What was the situation?

A unit of a Fortune 100 company with a large government contract was experiencing poor performance and declining employee morale. Turnover in some parts of the company had been very high and there had been some lay-offs within the past year due to corporate level restructuring and cost-cutting efforts. A large amount of the workforce had become complacent over the past five years and the government customer was not happy with the quality of the products or their timeliness.

About a year ago, a senior individual was brought in from outside the company to affect a turnaround and to provide strong leadership. The new leader was immediately faced with the problem that his senior team had a lot of open conflict with one another and there was a sense that not all members of the team were equally respected or valued. This hostile and unproductive environment would often lead to shouting matches and backstabbing among the leadership team. Some of the less aggressive members of the team responded by simply disengaging from the team. The leader quickly recognized that the situation was unhealthy and that the team was not going to improve simply because he was their new leader.

What did the client want?

The client was not sure how to address the hostile situation among many of his senior team members. He wanted the open conflict to stop and he wanted people to work better together at solving problems. He also wanted the team to put on a united front to the customer which was not always the case. Because the team did not freely share information with one another, often the customer would get conflicting stories and messages from different parts of the company. He also wanted his team to respect and trust one another.

What were they doing about the situation?

The leader felt powerless to change the situation. The conflict and hostility among the team members had existed for several years and he was the newcomer to the group, albeit, their new leader. Individual members of the team were either avoiding conflict altogether or holding their emotions inside and then occasionally having issues erupt during various meetings into raw displays of anger and animosity toward one another. Their actions and inactions were only making the problems get worse. Nothing seemed to help.

How was that working?

Attempting to control their emotions or to avoid disagreement altogether was simply not working. Often, members would be afraid to speak up during meetings out of fear that their question or comment would lead to an outburst of emotion. Members would often go behind

the other team members’ backs and undermine decisions that had been made during meetings or plot ways to thwart the efforts of the other members. What’s worse was that their open conflict was being seen and talked about by their subordinates. Their conflict was leading

to lower morale and to a growing sense of “us” versus “them,” or “me” against “you.” People were not being incentivized to work together to solve problems in the organization.

What approaches did we use to solve the situation?

Fortunately, the client knew of our coaching services and brought us on-board to help. He specifically asked us to improve the communications and teamwork of the organization. We began our efforts by observing their meetings to get a sense of their interactions with one another. We also began having individual coaching sessions with each member of the senior team.

During these sessions, we listened to their perspectives regarding the issues among the senior team, and we learned about their similarities and common desires. We learned that individually, they were wonderful people and truly wanted the company to succeed. However, they were carrying around a lot of baggage from previous conflicts with one another that were holding them back. We also learned that some of the individuals did not feel valued or respected by other members of the team although when we talked with each individual on the team, they expressed their respect for everyone else’s expertise.

Over the next few months, we conducted a series of group coaching sessions outside of the normal workspace to help them discover who they were as a group and how much they had in common. We also coached them to be better active listeners and to question how they were interpreting their various interactions. Finally, we introduced them to some problem-solving frameworks and coached them through using the frameworks to solve some of their biggest problems.

What did the client commit to?

Through the group coaching sessions, each senior leader and manager made commitments to one another with regards to how they were going to personally change to improve communications and teamwork among the company’s leadership. They committed to follow-up meetings and to holding each other accountable. They committed to showing each other more respect and to listening to each other with less judgment. Finally, they committed to working together better as a team and to not take things so personally.