Last updated on August 21st, 2018

Ethical Systems is a collaboration of top researchers who share the conviction good ethics is good business. Ask an Ethics Expert solicits questions in the realm of business ethics to be answered by an Ethical Systems collaborators. This month’s professional collaborator is Dr. Chris Allen.

QUESTION: Lately I have been worried about alignment, specifically that of my team. As the group director, my creative ideas have been dismissed without explanation. It seems like my team is undermining my vision for future product spinoffs. Essentially, I feel like a mutiny is imminent. Can you help me identify ways to strike a better balance and gain more authority?

DR. CHRIS ALLEN: When a team is high performing with proper alignment among team members and with the organizational mission, vision, and strategy, there is a minimal focus on ego, status, and or personality-style differences.  Your question raises some issues regarding how your team is functioning.  The first question is how your team handles conflict.  Conflict about ideas (including creative ones) is usually healthy for teams while personal disagreements, especially mean-spirited attacks, are not.  Vigorous and even heated debate of ideas is positive if at times uncomfortable.  It concerns me that you are experiencing the problem as “your ideas” versus “the team’s” ideas. What happens when you ask for clarification when you feel that your ideas are dismissed?  If the team can debate ideas and convince you on merit that a different direction makes sense, then the team’s approach may simply be better than yours. Such an outcome may indicate that you have succeeded in creating a team that can hash out possibilities to choose the best idea.  A strong capacity for conflict around ideas is an essential quality of high-performing teams.

If on the other hand, there are personal issues at play, these need to be aired out.  What is essential to becoming a high performing team is to build trust within the team.  And for trust to exist, teams must develop what Amy Edmondson called “psychological safety.” When psychological safety is present on a team, team members can safely put forth ideas, knowing that their ideas will be taken seriously and that they won’t get thrown under the bus.  For whatever reasons, it does not seem that you feel psychologically safe on your own team.  As the group director, you can be a role model for openness and vulnerability by adopting an attitude of curiosity about why the team is so often going in a different direction than you are.  Ask your team for direct feedback.  However, you must sincerely want this input or individuals on the team may not have the courage to give it to you.

You may wish to revisit some of the basics of how to build trust on the team, to explore how the team wants ideally to handle conflict, and how decisions should get made.   For instance, regarding decision making, is it a majority rule, do you the leader make the ultimate decision with the input from the team, or does the team seek consensus?  As Pat Lencioni, who wrote “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” said, to get “buy-in” from everyone on the team about a decision, everyone needs to “weigh in.” Ideas need to be thoroughly debated so everyone’s view is genuinely considered and the best idea wins.

There are indeed teams that operate from a “command and control” approach, but these teams do not harness the full creative power of the group.  While the team may decide to go an alternate route than with your “creative idea,” you should not feel that your ideas are summarily “dismissed,” nor should any member of the team experience this.  I recommend that you get greater clarity on how you would like the team to handle decision-making, that you revisit issues of trust and psychological safety, and that you explore ideal ways to manage conflict. A combination of team building and team coaching may be worth considering.