How teams can work magic 🧖‍♀️

Hello and welcome to Working It

How often do you think about the Roman empire? 🏺

That question is now a huge TikTok trend. There are countless videos of women asking men about it. Sample answer: “Not very often. Maybe twice a week.” Cue women’s astonishment/disbelief.

I am obsessed with this. The Romans cross my mind rarely, if ever 🏛️. We really have no idea what goes on inside other people’s heads. This would make a fun example showing “diversity of thought”, for your next workplace inclusion presentation (you’re welcome).

Let me know how you feel about Julius Caesar, or anything else that’s on your mind: [email protected]

Read on for why team coaching makes sense rather than focusing on individuals, and in Office Therapy we advise a keen new employee given a hard time by a jaded colleague.

There’s no ‘I’ in team: coaching takes a collective turn 🤝

Why coaching one leader rather than improving their ecosystem: the team? That idea makes sense although it’s still a niche one. Most people tend to buy — or be offered — individual coaching. But if employers want to get the best from every senior person in their organisation, and have departments working harmoniously rather than in competition, it may make sense to pay for whole teams to be coached.

“Team coaching is still pretty nascent. There is some great thinking and work being done but it is probably 15-20 years behind executive coaching,” says Duncan Lewin, whose coaching focuses on working with teams to improve performance. He alerted me to what I am calling the “no I in team” coaching concept. And it slightly blew my work-y mind 🤯.

Duncan, a former accountant and finance director turned executive coach, has been researching why financial services teams are especially dysfunctional. (If you are in an FS team plagued with “competition, distrust, greed, narcissism” — read his full report on LinkedIn. TL;DR: It’s not your fault, it’s the system.)

Duncan had previously spent years doing traditional teambuilding activities such as “team awaydays, but it was really superficial. We had a good day but nothing really moved on.” I think we’ve all been to awaydays that seem great in the moment — and then it all gets forgotten, except for what went down in the bar afterwards💃🕺. It takes a lot of time and group work to shift perspectives and make change stick.

During the course of his research, