How can we coach a dysfunctional team to success? Helen Smith draws on her research and her experience of leading a poorly performing team to its peak
What makes a team perform to its peak and succeed, and what’s required of the team leader to enable this?
Having led a dysfunctional team of 23 individuals in a pharmaceutical organisation from a UK team performance ranking of 49 out of 50 to the number one national team in 12 months, I wanted to answer these questions, and to understand what happened at an individual, team and personal leadership level, as its young team leader.
In this article, I’ll share my experiences and the outcomes of my research involving 30 semi-structured interviews with managers who use a coaching style of leadership. I’ll also share some pointers for addressing team challenges. First, let’s explore what we mean by dysfunctional behaviour and how it can show up at work.
‘Dysfunctional’ behaviour
The word dysfunctional may seem a strong one but in essence, it’s simply the opposite of functional.
Personal dysfunctional behaviour can create challenges for any team leader. This can include workplace deviance, theft, dishonesty and aggression (Van Fleet et al, 2015) or behaviours such as underperformance, time-wasting and unproductive patterns (Maruping, Viswanath, & Thatcher, 2015), hoarding work and an unwillingness to delegate (Ehrhardt et al., 2013), poor communication (Egan & Hamlin 2014), lack of trust (Boies, Fiset, & Gill 2015) lack of flexibility, lack of follow-up and proactivity (Belschak & Hartog 2010).
Al-Nasser et al. (2015) itemised other non-productive or dysfunctional behaviours such as victimisation, hostility, verbal, mental or physically inappropriate behaviour, undermining, harassment, aggression, unwelcome and unfriendly confrontation, social isolation, silent treatment, excessive criticism or monitoring, discrepancies, gossiping, being assigned unreasonable workloads, deadlines or tasks, indifference, depriving responsibility, withholding information and lack of candid feedback.
Interpersonal conflicts
A specific behavioural challenge for team leaders arises when disagreements are allowed to manifest in the form of interpersonal conflicts that spiral into a dysfunctional working relationship with the potential to impede collaboration and cohesion (Driskell, Salas, & Driskell, 2017). Kaufmann (2012) clarifies that if challenging behaviour is left unchecked by the team leader, it can evolve into dysfunctional behaviour.
Dysfunctional behaviour in this context is characterised by personal quarrelling, ineffective decision-making and suboptimal performance. All these behaviours potentially lead to a dysfunctional and challenging team environment for the team leader.
Conflict has a big part to play in creating dysfunctional behaviour, resulting in negative impact within the workplace. According to a CIPD report (2019) and ACAS summary, the financial cost of conflict to UK organisations was £28.5 billion – the equivalent of more than £1,000 for each employee, with close to 10 million people experiencing conflict at work. Of these, more than half suffer stress, anxiety or depression as a result, with nearly 900,000 taking time off work, approximately half a million resigning and more than 300,000 employees getting dismissed.
So, what can we do about this? I’ll share a case study from a team I led, before moving on to share my research.
The work with the team
However, even though it’s important to understand the territory of dysfunctionality, in the poorly performing team I was leading (with 23 staff covering London and outer London regions), there was no immediate explanation as to its low ranking. We thus embarked on a journey for them to becomes familiar with each other and for them to get to know me as their leader.
I held discussions with each team member to establish their personal drivers and ambitions and what they felt ‘was the status of the business’ in their area. I invited each to come to the discussion with a pre-prepared response to the following questions:
- What is the status of your business?
- What are your challenges?
- What are your quick wins?
Their responses brought me up to speed with the nature of the business across the regions, appraised me of the competence of each team member, provided a list of challenges to address, and created an opportunity to build a trusting relationship by addressing their quick wins.
What we did
In addition to one-to-one discussions, I hosted motivational sessions to overcome self-limiting beliefs, during which individuals were offered the opportunity to ‘karate chop’ wooden bricks. After a little hesitation, they all achieved the task of smashing the bricks, transferring this metaphoric experience to their day-to-day work. It was an empowering experience for all.
We soon adopted a ‘can do’ attitude, with coaching-style joint problem solving and collective discussion regarding approaches. Another tactic involved setting their own targets and goals and assessing what they could achieve ‘if their best ever day became the norm’.
We envisioned what makes a good day and how to plan for it. These activities embedded a sound planning practice across the team and focused individuals on how to attain that great day for today, tomorrow and the day after. As a result, the team became energised, using their adrenalin rush to create ongoing momentum.
I also created small collaborative teams to support one another, with rewards based on the whole team achieving defined outcomes fostering a collective team spirit. There was also a healthy competition between the small teams. This ensured the newer and weaker team members were supported via shared good practice and the differing approaches to achieve success. It was clear they all wanted to win.
This small team approach meant I had three primary reports vs. the 23 team members, which allowed more free time to focus on the weaker areas of the business while building a succession plan of future leaders. This approach reinforced the trust placed on them.
Results
Every team member achieved their set targets within nine months, with phenomenal individual performances (eg, a 360% increase vs personal target) and the collective team achievement was more than 130% higher than anticipated. As their team leader, I could hardly believe what the team had achieved in such a short timeframe.
Fast forward some years and I reflect on this experience and the reality of what can be achieved by the act of coaching the team individually and collectively.
