team of women discussing and capturing ideas on chart paper

Enhancing Team Communication with Kantor’s 4 Player Model

In today’s complex and fast-paced work environments, effective communication with teams is paramount for success. When your team understands the communication dynamics occurring during team meetings and even in ad hoc conversations, psychological safety can substantially increase. This in turn facilitates other desired team conditions and behaviors like productive conflict, team learning, and innovation, which all enable better team performance.

A useful framework for understanding what’s going on during team conversations and for ensuring everyone’s voice is heard is David Kantor’s Four Player Model. Kantor’s model describes 4 roles or “stances” that people in conversations naturally fall into. Eventually, as your team members become more adept at assuming different roles, they can adopt a stance they thinks is necessary in the moment to move the conversation forward productively. In this way, Kantor’s framework gives powerful context to any conversation by helping to decode communication dynamics and by fostering clearer communication.

Kantor’s 4 Players

So, let’s break down the dynamics that typically show up in conversations by looking at each player or stance individually.

Mover. When you initiate an idea or action, drive progress, or set goals or aspirations for the conversation or your team, you are stepping into the role of “Mover”. Without someone in the role of Mover, the conversation will lack direction and there likely won’t be actionable follow through on items discussed.

Follower. In the stance of Follower, you typically lend your support to the idea proposed by the Mover. You can do this by aligning yourself with stated goals, adding or expanding on the Mover’s idea, and contributing your ideas and effort to make the Mover’s idea successful. Without a someone in this role, others may not complete or follow through on the proposed or adopted idea.

Opposer. When adopting the Opposer stance, you question assumptions, challenge ideas, and ensure critical thinking within the team. In these ways, the Opposer serves to shape a Mover’s proposed idea or course of action, so it will work or align better with team values, resources, and priorities. No one wants others to poke holes into their ideas. But without the Opposer, the team doesn’t explore alternatives or correct flaws in ideas under discussion.

Bystander. Acting as Bystander, you observe the conversational content and dynamics during the conversation. You remain relatively neutral and take a broader perspective of what’s happening in the conversation. In this way you can provide valuable feedback and insight. For example, when in this role, you may comment on the interplay of dynamics between the various players or on areas of agreement that other team members might miss. You might also add historical information about the topic. Without a Bystander, there is there no perspective on the conversation.

What’s Happening in Your Team?

Think about your team meetings. Are you able to place team members in these roles based on how everyone usually naturally participates? Is there a role from the model that no one on your team usually assumes?

Having each of Kantor’s four players show up in your conversations is vital to having productive conversations. When you team understands and values the purposes of each of these four stances, conversations become richer. Also, , your team will increase psychological safety because team members will understand what’s happening in the conversation. They will understand the roles others are playing, instead of taking offense, tuning out, or being critical of how others are participating.

In short, when your team understands Kantor’s four roles or stances and their importance, team members can participate in discussions more effectively and leverage the strengths in the viewpoints of each participant.

You’ll find that while individuals tend to naturally gravitate to one or two roles. It’s also possible that team members will shift and play multiple roles during the same conversation. Eventually though, each of you can learn to fulfill any one of the four stances. This will ensure that your team will discuss topics more thoroughly and include various perspectives, using direction, support, questioning, and insight.

By using Kantor’s 4 Player Model as a framework, you’ll unlocking the power of your team’s communication. Team conversations will become more dynamic, inclusive, and productive with greater participation, creativity, and success.

Building Psychological Safety Starts with You

You’ll rarely have the perfect mix of people on your team. But keep in mind that the very best teams are based on how they interact with each other and with stakeholders. So keep recruiting the best people you can for your team, and if you really want to build a better team, create the conditions for greater psychological safety and start with showing up for your team a little differently.

The Importance of Psychological Safety

Psychological safety is a team member’s belief that they won’t be punished or humiliated for speaking up with questions, concerns, ideas, or mistakes – by you or by other colleagues. In short, it means that team members believe other team mates will give them grace when they take the risk to look silly, uninformed, or just plain wrong.

