It’s okay; you can admit it. We’ve all been there. Working in teams can be incredibly frustrating.
Whether it was in school, work, or a community organization, you’ve probably had a dysfunctional team experience. It’s that team who can never seem to productively discuss challenging topics. Either they avoid the conversation completely and pretend the issue doesn’t exist, or when someone does get the courage to raise the topic, the discussion becomes heated and spirals out of control.
In a world of mounting complexity and rapid-fire change, it's more important than ever to build teams that work well when the pressure is on. Despite organizations investing in a broad array of team development strategies, research shows only 15% of mergers and acquisitions succeed, 9 out of 10 organizational change initiatives fail to achieve their intended results, and teams consistently fail to meet their goals. Why is this so? It's because our focus on effective teamwork is overly technical. We are too concerned with processes, systems, structures, and policies, instead of focusing on the people and how they communicate with each other. If we want to build healthier, more capable teams, we must pay attention to the key piece of the puzzle upon which every other aspect of teamwork depends–conversational capacity.
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