Strong Teams Tackle Tough Conversations. Weak teams avoid them.

If you want to know how powerful your team is, just see how team members deal with sensitive and tough topics.

Sensitive and tough topics often require the leaders and team members to put their own personal feelings, egos, and agendas aside for the greater good of their company or team.

They could large organizational-wide trade-off topics like deciding which team to invest in, which team member to promote or re-allocating people and budgets from one leader’s team to another. It could also be one-on-one topics like giving honest feedback to colleagues, your boss or subordinates about bad behavior, lack of accountability or poor performance.

When it comes to sensitive and tough conversations the line between significant and insignificant topics becomes blurry. People tend to take even the most trivial topics personally, often leading to disproportionate emotional reactions and behaviors.

In powerful teams, members never lose sight of the bigger picture. They put their team and company first and they always strive to do the right and the best thing for the collective cause.

In powerful teams, people also don’t hold back their punches when it comes to discussing and debating the tough and sensitive topics. Teammates may fully ‘go at it’, push back and disagree with their colleagues, but they continue openly to listen to each other, consider each other’s views objectively and they never cross the line of disrespectful interactions.

At the end of the conversation or meeting when the team or their boss makes a decision all team members genuinely align, own and support the verdict, whether in their personal favor or not. When they go back to their respective teams, they represent the decision as their own in a united front with their colleagues.

I have seen some great teams that exemplify this behavior. However, I have also seen many teams that don’t.

I believe it is safe to say that most teams don’t do a great job in dealing with tough and sensitive topics.

Take for example the senior executive team of a large technology company. They took on a bold company-wide transformation strategy with an ambition to expand and evolve the company’s product portfolio, grow its revenues and improve its customer experience and satisfaction. Pursuing any one of these strategies would have been audacious. But taking all of these on simultaneously was a daunting endeavour.

At first there was good synergy and harmony and executives were aligned and excited. But after a few short months colleagues started experiencing cross-functional dependency challenges between each other. The heads of Sales and Customer Success/Satisfaction were failing to achieve their targets, because their head of Product counterpart was significantly behind in achieving the product road map he committed to. When they confronted him at a senior executive team meeting, he blamed the chief financial officer for not releasing investment budgets in a timely manner.

The executives tried to engage in direct and honest conversations to address and fix their issues. They made a few attempts to express their frustrations and hold their colleagues to account for not keeping their commitments, but personal egos got in the way. Peers took personal and professional offense from the feedback and reciprocated with defensiveness, excuses and self-protection (CYA).

Instead of staying bold and figuring out how to learn from their shortcomings, and growing together as a team, executives stopped owning the greater company success and each other’s success. They continued to say all the right supportive things, and perhaps they through they meant them. But their actions said otherwise. They started looking out for themselves, make smaller more predicable commitments to mitigate dependency on colleagues for success. They behaved friendly and politely with each other to avoid tensions but they avoided deep and blunt conversations.

Presenting a positive report card on their functional activities and achievements became more important than doing the things that made the biggest impact to the company’s bold vision. And overall, the senior executive team became more tactical and less strategic; more conservative and less bold, more political and less authentic and courageous.

To be fair, addressing the tough and sensitive issues in a bold, powerful and respectful manner, takes leadership maturity and courage.

Unfortunately, too often there isn’t enough of these qualities even in the most senior teams.

Gershon Mader

Founder and President of Quantum Performance Inc., a management consulting firm specializing in generating total alignment and engagement in organizations.

His work has encompassed a broad range of industries including banking, telecommunications, manufacturing, entertainment, real estate, retail, startups and non-profits.