Psychological Safety is critical to have, especially with work that is complex, uncertain, cutting-edge or creative, and requires interdependence with other parties or groups. Research shows that it is the “gateway” condition for creating a high-performing team. So, without adequate psychological safety in place, your team members won’t give you their best.

Without psychological safety, your team or organization will fall behind when trying to create high-quality products or services that meet or exceed your stakeholders’ expectations. You’ll know you have work to do when you see low or even mediocre employee engagement, innovation, growth, customer satisfaction, and by extension, profitability.

There is no one thing that will magically make your team perceive more psychological safety. So, stop waiting for a magic bullet or for something or someone else to change it for you. You must take responsibility to do something different to improve the psychological safety on your team.

How to Show Up for Your Team to Build Psychological Safety and Move Toward Better Performance

Whether you’re a team leader, middle manager over a department, or executive, work on these aspects of your own self-development to create the conditions conducive to better psychological safety and a high-performing team.

Be Authentic

Being authentic is about being your genuine self with others. To become more authentic, embrace your uniqueness or “weirdness” instead of trying to fit a cookie cutter idea of who you need to be at work. The concept of being “weird”, a word that comes from a Norse word (wyrd), refers to one’s individual experience and expression. So, express your own “wyrd-ness”. (Watch a video I made on this topic.)

Also, to show up more authentically, you it takes the self-awareness and self-development work to get a handle on “your stuff” and increase your EQ. A good place to start is to look at the things or people that “set you off” and how you react when you are triggered. You might not realize that your reactivity impacts those around you, and your status as a leader magnifies that impact. These triggers indicate beliefs and behaviors that aren’t working for you anymore and that you might want to let go of.

Adopt a Learner Mentality

When work on showing up more authentically, you’ll become more secure and centered, which means you can admit mistakes and be open to ideas from others, which is key to learner mentality. The qualities to tap into for a learner mentality to include:

humility – knowing that you aren’t better than others, which allows you to admit when you don’t know something;

fallibility – knowing you’re not perfect or all-knowing and will readily admit when you’re wrong and will share your mistakes and what you learned from them;

curiosity – having a desire to learn, which you can harness by asking thoughtful, open-ended questions of your team that are both broad and deep; and

putting focus on learning as they execute – helping team members discover what they need to learn to be successful as they pursue the tasks required to reach a team objective or goal

Respond Effectively

You can encourage more team member participation, thoughtful discussion, and better questions from your team when you:

Assume good intentions – suspending judgment of something a team member does or says until you more fully understand where they are coming from. (Watch a video I made on this topic.)

Express appreciation for sharing bad news or failures – thanking team members for their contributions, questions, and broaching difficult to hear topics by. That means you’ll listen thoughtfully, indicate that what they shared matters, and acknowledge or thank them for bringing up the topic, idea, mistake, or question.

Put mistakes or failure in perspective – based on the nature of the work…

Celebrate failures that helped the team learn something new – avoid “shooting the messenger” when a team member delivers bad news to you and offer help or support when team members experience failure or mistakes

Address clear violations of policy and procedure – Clarify boundaries from the start, so team members know what is blameworthy and respond appropriately to clear breaches of policy or procedure in a timely and appropriately serious manner to influence future behavior

Building more psychological safety starts with you. No matter how good or discombobulated your team is currently, realize that you personally have some work to do. After all, you are a powerful role model for the rest of your team. So, become more authentic, adopt a learner mentality, and work on responding more effectively to encourage team members to take the risk of disappointing you to create psychological safety. When you become the type of person who routinely creates the conditions for psychological safety, team performance and relationships will improve.

See more videos on psychological safety on my YouTube channel here

black and white image of three women at a table in a meeting

Empathy and Emotional Intelligence: The Influence of the Feminine in the Workplace

In today’s business world, your ability to access your empathy and emotional intelligence is a must. Increasingly, the modern workplace has changed, morphing from a bastion of masculine qualities and values to giving greater value to these and other feminine qualities. Consequently, your effectiveness as a leader is no longer simply about making decisions or delegating tasks; rather, your leadership effectiveness is about understanding and connecting with your team on a deeper level.

