leaders subordinate personal agendas to the greater good of the community.**
At election time, the issue of teams - team building, teamwork and cooperation - is raised most when it is apparent it was lacking in the current term. People see a divisive, disjointed and uncooperative council as a failure. This election it was a hot topic among the public.
But is it really a collective failure or simply a lack of leadership? I believe the fault lies not with council as a whole, but rather with the head of council for not bringing the group together as a team. The mayor must set the tone and create the culture of teamwork and cooperation - it is not up to the individual councillors to do so. And it must be done early in the term.
Early in this term, however, it was exposed that the mayor was spying on some council members' email traffic. That set a tone of distrust right from the start, and thus made teamwork much more difficult to accomplish. Subsequent actions and a practice of exclusionary rather than inclusionary politics, only exacerbated it.***
Teamwork, though, has some darker aspects when it becomes merely voting along with others - or voting the way the mayor votes - for the sake of avoiding confrontation or downplaying dissent. That's not teamwork - it's just a clique.
Consensus or majority votes may look like everyone (or most of council) is working together, but it may also mean people have given up their right to think or to make independent choices in favour of apparent teamwork. I think we do a disservice to the people who elected us if we sacrifice our integrity and beliefs in order to make it look like we're getting along swimmingly. Supporting the mayor only makes sense if he or she is presenting a common goal for the benefit of the whole community. When he or she promotes a personal agenda, support looks less like teamwork and more like blind obedience.
Dissent, I've noted in other posts, is not bad. It is, in fact, the hallmark of a democracy that we can dissent openly, even with our leaders. And the measure of a democracy is not in how it reaches consensus - any dictatorship can boast consensus - but rather in how it tolerates dissent. Dissent is only seen as inappropriate by people who demand they control everything, and that everyone else kowtow to their whims. A good leader acknowledges and respects dissent as part of the fabric of democracy.
In the book, High Five! The Magic of Working Together, authors Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles wrote that teamwork comes from a culture that values collaboration, an environment where people understand that decisions and actions are better when done cooperatively than individually. Team members understand and live by the belief that "none of us is as good as all of us."
All of us doesn't mean five or six out of nine. Only nine of nine constitutes "all of us" and any less is a clique. A good leader respects and includes everyone, not merely his (or her) favourites. Publicly insulting or showing disrespect for the opinions of other members at the table only widens the gap that needs to be bridged to create that team.
A good practice for a new council is to get everyone together at the start of the term to discuss goals, directions, ambitions and wishes - and then to set out a timeline to work towards those the group agrees are reasonable, beneficial to the community, affordable and sustainable. That way we learn each other's goals, and agree to bring them forward together. And in turn we get to know one another a bit.
This doesn't stop individuals from bringing their own issues forward independently, but it does allow us (and staff) time to plan for the collective issues with the knowledge that they will be presented. This will help all of us find common ground and common causes. That's the start of a team. We didn't do that this term (although we did the previous term - a lesson obviously overlooked).
Another thing we have to consider is that "the team" has to look outside itself: it has to include the public, as well as staff. Public input and staff recommendations have to be respected and incorporated into the decision-making process. That doesn't mean either have to be blindly followed, but rather that they should be given serious consideration and not merely shrugged off - like the 2,500 name petition to restore the Admiral Collingwood development was this term.
Team building is an activity, not an intellectual exercise. It has to be engaged in and practiced regularly and consistently.****
Teams are not elected any more than leaders are born. Both are made. Both require effort, skill and patience to accomplish. And the next term offers new opportunities to restore both to Collingwood politics.
~~~~~
* Leadership is "a process by which a person influences others to accomplish an objective and directs the organization in a way that makes it more cohesive and coherent." Peter Northouse wrote in his book, Leadership Theory and Practice that "Leadership is a process whereby an individual influences a group of individuals to achieve a common goal." As this site on leadership notes, "Leaders carry out this process by applying their leadership knowledge and skills." The site also comments on the four types of leader, which includes one you might recognize:
"Authoritarian Leader (high task, low relationship)
People who get this rating are very much task oriented and are hard on their workers (autocratic). There is little or no allowance for cooperation or collaboration. Heavily task oriented people display these characteristics: they are very strong on schedules; they expect people to do what they are told without question or debate; when something goes wrong they tend to focus on who is to blame rather than concentrate on exactly what is wrong and how to prevent it; they are intolerant of what they see as dissent (it may just be someone's creativity), so it is difficult for their subordinates to contribute or develop."
