Transforming whiners into winners

A client I have been working with for a few years now was recently hired into a Senior Management role for a new company. ”Mary,” as I’ll refer to her here, soon brought up the culture of her new workplace as her biggest emerging pain point. She was hired into a Managerial role, but her large team had a toxic culture characterized by unhealthy competitive dynamics such as gossip, in-group vs out group socializing, slander, and critical focus on age, looks, wardrobe, and other irrelevant and personal characteristics. Read on below to hear how she turned a culture of whining into a culture of winning.

 Mary is a high performer with a background of leadership experience at multiple levels at a single company the past 10 years. Frankly speaking, she didn’t have much experience with toxic team culture as her previous company was run well and had a strong culture of professionalism. She was really frustrated with her experience here in her new role, particularly given the scope and scale of the changes she would like to see happen. She felt she had been given 2 bad options to choose from which she humorously phrased as *NPC vs Main Character Syndrome.

• In common parlance, NPC stands for “Non-Playing Character” in reference to certain built-in video game characters that aren’t “real” players and just fill a programmed role, like an extra on a movie set. Main Character Syndrome, on the other hand, is a derogatory term used to describe somebody who believes they are the “Main Character” in a Made-for-TV Drama and acts as if the world is centered on them.

 In other words, Mary she felt she needed to either pick the “NPC” route of simply ignoring her team’s culture, keeping her head down, and focusing on the performance challenges, or go the other way and join the fray by taking on Main Character Syndrome and claw her way through the chaos by asserting herself as Queen Bee.

 Neither of these options was the least bit appealing to Mary, but her early attempts to find ways to productively shift her new workplace’s culture weren’t working.

 However, by embracing the Challenge & a Choice framework and taking on a more empowered and agentic stance she was able to create her own 3rd option and fairly quickly lead her team’s culture towards a common higher ground. I’ll share a few of her strategic choices here below for your consideration for if and when you find yourself in similar shoes.

 1)    Already familiar with taking action and getting results, Mary loved our conversation reminding her of the “Challenge & a Choice” framework that informs every “Hero’s Journey” Narrative. Here for Mary, the immediate challenges presented by her team and its dysfunctional dynamics were obvious, but the choices seemed limited. Mary leveled up by reframing the entire situation in a larger Challenge & a Choice dynamic where the true Challenge was NOT how to work within the constraints of the current culture, but actually how to lead her team UP and out towards the co-creation of a new and healthier culture. By reframing her Challenge this way, Mary left the 2 “false choices” of NPC vs Main Character Syndrome behind and CHOSE to take ownership of the “Hero’s Journey” opportunity to lead her team upward into a healthier environment that was better for everyone.

2)    Having taking more full ownership of her power of choice, and having decided on her strategy to lead her team to higher ground, Mary decided that her main tactical plan would be to find ways to move the competitive energies OUT of the covert and personal realms and over to the overt and professional realms. She implemented 3 specific means to achieve her goals here:

a.     Her predecessor had only shared team performance updates during quarterly full team meetings, and had also been reluctant to discuss how individual members of the team were doing outside of individual monthly 1-on-1’s.

 Mary created a new Performance Dashboard that had Team goals and performance metrics on it, but also clearly featured all the individual members’ performance and contributions to the collective. This new Dashboard was accessible for viewing by anybody at any time from their desktops, and was also permanently and prominently displayed on a large monitor mounted on the main wall outside the break room. Mary powerfully moved invisible covert performance awareness to shared overt performance awareness with this bold maneuver.

b.     During those first few weeks in her new role, one of the most concerning elements of Mary’s experience was how so many of the conversations she was hearing among her team members were primarily focused on other team members! It was almost as if the abject goal at work of each team member was to improve their own cultural standing and/or lower somebody else’s. Mary wanted to shift their focus out of the personal and up to the professional.

 Mary addressed this by adding her company’s Mission Statement up in huge letters above her public Performance Dashboard mounted outside the breakroom. Underneath the monitor she simply had the following question spelled out, in only a slightly smaller font: “How are you helping us meet the mission today?” This simple reminder of professional obligation, combined with the public Performance Dashboard stats, acted as a powerful magnet pulling her team’s attention out of the miasma of personal concerns and up to the proper level of professional ones.

c.     Building on the above items, Mary also implemented an aggressive weekly 1-on-1 schedule for her entire team of 20+ people. During the first one of these new meetings she clearly framed out her expectations something like this: “I am the Manager of this team, and as such, I am responsible for this Team’s performance in relation to the goals we’ve been given to support the company’s bigger mission. As a member of this Team, your job is to help us meet those goals. In these meetings I want to learn more about where you need support or guidance so as to up your performance so that we can work together to give you what you need to be successful. I want to help you be as successful as you can be here in your current role, and am more than willing to help you be successful elsewhere if it isn’t for you. But in order to stay here on my team you need to perform at a certain level, and that is non-negotiable.”

 She also reminded them of HR’s guidelines for office language and refused to address any personality-based complaints below that threshold, instead often asking “And what did they say when you addressed this with them yourself?” In short, Mary made it clear that her concern was improving professional performance, not in policing personal quibbles.

Mary stayed true to her commitments, and over the next few weeks saw 6 people leave her team for various reasons. But guess what qualities those same 6 people happened to share? Embarrassed by the public posting of their low individual performance metrics, they first doubled down on their toxic behavioral traits to try to form a coalition to get Mary fired. The rest of the team, relieved and inspired by Mary’s strong leadership, stood up for Mary, banded together, and advised those 6 chronic complainers that their time and energy would be better spent on self-improvement and/or getting results.

Down 6 people, Mary’s team still managed to boost their next quarter’s performance by 25% over the previous quarter’s numbers, leading to larger than expected bonus distributions all around.  

But more importantly, Mary had turned around her team’s culture to one that was clear on the company’s mission, focused on performing well, and shared in the freedom to excel in their professional aspirations.

When I recently asked Mary what her biggest take-away from that experience was for her, she simply replied, “People like to be on a winning team, and winning teams get better by recognizing and rewarding individual performers. Managers who hold high standards, support Team development, and reward high performers will have a winning team. Managers who don’t, won’t. I’m proud of how I was able to turn my team’s performance around by leading them to a culture built on winning rather than allowing them all to suffer in a culture based on whining.” 

Mary’s take on things clearly illustrates the power of effective Leadership and how good Leaders can make all the difference along so many dimensions of workplace dynamics. What small tweaks to your Leadership could you make to help move your team a little further up the spectrum from whining to winning?