Practice Management
September 2021
by Ellen Stodola
Editorial Co-Director
The Monday General Session at the ASOA Annual Meeting featured Joe Mull presenting “No More Team Drama: Ending Gossip, Cliques, & Other Crap That Damage Workplace Teams.” Mr. Mull said you can’t completely eliminate team drama from the workplace. “The biggest reason for that is because … people.”
Mr. Mull said when he’s discussing “no more team drama,” he’s not promising that it won’t show itself again; rather, he means no more team drama at the level where it causes harm and drives away talent.
When asking the audience who has experienced team drama, almost everyone in the room raised their hand.
What is team drama? Mr. Mull agreed with various examples proposed from the audience: gossip, jealousy, picking favorites, and bullies. “Every one of these fits the bill,” he said.
Source: ASCRS
Mr. Mull said that even after writing a book on team drama, he still struggles to capture it in a single-sentence definition. The definition he has come up with is “actions and reactions that harm morale, relationships, and culture in the workplace.”
Mr. Mull said that if you can move the needle a bit and reduce how often team drama happens at work, people are happier, performance is higher, and outcomes are better.
Asking the audience to say, “True or false,” Mr. Mull made the statement that team drama is often born from people reacting to perceptions on how they’re being treated by someone else. The audience responded, “True.” The reason it’s true is because each day, our brains take a series of short cuts to operate more efficiently, and this results in bias, he said. The bias is your brain operating against anyone who’s not you.
Mr. Mull discussed two sets of rules. The first, illusory superiority bias, tells you that you’re a good person doing the best you can. We tend to overestimate ourselves in a variety of ways, he said, including in terms of talent, effort, and circumstances. We tend to perceive our capabilities at a higher level than they truly are.
The second, fundamental attribution error, is when you see someone do something you don’t agree with and don’t understand; you believe the reason is because of who they are at their core.
Mr. Mull highlighted four things teams have to get good at to overcome bias:
- Courtesy
- Camaraderie
- Conflict
- Cause
Initially, when we talk about courtesy and respect, we start thinking about other people, he said. “We must build a culture of courtesy that is defined and personalized,” he said.
Camaraderie is another important factor. It helps to mute the fundamental attribution factor. It helps to find things in common, Mr. Mull said, adding that you have to be sure you can include everyone.
Conflict is actually good and important, he said. It’s a means by which people buy into things together and work through differences. When you avoid conflict, you sweep things under the rug.
Before discussing cause, Mr. Mull pointed out that this is the first live keynote talk that he has given in 17 months. Usually, Mr. Mull said it’s at this point in his talk that he asks attendees, “Has your team ever gone through anything hard?” But with the COVID-19 pandemic, “I bet you’ve seen a lot in the last year and a half,” he said.
Teams form and develop in stages, and what moves a team through these phases to higher levels of performance is a shared purpose, the idea that we’re all contributing to an important thing that we all believe is valuable. What’s your cause? Your cause is the difference your work makes in the lives of others, Mr. Mull said. When we work on these four things with teams, we start to move the needle on team drama.
Mr. Mull said a takeaway for attendees is that they’re going to have to “boss better.” We have to recognize our roles are different, he said. Part of that is creating belonging, championing teamwork, and recognizing it’s not enough to just care about the quality of relationships with employees; you have to care about the quality of relationships that they have with each other.