** To reiterate at the risk of being boring, here are the answers I gave to the Connection in response to its questions on teams and teamwork:
4) Some feel council needs to work better as a team? Do you agree and why is this important?
Municipal councils are, for the most part, elected as individuals who work independently. That is the strength of municipal politics: we are not tied to a particular platform or party policy. If we all did what the person said, then we would not be effective or even honest to our constituents.
Council members need to work to the best of their individual conscience towards the greater good of the community. One can only behave as a team when there are shared goals – and that does happen, but it requires good leadership to bring it to the fore.
5) How would you help council work better as a team and what makes you a good team player?
People who rubber stamp decisions in favour of "team" spirit are doing the community a great disservice. We saw that in the Admiral Collingwood debacle when "the team" rubber-stamped a bad decision. A good councillor does his or her homework, studies, reads the agenda and supporting documents, researches, asks questions, discusses issues with constituents and explores alternatives. A good councillor is open to new ideas and is willing to change his/her mind when new information arises. Team players don't do this when they sacrifice integrity or conscience for the sake of the team.
We can only operate as a team when we have common goals – and that requires a good leader to help council establish its collective strategic priorities early in the term.
*** As this site on leadership notes (emphasis added),
"What makes a person want to follow a leader? People want to be guided by those they respect and who have a clear sense of direction. To gain respect, they must be ethical. A sense of direction is achieved by conveying a strong vision of the future.
When a person is deciding if she respects you as a leader, she does not think about your attributes, rather, she observes what you do so that she can know who you really are. She uses this observation to tell if you are an honorable and trusted leader or a self-serving person who misuses authority to look good and get promoted. Self-serving leaders are not as effective because their employees only obey them, not follow them.
<snip>
According to a study by the Hay Group, a global management consultancy, there are 75 key components of employee satisfaction (Lamb, McKee, 2004). They found that:
It proved difficult to trust a mayor whose actions showed he clearly did not trust his fellow council members. No effort I can recall was made after the email scandal was brought to light to rebuild that lost trust.
**** Getting members together for social events can help create an atmosphere of relaxed respect for one another. Last term Mayor Geddes brought council (and many department heads) together after most council meetings at a local pub for a drink, some food and conversation. We could talk about anything EXCEPT politics. That way we got to know each other better, got to see each other's personal lives. As a result, we tended to respect one another more when in debate at the table. The only member of council who didn't attend those after-meeting sessions was our current mayor (except for a single time at the end of the term). He refused to continue that practice this term. In comparison, this council has rarely socialized, rarely engaged in group events (even the collective council pancake breakfast was stopped) and generally met weekly only to fight at the table. Council meetings were shorter last term, much less confrontational and we all respected one another a lot more back then.
Municipal politics are the closest thing to actual democracy we have in this country. Anyone eligible to vote can run for a council position, no party membership or nomination process is required. In provincial and federal politics, you don't really elect a team, either: you elect a single party representative. It is up to the premier or prime minister to build his or her group of elected representatives into a party-oriented team. This is usually done by a combination of varying degrees of bullying, coercion, cooperation and seduction. But in general, all the members toe the party line and follow the leader along that proscribed path.
And remember, leadership is not just management. Leaders have followers, managers have subordinates. Leaders inspire, managers tell others what to do.*
In municipal politics, especially at this small-town level, party politics do not come into play (although some have attempted to interject them into their term). You elect independents: people who vote according to their individual conscience and their beliefs, and not (usually) according to a party platform. Individual members of council, not parties, rise and fall in public opinion and the polls based on their own actions and decisions, not on the policies or legislation decreed by the party or its leader. Incumbents reap from an election what they have personally sown during their term.