Empathy

First, look at the growing importance of one feminine quality, empathy. Empathy is about stepping into someone else’s shoes and seeing the world from their perspective. As a leader, it is crucial to recognize that each employee has their own challenges, strengths, and aspirations. In the old masculine-dominated paradigm, showing empathy by being interested in your employees’ challenges and perspectives would have been seen as weak because employees were mostly seen as cogs in the machine. Their job was simply to show up and “do” without allowing their individuality to get in the way. Caring about them would just get in the way of getting the work done.

The Research on Empathy

But more and more, companies see empathy as important. In a recent study, 98% of employees surveyed, considered empathy an important factor in the workplace, even though only 40% of them agreed that their employers were empathetic. To add weight to the importance of empathy, roughly 45% of consumers say they’ll purchase more from a company if it shows empathy.

Additionally, research on empathy shows:

leaders with empathy increase the satisfaction of their employees by 50%. Indeed, 83% of employees are more likely to stay with a company that is empathetic;
70 – 80% of virtual workers state that high empathy is important for successful remote work;
a lack of empathy contributes to 60% of incidents in the workplace;
80% of CEOs report a direct correlation between empathy and the financial performance of their business, which might be because approximately 77% of workers would be willing to work more hours in a more empathetic workplace; and finally,
empathy can reduce racism by up to 50%.

Showing Empathy

How do you show empathy at work? It’s as simple as asking employees how they’re feeling about their current work –whether it’s the same-old, same-old or a new project — then offering support and guidance as required. As a leader, you can show empathy by recognizing the interpersonal dynamics going on your team and taking time to talk about or check in with team members to enable them to support one another better.

Having Emotional Intelligence

Empathy goes with another increasingly valued feminine quality: emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is about being aware of your own emotions and how they impact others, as well as being able to regulate your emotions effectively.

Leaders who possess emotional intelligence can navigate challenging situations with grace and composure, instead of becoming reactive and allowing the fight-or-flight response get the better of them. By demonstrating your own emotional intelligence, you will inspire your team to do the same.

The Research on Emotional Intelligence

Research shows that supervisors who act in emotionally intelligent ways create a more positive work climate, have employees who are able to grow into their jobs, and are generally more effective. To these ends, emotional intelligence is what helps you successfully coach teams, manage stress, deliver feedback, and collaborate with others.

With emotional intelligence, you can achieve two important business goals: create an environment that supports employee well-being, and build greater team cohesion and focus – which allow teams to deliver results aligned with company and stakeholder objectives. In fact, some research suggests that you can increase productivity by as much as 20% if your employees increase their emotional intelligence, too. This is probably because with high emotional intelligence, your team is more likely to stay calm under pressure, resolve conflicts effectively, and respond to each other with empathy.

Final Thoughts on Empathy and Emotional Intelligence

Whether it’s offering support during difficult times, fostering a culture of open communication, or providing constructive feedback, your ability to harness the power of the feminine qualities of empathy and emotional intelligence is in demand. It’s not just about what you do. It’s about how you make your team and others around you feel. When you foster an environment where emotions are acknowledged and valued, you can create a culture of trust, collaboration, and psychological safety.

It’s important to lead others to do the work to achieve company goals, but it’s the teams who develop good working relationships with each other and their stakeholders who perform above the rest. To that end, empathy and emotional intelligence are qualities that everyone on your team can and should cultivate because in the end, it’s the feminine value of creating human connection that drives success in the workplace today.

Dialogue: Moving Through Conflict To Creativity and Innovation

Do you congratulate yourself on the fact that your team never argues or even disagrees with each other? Hold on. That might not be a good thing.

