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Strategies for improving team communication as a leader

By Oscar Mathew, Director MMF

Leaders often approach us for help when their teams are stuck in conflict.

Sometimes they are a party to the conflict; sometimes they aren’t but are tasked with managing it. Commonly they are seen as being responsible for dealing with it, but easy solutions are hard to pin down. It can be difficult to see a successful route through the conflict.

This isn’t in any sense a failing on their part; it’s a reflection of the fact that discord within a team is a knotty and stressful dynamic to try and unpick, and one that rarely lends itself to easy answers.

Sometimes conflict has become so embedded that it requires a mediated solution, but there are also steps leaders can take to help prevent issues escalating to that stage. Encouraging open, constructive disagreement and inclusive dialogue is a great way of preventing conflict establishing itself in your team.

So - what can you do as a team leader to try and establish the right kind of team dynamics?

Here are some ideas:

1. Focus on future group behaviours

Teams in conflict often identify one or more people as ‘the problem’. Even if they’re right, focusing on individuals will generally drive them further away from the team, and exacerbate those behaviours.

The focus here isn’t to punish certain unfavoured groups, but to try and bring the team together as a collective.

In order to do this, it can be really helpful to get the team looking forward. That’s not to say past behaviours shouldn’t be discussed – they should – but what we’re really looking for here is constructive, collectively held behavioural change.

You might wish to engage your team with the following questions:

• When things are good, what does it look like?
• What do we appreciate about each other, and the team?
• What behaviours would we like to see at the centre of how we operate?
• What behaviours get in the way?

The key is to look at behavioural issues as a group challenge, and focus on what the team wants to see; the individual doesn’t feel like they’re in the crossfire and the team can talk about what it expects from its members.

2. Gently reference the elephant in the room

Teams often have ‘undiscussable’ topics – those things that people swerve talking about, because they’re difficult or awkward. There are even ‘undiscussable undiscussables’ which are so difficult to engage with that even recognising their existence in the group isn’t possible.

It’s important to get these things out into the open. If you don’t, they’ll exist as an unspoken presence in the room.

A question that might help is simply: ‘In the course of this discussion, is there anything that seems important that we are not talking about?’

3. Try a communication recalibration

Leaders tend to default to communicating in a style and format that they prefer. This is especially true at times of pressure. For example: do you like factual, to the point emails that focus on objective data? If so, that’s probably what you’re giving your team. But not everyone will share your preference.

We often lead teams into a conversation about co-designing a communication approach that works for the team as a whole. Get in touch to find out more about how to run a step by step communication recalibration process!