The mayor, if he or she is to be a leader, has the burden of creating a team from a group of individuals with often disparate and conflicting ideals, goals and beliefs, without the benefit of a commonly-shared party platform. That's a challenge that only the best can rise to.
And creating a team doesn't mean using a clique of your own supporters to bulldoze your personal policies and goals through council. It means bringing everyone on board to work together and finding shared goals. Good leaders subordinate personal agendas to the greater good of the community.**
At election time, the issue of teams - team building, teamwork and cooperation - is raised most when it is apparent it was lacking in the current term. People see a divisive, disjointed and uncooperative council as a failure. This election it was a hot topic among the public.
But is it really a collective failure or simply a lack of leadership? I believe the fault lies not with council as a whole, but rather with the head of council for not bringing the group together as a team. The mayor must set the tone and create the culture of teamwork and cooperation - it is not up to the individual councillors to do so. And it must be done early in the term.
Early in this term, however, it was exposed that the mayor was spying on some council members' email traffic. That set a tone of distrust right from the start, and thus made teamwork much more difficult to accomplish. Subsequent actions and a practice of exclusionary rather than inclusionary politics, only exacerbated it.***
Teamwork, though, has some darker aspects when it becomes merely voting along with others - or voting the way the mayor votes - for the sake of avoiding confrontation or downplaying dissent. That's not teamwork - it's just a clique.
Consensus or majority votes may look like everyone (or most of council) is working together, but it may also mean people have given up their right to think or to make independent choices in favour of apparent teamwork. I think we do a disservice to the people who elected us if we sacrifice our integrity and beliefs in order to make it look like we're getting along swimmingly. Supporting the mayor only makes sense if he or she is presenting a common goal for the benefit of the whole community. When he or she promotes a personal agenda, support looks less like teamwork and more like blind obedience.
Dissent, I've noted in other posts, is not bad. It is, in fact, the hallmark of a democracy that we can dissent openly, even with our leaders. And the measure of a democracy is not in how it reaches consensus - any dictatorship can boast consensus - but rather in how it tolerates dissent. Dissent is only seen as inappropriate by people who demand they control everything, and that everyone else kowtow to their whims. A good leader acknowledges and respects dissent as part of the fabric of democracy.
In the book, High Five! The Magic of Working Together, authors Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles wrote that teamwork comes from a culture that values collaboration, an environment where people understand that decisions and actions are better when done cooperatively than individually. Team members understand and live by the belief that "none of us is as good as all of us."
All of us doesn't mean five or six out of nine. Only nine of nine constitutes "all of us" and any less is a clique. A good leader respects and includes everyone, not merely his (or her) favourites. Publicly insulting or showing disrespect for the opinions of other members at the table only widens the gap that needs to be bridged to create that team.
A good practice for a new council is to get everyone together at the start of the term to discuss goals, directions, ambitions and wishes - and then to set out a timeline to work towards those the group agrees are reasonable, beneficial to the community, affordable and sustainable. That way we learn each other's goals, and agree to bring them forward together. And in turn we get to know one another a bit.
This doesn't stop individuals from bringing their own issues forward independently, but it does allow us (and staff) time to plan for the collective issues with the knowledge that they will be presented. This will help all of us find common ground and common causes. That's the start of a team. We didn't do that this term (although we did the previous term - a lesson obviously overlooked).
Another thing we have to consider is that "the team" has to look outside itself: it has to include the public, as well as staff. Public input and staff recommendations have to be respected and incorporated into the decision-making process. That doesn't mean either have to be blindly followed, but rather that they should be given serious consideration and not merely shrugged off - like the 2,500 name petition to restore the Admiral Collingwood development was this term.
Team building is an activity, not an intellectual exercise. It has to be engaged in and practiced regularly and consistently.****
Teams are not elected any more than leaders are born. Both are made. Both require effort, skill and patience to accomplish. And the next term offers new opportunities to restore both to Collingwood politics.