Results from a study of 55 executives teams by consulting firm RHR International found that while internal cohesion and psychological safety are important to executive team performance, they are not the most critical at the enterprise level. Rather, it is the team’s ability to manage conflicting tensions—as opposed to seeking agreement—that predicts top-team performance.

Even if you don’t lead an executive team, you know that conflict happens on most teams at all levels of your company. Indeed, with the emphasis on creating diverse teams, it’s likely that the different backgrounds, experiences, and expertise will lead to more wide-ranging points of view.

The trick is not to avoid conflict, but to understand that disagreement is often a step in the conversation process on the way toward understanding the larger system you within which your team operates.

Field #1: Politeness

In this field, team members are minding their p’s and q’s, making sure not to be seen as negative. In this stage, people do not necessarily say what they think in order to keep the peace and the appearance of playing “nice”. At this point, team members work to maintain the appearance of being a cohesive team by not “rocking the boat”. Nothing new happens in the field of politeness, so it’s likely that team members leave a conversation that stayed in this field with their expectations met. Same ol’ meeting, different day.

Field #2: Breakdown

During a team meeting or discussion, it’s probably not uncommon from your team to move to the field of breakdown. You know you’re in breakdown when individual team members begin to assert their individual points of view (POV). In this field, tension in the group begins to rise as group cohesion dissipates and individuals debate, defend, and argue about the merits of their assertions, credentials, experiences, and facts known to them. When team conversations end in this field of breakdown, team members leave the conversation with awareness or new information from other POVs that challenge assumptions and information they knew coming in. When team members begin to realize that there is a different way to look at the issue or their own part in the issue/situation that they hadn’t thought of or realized before.

Field #3: Inquiry

In inquiry, team members begin to reflect on their own perspectives as parts of the whole, rather than the only or the “right” perspective. In fact, in this field team members gain a new perspective. They begin to ask questions out of curiosity about what they truly don’t understand, instead of asking leading or charged questions to convince others to see their points of view.

Field 4: Flow

The team enters level four feeling like a cohesive group again co-creating new ideas that move within the group. The team sees the bigger picture or system because of its awareness of multiple POVs. You’re in this field when energy and inspiration is high in anticipation of something new being created. Team members leave the conversation feeling like they have become different people who are more connected to who they are meant to be.

As a bonus, fill in the form below to download a graphic detailing the four fields of conversation. This tool is useful in teaching your team how think and work together for break-through results. You and your team will learn to move from conflict to creativity and innovation more effectively.

individual, team, team identity, team purpose

5 Ways to Transform a Group of Individuals into a Team

In the U.S., most people are taught from an early age to be individually competent and independent. It’s no wonder that most of your employees have some difficulty in knowing how to work effectively within a team. Here are five things you can do to forge a collective sense of “team”:

1. Create Routines That Signal Start of Team Space

Being part of a team is like being a partner in a marriage — both require individuals to give up some of their individual desires and aspirations in service to the group. (Read a previous post I wrote about the ego “sacrifice” required here.) As a team leader, you can reinforce this notion with routines that are designed to signal that the group is entering “team” mode and to put their individual goals to the side.

Examples of these routines are:

At the beginning of team meetings, consider starting with a few seconds of silence to allow everyone to bring their focus into the meeting.
Use a team “check-in” to allow each individual to engage with the rest of the team from the start.
During an initial team or project launch, ask each individual to share what baggage they intend to leave behind (past quarrels or resentments, habits, tendencies, etc.) that won’t serve the team purpose and stakeholders.

In short, you can build small habits into team processes to reinforce the notion that everyone is moving into team mode where the team and its work is the focus instead of furthering individual agendas.

2. Frequently Revisit Team Purpose

To maintain the focus on the collective team endeavor, always remind your team of its purpose. Reminding the team why your team exists is a fundamental way to establish and re-establish team focus. Everything team members do — from the behaviors needed to achieve team success, to the goals and objectives they strive to achieve, to the processes they create for high quality output, should all come from to the team’s purpose. This is also true for each decision made and the roles and responsibilities assigned. In short, team purpose informs everything your team does. Team purpose reminds your team that their collective endeavor is not about them as individuals as much as it is about the team as a whole and the benefit it provides to others.

