How small misunderstandings accumulate to undermine teamwork
Transcript of this video:
There’s a great phrase in the world of IT called technical debt, which describes what happens to a piece of software or code as it’s developed over time and new features are added.
Gradually, this software starts to do new additional things, but the code base becomes a bit more complicated as new things are bolted onto it. And it can become a bit like a haphazard tree house over time as new bits are added, it becomes less stable. And eventually, it stops functioning really well, and in the end, you have to go back and clear all that technical debt and rebuild it to be more effective.
Now, I think a parallel process happens in human groups, and I call it emotional debt. Over time, little slights and errors and misunderstandings in the group tend to get sorta papered over rather than dealt with. I
f someone isn’t responding to emails, well, people learn to sort of bypass them, which might not be the best thing to do, but it solves the problem and it avoids a difficult conversation.
But gradually, this emotional debt of misunderstandings builds up over time. And often, my law of ruts, as I call it, kicks in, which is that we only realize how deep a rut is when we’ve got out of it. So the team doesn’t quite get that, this accumulation of emotional misunderstandings and slights and hurts and what-have-you have built up to the point where the team isn’t functioning well.
Now, the team thinks the issue is, “Oh, well, we haven’t delivered on our first quarter targets,” et cetera, et cetera, and they talk about all that stuff.
But it’s only when they start to address or someone is brave enough to have some challenging conversations to address these little small slights and misunderstandings that you get a chance to clear the emotional debt, and surprisingly, find the team starts working a lot better as a result.
Photo by Ehud Neuhaus on Unsplash
