Some very thoughtful comments and suggestions made here. One of the jobs I had after I retired was working with the state's Department of Education. We worked with school building level teams to develop school improvement plans. Among the many things we did was to spend time learning about what team breaking habits we each held, and yes we all have them. No one is perfect. The hard thing to learn is that often we don't realize what our team breaking habits are. The other part of the process is to learn how to confront these issues in ways that allows each of us to maintain our self esteem. That's mostly the team facilitator's job. We don't have that here, so we need to inspect our own behaviors and try to avoid them, and when we do forget, someone forgets and tries to break the team so to speak, we can chose to ignore that behavior or take some action. What you do will depend on how much the team will loose by allowing that to pass. I know this is not a team in a real sense, yet there are a lot of parallels. Some of the team breaking behaviors were considered in the earlier posts. It should be realized that all team breaking behaviors are for the purpose of gaining control or position. Don't be scared by that comment, it's just a matter of fact. It's not usually done on purpose, although some times it is. Here are a few of the team breaking habits that I can remember, I'm sure you could google them and find all of them.
The Expert - always knows why everything is the way it is, and often expresses their positions.
The Agenda Grabber - They have their own agenda, and will get the group off track onto their topic.
The Blocker - They block progress by never agreeing or allowing the group to make a decison.
The silent member - they never say anything at the meeting, but after the meeting they back stab and agitate the team. (this would be the ones who garner support on here with private tree mails)
There's more, but my memory is busted today. But I think you see what I'm trying to get to. We are always the last to know our own weakness, but it's totally easy to see the other guys.
I know that change is uncomfortable, but we never will improve without some pain. If someone is made to feel uncomfortable by these comments and others stated, it means you have the opportunity to make some personal growth gains.
One of the ground rules that our teams had was, It's OK to disagree It's NO OK to be disagreeable.
I liked Bob's comments on our language is based somewhat on tonality. Just for fun think of all the ways you can change the meaning of this phrase just by changing the tone of different words.
This grass is great.
Now, we can watch for the agenda grabbers with this one !
At the end of the day, I think every one on here is great, no relationship, be it personal or professional can succeed without effort. OK, Now have you picked out my team breaking behavior yet??????? I'm no