3. Keep Stakeholders at the Center of the Team’s Work

It’s easy for team members to get overly focused on their individual agendas and responsibilities. Yet, your team’s success is ultimately measured by how well its collective work provides beneficial value for stakeholders. In fact, stakeholders and their needs are the reason for your team’s purpose, which in turn drives your team’s work. (Read a previous article on how to take yourself out of the center.)

To keep your team’s focus on stakeholders, connect with them from time to time. Staying in touch allows your team to discover how well your team is providing valuable benefit to them and whether the relationship is good. When your team sees its stakeholders as central to team operations, you prioritize the collective team endeavor of serving stakeholders over individual team member interests.

4. Make Vulnerability and Fallibility Okay

One of the big reasons individual team members can be overly focused on themselves is that they want to appear capable. Yet, each human on your team has flaws. To mask those flaws, individuals often balk at admitting they sometimes lack skills or that they make mistakes. That’s why it’s important that you as team leader show that it’s okay to admit you aren’t all knowing, may lack some ability, and will own up to mistakes in the spirit of learning. Additionally, your team might consider creating norms around these concepts.

Acknowledging human frailties permits team members to accept each other as individuals. It also can focus them on learning together as a team rather than protecting their individual egos.

5. Create Team Accountability for Individual Team Member Development

As suggested by Keith Ferrazzi, you can forge a deeper focus on the team by creating a Team Relationship Action Plan. The key to such a plan is to ensure each individual team member identifies their own areas for growth. Then, they ask for what they need from other team members to make gains in those areas. This creates mutual accountability between each individual and whole team for individual development that furthers the team purpose and goals.

To conclude, individual talent and creativity are necessary contributions to team success. However, successful teams are able to create a singular team focus to serve their stakeholders. Don’t rely on this happening naturally; consider trying some of these ideas to routinely reinforce what it means to be a team.

WANT TO USE THIS IN YOUR NEWSLETTER, BLOG OR WEBSITE? You can, as long as you include this information with it: Beth Strathman works with executives and senior leaders to create team environments that optimize ownership, accountability, learning, and results. Learn more at bethstrathman.com.

Challenges of Forging Individuals Into a Team

How does a sense of team emerge where the whole is prioritized over the individual, especially in Western cultures where the emphasis is on the individual?

A team is a specific type of group where individuals come together to accomplish a shared purpose. In a team, the individual team members bring their unique talents and perspectives and work interdependently to achieve a unified outcome. This requires mutual responsibility, accountability, and support.

Move from a Focus on Individual Team Members to a Focus on the Team Purpose

With the complexity of today’s world, many companies are finding that individuals working by themselves but together with a common goal doesn’t rise to meet the demands of today’s complex and changing world. The creates an “every person for themselves” approach that falls short. Thus, the challenge for many companies today is to create true team where its “all for one and one for all”.

Forging individuals into a team requires the ability to create conditions where team members express their individual talents in service of the team, while keeping their focus on achieving the team’s purpose and serving the team’s stakeholders.

This is easier said than done because most people have been raised to focus on their own talents, needs, and goals. When this is the case, a focus on individuals is at the center of decision-making. Instead, this is where the team’s collective purpose, goals, and stakeholders should be. Consequently, the team can easily devolve back to being a group of individuals, each in pursuit of looking good individually.

As with most things in life, it’s a balancing act. A healthy team must strive for a balance between encouraging the individual team members to fully contribute while ensuring the shared team purpose drives the work.

Here are some things to monitor if you want to forge a collection of individuals into a high-performing or even transformative team:

Strive For Your Team’s Individual/Team Balance

A team leader along with the team must strive to create conditions where individual team members:

know which unique skills, knowledge, and abilities they contribute to the team.
are willing to reflect on their abilities and their limits to grow through the challenges of working with others.
have interesting and purposeful tasks to perform.
are willing to engage in productive conflict to find creative solutions with others.
are willing to ask for and offer help when needed without judgment.