The research
This team experience led to an active research interest that focused on the outcome of 30 semi-structured interviews with team leaders who employ a coaching style of leadership. This style, referred to by Karacivi and Demirel (2014) as coach-like leadership, includes characteristics such as reflection, asking good questions and providing active support. It was inappropriate to ask the 30 leaders from multiple sectors directly how they dealt with dysfunctional behaviour, since it may have implied they were chosen because they had dysfunctional teams. So, to aid sensitivity, I changed the term to challenge.
A critical incident based on challenge was embedded within the interview, aiding the exploration of what creates the greatest challenge in teams, sharing a dialogue of challenging scenarios and the team’s experience of having dealt with the challenge. There was diverse opinion on challenge ranging from a strong negative influence, to being viewed as motivational, inspirational and positive, to being a double-edged sword in team dynamics in terms of motivation and intervention by ensuring the team maintains its coherency by preventing chaos, demotivation and diminishing communication (Smith, 2018).
As it happens, I needn’t have worried about the use of the term dysfunctional since the reported challenges from the interviewees went full circle to actual descriptions of dysfunctional behaviour.
Table 1 illustrates the reported challenges which often led to dysfunctional behaviour, as reported by the 30 interviewees.
Table 1: Team challenge
Conflict was reported on 51 occasions during the 30 interviews, with 60% of the total responses referencing individual team-based behaviour, namely conflict and attitude. Addressing dysfunctional behaviour appears to be one of the most difficult aspects, with some team leaders shying away from dealing directly with challenge hoping it will either abate or resolve itself, which is often not the case. In the meantime, there’s serious potential for a loss in credibility as a leader.
Looking more closely at the reported challenges, reference to poor attitude falls within the descriptors of dysfunctional behaviour as illustrated in Table 2 where the characteristics of reported attitudinal challenges from the 30 interviewees are clustered and compared with unproductive or dysfunctional behaviour, as referenced in recent publications.
Table 2: Data supporting attitudinal challenges
Addressing challenges
The next step was to assess how the coach-like leaders dealt with team challenge. The interview data facilitated a better understanding of defining a critical team situation (prior to any intervention) and contained unique perspectives from the coach-like leaders not normally associated with published literature and established team effectiveness models (Smith, 2018). Data from the 30 interviews relate their response in dealing with team challenge as indicated in Table 3.
Table 3: Dealing with team challenge
The interview data informs us that the skill set required by the coach-like leader in responding to team challenge utilises different skills and a different approach to the more established role of leading a team.
Being a coach-like leader utilises a more personal, interactive and interventionist approach to meeting the challenge of the modern team.
It requires pursuing a more active, knowledgeable and intuitive approach which can create a conducive team environment to combat the most enduring team challenge – dysfunctional behaviour.
The opportunity to mitigate the main contributors to challenge in the form of conflict and poor attitude (according to the interviewees) can result in positive outcomes provided the challenge is well analysed, adequately resourced, with the team leader as coach focused on conflict resolution and creating the right attitudinal response from the team members.
Feedback from the interviewees has provided a pragmatic and practitioner-based perspective as to the origins of team challenge, its contributing factors and how they can be recognised, identified and acted upon to avoid escalation and maintain team functionality.
The role of the coach-like leader is instrumental in addressing challenge issues and specifically those arising from unproductive or dysfunctional behaviour.
This insight has led me to create a model (The Team Challenge Framework; see Figure 1) to assist team leaders adopt the coach-like leadership style and provide a quick reference to remind ourselves of the important points to address team challenge and specifically dysfunctional behaviour.
Figure 1: Team Challenge Framework ©
Time is a primary factor – being proactive and addressing challenge before it becomes dysfunctional is important in achieving a fully functioning team, as shared by the coach-like leaders.
Further, possessing a coach-like mindset aids success in having the team member’s interest at heart in creating alignment, mutual appreciation and support.
As team leaders, it’s important to be proactive in getting to know team members, understanding potential conflict scenarios and to work collectively to mitigate issues as a routine part of team leadership.
About the author
- Dr Helen Smith is senior lecturer in Coaching and Leadership at Manchester Metropolitan University, founder of the Greater Manchester Coaching Hub and founder of Enhancing Leadership. Having started her career in the life sciences, she has dedicated herself to helping knowledge-intensive companies with strategy, organisational transformation and performance management. With extensive experience across Europe and the US in the healthcare and pharmaceutical sector, her passion lies in guiding individuals and teams out of their comfort zone to make positive things happen.
Further information
- This publication offers additional information and tips on leading a functional team, analysing in greater depth the impact of trust, creating the correct environment for thriving and contributory elements of leading a team the coach-like way: https://bit.ly/3U63eE6
- Smith, H., & Wall, T. A. (2023). Coaches Guide to Team Building-Understanding Structures, Functions and Leadership, Open University Press / McGraw-Hill.
References
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2015.07.007 - Chen, X. H., Zhao, K., Liu, X., & Wu, D. D. (2012). Improving employees’ job satisfaction and innovation performance using conflict management. International Journal of Conflict Management, 23(2), 151-172.
- CIPD. (2020). Managing conflict in the modern workplace report
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- Kaufmann. B. (2012). The anatomy of dysfunctional working relationships. Business Strategy Series,13(2).
- Maruping, L. M., Viswanath, V., & Thatcher, S. M. (2015). Folding Under Pressure or Rising to the Occasion? Perceived Time Pressure and the Moderating Role of Team Temporal Leadership. Academy of Management Journal, 58(5).
- Smith, H. A. (2018). Manager as Coach: An Exploratory Study into the Experience of Managers Dealing with Team Challenge. Dissertation, University of Chester.
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