I’d like to share with you a story. It’s about Linda, a team leader who one day reached crisis point with her team and a key lesson she learned when she was forced to face up to why it all went wrong and what she needed to do to get back on track.
Let’s find out a bit more…
Linda sits with her head in her hands and wonders what went wrong. She had so wanted her team to work well together and make the project a success. Instead, her team meeting has fallen apart with four of the members of the team stalking out in anger in a team meeting where acrimonious argument rather than productive discussion was the order of the day. The rest of the team members yelled at Linda for a while, blaming her for the team falling apart, and then left.
Linda needs to get her team back together and quickly. First, she starts to think about when things started to go wrong for the team. There were some early decisions made that some team members disagreed with, and as team leader she had made the final call.
At least one of the decisions included making a short cut that she had hoped would get the team finishing the project BEFORE the deadline, even if it was not exactly something she would normally agree with in her personal work life.
Thinking back, Linda is sure that this is when the team really started falling apart and individual team members started to work against each other. Linda realises her team is lacking integrity.
Integrity is one of the most important characteristics of successful teams. While each team member should have personal integrity, the team as a whole needs integrity.
The dictionary has three definitions of the word integrity: adherence to moral and ethical principles, the state of being whole, entire, or undiminished, and being in a sound, unimpaired, or perfect condition. The first two are the most important for the integrity of a team.
Team integrity can have two ways of showing: the team upholds moral and ethical principles, and the team works together as a complete whole being with undiminished power to be cohesive in productivity. Without integrity, the team will ultimately fall apart and become unproductive.
Building integrity into the team is part of building team trust and building the team into a productive, cohesive unit. Making decisions that individual team members cannot agree with, or worse, feel are working against personal standards of integrity will prevent those individuals from putting their all into the team project, as the individuals seek to disassociate themselves with the team.
Across the hallway from Linda, Brian is also closing a team meeting. His team is working together on a productive level, and the project is nearing completion.
Brian thanks his team members for their hard work and confirms the individual and team tasks that need to be completed for the next meeting. With nods of agreement, his team meeting closes with renewed enthusiasm for finishing the project. Brian packs up his team notes and walks out of the meeting room with a smile on his face. He sees his colleague Linda, who is leading another team on a similar project and stops for a chat. Linda’s team is not going so well and she is worried. Linda asks Brian about the team rules his team works by.
“Well, we agreed in the very first meeting to make this project something we could all be proud of – the type of project we would want mentioned during our retirement celebrations! With that goal, everyone is working hard to make the project our legacy.”
“We had some tough decisions to make along the way; some of the ideas a couple of team members suggested did not sit well with the personal integrity of other members, but in the end, the team came back to our guiding principle of making the project something we could ALL be proud of, and so the team’s integrity remained intact.”
“Everyone turns up on time to the meetings and has completed the delegated tasks in the meantime, so the project is moving forward at a solid pace. We’ll make the deadline for sure,” Brian said.
Setting and agreeing to guiding rules and principles for the team to follow early on and upholding those rules and principles has been the way to build greater trust and a sense of integrity in the team.
Brian’s team has integrity because the team members all want the project to be something to be proud of and therefore refused to take the short cuts that Linda’s team did.
The individual team members show integrity by completing designated tasks and supporting the team by showing up to team meetings on time. Everyone is working towards the final goal of completing the project on time all the time.
Linda realises that team integrity is not something that is optional, or something that the team shows only part of the time. Every decision either adds to the team’s integrity or takes away from it.
Lesson learned
Decisions that reduce team integrity will push the team apart, while decisions that add to team integrity pull the team together. Team integrity is essential to build a productive team, and good team leaders develop this characteristic in the team consistently from day one.
Photo Credit: 
photo credit: Francis Carnaúba
