Outside it was the absurdly charming Cambridge England, but we sat in a rough
circle in one of those AirBNBs that reek of sterility. Everything was shades of bland
grey, with one out-of-place photo of an older couple gazing deeply into one another’s
eyes. As a skim coat over the sterility, everywhere there was the detritus of teaming:
tea and coffee mugs, mostly empty. Chocolate boxes, mostly eaten. Pastries that we
had split into so many sharing pieces that now there were crumbs everywhere. And
of course giant sheets of paper littered with post-its, scrawling handwriting, looping
drawings.
This was the 3-day offsite meeting of the leadership team of Cultivating Leadership,
seven of us in the room with a brilliant facilitator, one of us on Zoom after a freak
accident cracked several vertebrae and made travel impossible. We were processing
what we had heard from our colleagues at our annual meeting, considering what we
would be doing in our next chapter of running a leadership firm that specializes in
helping organisations cultivate their leadership for increasingly complex times. Now
is a breathtakingly complex time and we needed to lead it in a new way. At this
soulless AirBNB, we needed to come to a decision to cultivate leadership in an
entirely different way. We needed to be creative about innovation even as we saw
that the innovation could end our own team. We had to use our strength as a team to
undo ourselves.
We have always tried to live what we teach. It would be absurd if we were carrying
on into this new world with our old patterns and habits unchanged. And yet the world
is moving so fast it’s dizzying. We are spun around. In the spinning, how do we move
into a next chapter?
The eight of us on our leadership team know each other well, as human thinkers, as
human feelers. We understand what makes our teammates enthusiastic, what makes
them afraid, what makes them joyful. We know each other well enough to understand
what each of us is likely to be triggered by, so that we can help each other breathe
our way back to centre. We share our vulnerabilities with our teammates so that they
can help us. As we stretched out on sofas and boiled more water for tea, we were
learning quickly that unraveling your own power, clearing out to make way for others
was triggering in one way or another for us all.
One thing we have worked the hardest at over the years is to make it safe to screw
up, to be emotional, to change your mind, and still retain the admiration of, the
genuine affection of, your teammates. I can’t say enough about how important this is.
Each of these human “flaws” is a necessary component to learning and to growth,
and all of them become extraordinarily difficult in a context that pushes for perfection.
Brave Teams require a context that encourages bravery instead of punishing it.
At our meeting we tested that. Someone would dissolve into tears in the middle of a
sentence, someone else would snap at the tentative idea of a teammate, risking the
death of an idea too new to withstand derision.
Even in the heat of it, there was always someone who could remember to thank
colleagues who were showing their passion for something in a moment of unguarded
grief or anger. Someone else could help hold them until they found their way back to
their own centred place. While it would be much more comfortable to avoid those
spikes of emotion, we know the peril of creating conditions where teammates politely plaster over their feelings to create shields that hide emotions so deeply that they
can’t be dealt with or learned from.
We kicked around ideas, some tediously familiar, some frighteningly innovative.
Someone took on the role of the one who says no. Someone else took on Risk-taker.
There was at least one Peacemaker. As more edgy ideas arose, we each found
ourselves defending the identity that felt best (safest?) to us. With effort, we fought
out of that trap too, pushing ourselves to take multiple perspectives and listen deeply
to one another—especially when we didn’t want to listen at all, when we wanted to
double down on our own perspective. Because we are a team, someone was
(almost) always able to catch ourselves out of the trap of listening to win and
remember that other perspectives—no matter how different—have merit from which
we can learn. I watched disagreements that seemed irreconcilable turn into
extraordinary moments of creation when one person stopped arguing long enough to
say, “Oh, so what really matters to you here is…” Or simply, “I feel like I wasn’t
hearing your point well enough—can you explain it again?” In the moment, that
seems as unnatural as breathing underwater, but it turns out that we can grow our
capacity to listen much more easily than we can grow gills.
We called each other in out of silence or passive agreement to speak our own
perspective, clearly and bravely, even if it is different, even when–-especially
when—we thought it would be unpopular.
We haltingly made a dance of the courage to listen and the courage to speak. This is
the Brave Team dance: it both requires the careful creation of Brave Team contexts
and also creates the conditions for more bravery to emerge.
And as we disagreed about things that matter deeply, we struggled to be ready to
change our minds, to loosen our grip on control, to allow for the co-creation, the
utterly novel innovation that is the hallmark of brave teams. We cannot have our
identities so entangled with any one answer that it rips a wound to let it go. And when
we find one of us in that small, defensive, terrifyingly small and unstable identity
platform, we need to be able to hold out a gentle hand and coax our teammate back
onto the more solid ground of themselves.
By the end of the meeting, we had taken down the multitude of flip charts on the wall.
We had washed the mugs, wiped the crumbs, and polished off the chocolate. We
had hugged each other and cried a little at the end, knowing that this was probably
the final meeting of this team, that we would scatter to lead different things across
our growing firm in the next months. We had learned that an unanticipated aspect of
being a Brave Team was letting go of this circle to create the possibilities for other
generative circles to emerge, that the undoing of our team was our finest moment of
teaming.