Additionally, the team as a whole must:

agree upon a shared purpose, norms, goals/aspirations, and priorities.
recognize and appreciate individual contributions and encourage individual growth.
prioritize its work together with the stakeholders and shared purpose at the center.
take collective responsibility to improve as a team and to assist each team member in their individual development
engage in dialogue and productive conflict to find creative solutions

Warning Signs That You’re Losing the Individual/Team Balance

To strike that individual/team balance, there are also things to avoid. For example, signs that the focus is too much on individuals include:

individual opinions and preferences drive decision-making over what’s best for the team and its stakeholders.
the team allowing a louder or outspoken team member to dominate team discussions frequently.
the team allows individual preferences or behavior to derail group progress towards a shared goal.

Signs that the team might be stifling individual participation include:

group think sets in — team members don’t challenge interpretations or points of view out of habit or because they fear not being seen as “team players”.
a dogmatic or misguided group personality emerges that isolates the team and creates difficult interactions with others outside the team.
the team as a whole dismisses individual contributions (+ and -) that could lead to breakthroughs.

Building a great team is not easy. When you get full team member participation that serves the purpose of the team, it will be a thing of beauty.

WANT TO USE THIS IN YOUR NEWSLETTER, BLOG OR WEBSITE? You can, as long as you include this information with it: Beth Strathman works with executives and senior leaders to create team environments that optimize ownership, accountability, learning, and results. Learn more at bethstrathman.com.

Why You Should Prize Failure

Failure happens when a desired or expected outcome doesn’t materialize. It can happen whether or not there was something you could have done about it, too. Whether the mistake is a small glitch or a major flop, failure often weighs heavily on you personally because you’ve been conditioned that, without exception, “failure is not an option”.

This is a lot to overcome. In most people’s experience, nothing is perfect; you and the people around you are flawed, and the world is constantly changing. Thus, you’re not always going to get things right on with mistakes, foibles, and failure and re-frame them as ”learning”:

1. Failure points to weaknesses in behavior, skill, processes, your overall system, or level of support provided.

Use an error to examine a weakness in how you are performing the work. People involved may need to build technical or interpersonal skills. The steps designed to produce the work output may be inadequate. Also, you might need to increase follow ups or check ins during a process to increase the ability to get and give needed guidance.

2. Failure provides you new information and data about what does and doesn’t work.

Mistakes help you home in on what will ultimately work well, especially when you are in uncharted territory. Repeated, incremental failures can help you fine tune toward success.

“Mistakes are the portals of discovery.” – James Joyce

3. Failure can highlight false assumptions.

Consumers didn’t embrace the Ford Edsel in the late 1950s in part because the company mistakenly assumed consumers wanted big cars when they wanted smaller, more economical ones. The maker of Coke incorrectly assumed that it would convert Pepsi drinkers if it made its product taste more like its rival. While it’s too bad that these companies went all the way to market with ill-conceived products, they did learn that their thinking was flawed at a fundamental level.

4. Failure can create curiosity that leads to inquiry and more engagement.

With an eye towards learning, you can use failure to focus your team on the work. To do this you must avoid blaming and shaming individuals, which can drive a wedge in the middle of your team. Instead, focusing on what happened can bring your team together to solve problems. Additionally, your team can go one step further to share what they learned with others in your organization.

Perfection is not the goal. Nothing and no one will ever be 100% error free. Rather, view the performance of work as a creative process that can teach you a lot through the errors, mishaps, and failures that occur along the way. Be grateful you have opportunities to discover what and how you can improve the next time.

WANT TO USE THIS IN YOUR NEWSLETTER OR BLOG? You can, as long as you include this information with it: Beth Strathman works with executives and senior leaders to create team environments that optimize ownership, accountability, learning, and results. Learn more at bethstrathman.com.

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Leadership & Executive Coaching | Systemic Team Coaching