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Enabling culture change with leaders and teams to sustain inclusion, innovation and high performance

Conflict and the rusty bike…

by | Oct 1, 2018

old fashioned bike
Working with continual underlying dysfunction in a team is like trying to ride a bike with a rusty chain.  It may get you there – but it’s unnecessary and an utter grind!

In our work facilitating behaviour change with teams and their leaders we have seen different types of dysfunction many times over.

Our work takes us into organisations when the chips are down, there may be thousands or even millions in deficit and both the teams and their leaders can be fractured and worn.

One of the main culprits is likely to be unresolved conflict.

When these organisations call us in, we find instead of being wholly focused on kicking goals, their teams are expending large amounts of their time, energy and resources to continually work around this conflict.

In other words – they will ride their rusty bike, four miles out of their way to get just half a mile up the road.

For these teams, operating with the difficulties of dysfunction has become so ingrained it is now their “norm”.

This is just not efficient, effective nor remotely profitable. Never mind the impact on employee engagement which always precedes performance, or creativity which precedes innovation…

“So why don’t we do a white-water rafting day? Hit some rapids, keep the boat afloat, let Sales high five Marketing and be done with it?”

Go ahead, but the results will be hollow and unsustainable.

How can teams in any business be expected to maintain a top-shelf performance if they lack the ongoing skills to repair this conflict – let alone to clearly identify it?

Why accommodate a dysfunction as damaging as unresolved conflict?

It’s irrelevant.

It’s unnecessary.

It’s costly.

and very solvable.

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