Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Avoideance of Team Accountability

Conflict | 5 Team Dysfunctions - Avoidance of Team Accountability posted 16 hours ago by Martin Longden   [ updated 16 hours ago ]

4. Avoidance of Team Accountability

People who avoid team accountability don't challenge one another about actions or mistakes that could hurt the entire group. They don't pressure other team members to improve, they don't question others' ideas or actions, and they don't hold one another to high standards.
More than this, they don't cover for failing team members, meaning that the team can miss its goals.
Team members may be avoiding accountability if they:
  • Resent each other for having different standards of performance.
  • Rely on the team leader to call out mistakes, give feedback, or manage performance.
  • Avoid direct conversations about performance and behavior with colleagues, opting instead to highlight issues with the team leader.
  • Allow the team to fail without making a determined effort to avoid this.
A key dynamic at work here is a lack of respect for the identity of the team. The team members effectively do not see themselves as having an opportunity to experience a sense of connection and contribution to the results and the identity of what the team stands for.

This is where vision and mission become a critical factor to enable the cultural development of the team to reflect and communicate this through what each team member perceives is their identity. When done well, team members are engaged. They will pursue outcomes that require effort. Challenges become an opportunity to work together to produce a solution.

When done poorly, this is one of the dysfunctions that occurs. Essentially the root of this is what I call ‘the fear of man’. It is the view that the team members’ opinions and contributions don’t really count, and this brings up an interesting point: the leadership style that is occurring to facilitate an avoidance toward accountability.

There are 3 foundational leadership styles: transformational, charismatic and narcissistic. When you have a high level of avoidance to team accountability, you generally have a leader who is narcissistic, and seeks to engage team members’ views and opinions as only serving and bolstering thier own image or importance as the leader of the team.

Avoidance of team accountability demonstrated by the indicators above will reveal a leader who is focussed on achievement first as a sense of identity, thereby creating an environment that seeks to elevate the importance of the leader above the members. This creates a competitive culture against others in the team and is how cults and cliques are formed for the purpose of initiating a method of control, usually by guilt or condemnation when the agreed standard is not met by others.
The outcome and final result of this is the symptoms and indicators mentioned above. Everything really does rise and fall on a leader and their leadership.


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