~~~~~
* Leadership is "a process by which a person influences others to accomplish an objective and directs the organization in a way that makes it more cohesive and coherent." Peter Northouse wrote in his book, Leadership Theory and Practice that "Leadership is a process whereby an individual influences a group of individuals to achieve a common goal." As this site on leadership notes, "Leaders carry out this process by applying their leadership knowledge and skills." The site also comments on the four types of leader, which includes one you might recognize:
"Authoritarian Leader (high task, low relationship)
People who get this rating are very much task oriented and are hard on their workers (autocratic). There is little or no allowance for cooperation or collaboration. Heavily task oriented people display these characteristics: they are very strong on schedules; they expect people to do what they are told without question or debate; when something goes wrong they tend to focus on who is to blame rather than concentrate on exactly what is wrong and how to prevent it; they are intolerant of what they see as dissent (it may just be someone's creativity), so it is difficult for their subordinates to contribute or develop."
** To reiterate at the risk of being boring, here are the answers I gave to the Connection in response to its questions on teams and teamwork:
4) Some feel council needs to work better as a team? Do you agree and why is this important?
Municipal councils are, for the most part, elected as individuals who work independently. That is the strength of municipal politics: we are not tied to a particular platform or party policy. If we all did what the person said, then we would not be effective or even honest to our constituents.
Council members need to work to the best of their individual conscience towards the greater good of the community. One can only behave as a team when there are shared goals – and that does happen, but it requires good leadership to bring it to the fore.
5) How would you help council work better as a team and what makes you a good team player?
People who rubber stamp decisions in favour of "team" spirit are doing the community a great disservice. We saw that in the Admiral Collingwood debacle when "the team" rubber-stamped a bad decision. A good councillor does his or her homework, studies, reads the agenda and supporting documents, researches, asks questions, discusses issues with constituents and explores alternatives. A good councillor is open to new ideas and is willing to change his/her mind when new information arises. Team players don't do this when they sacrifice integrity or conscience for the sake of the team.
We can only operate as a team when we have common goals – and that requires a good leader to help council establish its collective strategic priorities early in the term.
*** As this site on leadership notes (emphasis added),
"What makes a person want to follow a leader? People want to be guided by those they respect and who have a clear sense of direction. To gain respect, they must be ethical. A sense of direction is achieved by conveying a strong vision of the future.
When a person is deciding if she respects you as a leader, she does not think about your attributes, rather, she observes what you do so that she can know who you really are. She uses this observation to tell if you are an honorable and trusted leader or a self-serving person who misuses authority to look good and get promoted. Self-serving leaders are not as effective because their employees only obey them, not follow them.
<snip>
According to a study by the Hay Group, a global management consultancy, there are 75 key components of employee satisfaction (Lamb, McKee, 2004). They found that:
- Trust and confidence in top leadership was the single most reliable predictor of employee satisfaction in an organization.
- Effective communication by leadership in three critical areas was the key to winning organizational trust and confidence:
- Helping employees understand the company's overall business strategy.
- Helping employees understand how they contribute to achieving key business objectives.
- Sharing information with employees on both how the company is doing and how an employee's own division is doing — relative to strategic business objectives.
It proved difficult to trust a mayor whose actions showed he clearly did not trust his fellow council members. No effort I can recall was made after the email scandal was brought to light to rebuild that lost trust.
**** Getting members together for social events can help create an atmosphere of relaxed respect for one another. Last term Mayor Geddes brought council (and many department heads) together after most council meetings at a local pub for a drink, some food and conversation. We could talk about anything EXCEPT politics. That way we got to know each other better, got to see each other's personal lives. As a result, we tended to respect one another more when in debate at the table. The only member of council who didn't attend those after-meeting sessions was our current mayor (except for a single time at the end of the term). He refused to continue that practice this term. In comparison, this council has rarely socialized, rarely engaged in group events (even the collective council pancake breakfast was stopped) and generally met weekly only to fight at the table. Council meetings were shorter last term, much less confrontational and we all respected one another a lot more back then.
