The coach’s corner
Julia Rowan answers your management, leadership and team development questions
Q I have just moved to a large organisation with a team of five reporting to me. They are all well qualified and experienced, but they bring every little question to me and won’t make any decisions. There is huge resistance to coming into the office even two days a week, which means all non-essential tasks fall on me. How do I motivate a disengaged team without resorting to micromanagement?
A. Two things are going on here: motivation and self-protection. Remember both are the way they are for a reason.
This doesn’t mean you have to accept them. Rather, it’s a more helpful mindset from which to work towards change.
To move the team out of self-protection, you need to change your behaviour so that they can change theirs.
Reflect in a genuinely curious way on the range of issues that might have caused the team to behave defensively. Stop judging them (which is hard to do) and use their behaviour as data.
People generally defend themselves because they feel attacked. My guess is that their last boss insisted everything went through them, or perhaps someone got hung out to dry for a wrong decision. It can take time to build trust with people who have been burnt.
The starting point is to focus on your own responses.
It sounds like your frustration is causing you to “fill in the gaps’”. The more you do this, the more your team will expect you to continue doing it. This behaviour is hard to change in the face of a senior colleague or client expectations.
You need to be very intentional with how you work with and support this team. Plan how to respond in a way that is supportive but challenging when one of your team members:
- Asks for direction, say “I’d be interested…what do you think”; OR
- Avoids making a decision. Say “What options have you thought about?”
After a while, you could make an observation like, “When I ask you what you think, you generally have a pretty good idea of what to do”. This may help them move from self-protection to feeling more valued.
Getting people into the office can be tricky and there is a lot of negative narrative around this but a lot of leaders I work with feel that they are picking up a lot of dropped balls. You need to be really clear in your own mind about why you want people in the office.
For example, if the “everything falls on me” problem could be fixed while people worked remotely, would you still want them in the office: is it mainly because everything falls on you or mainly because there is a company policy?
Gather the team and let them know that from (for example) January, you expect everyone to be on site at least two days a week. This approach gives people time to make arrangements.
If you are bringing people into the office, ensure there is added value for them, such as team meetings, in-person one-on-ones, lunch or coffee together, updates or learning sessions. Employees get cross when they sit in the office on Teams calls all day (with remote colleagues!).
