When Your Patterns Meet Mine
Everyone is seated around the meeting room table in the glass conference room that looks like a fishbowl. From the outside looking in, it appears to be a highly functional team — talking, agreeing, making decisions etc. From the inside it appears similar — no disagreements, meetings running smoothly, deliverables getting done and decisions being made.
Yet, there’s an unspoken feeling of disconnection. Conversations stay at the surface level. Rarely does anyone speak up with a perspective that dramatically contradicts the direction being taken. Then there’s the leader who’s always on his phone while the analytics person is presenting, and no one says anything. The team VP who continues to offer an optimistic view on everything keeping the team from surfacing anything “real.” And team member who runs a constant reactive script of “this is a major problem.”
This is a team that looks functional, but is actually at risk if it keeps functioning this way — a lack of healthy conflict, an inability to hold each other accountable, a lack of feedback or communication on the hard thing that would optimize the way people interact with each other. But most of all — a scenario where each person’s hidden layers are at play and no one can even see it to name it or manage it.
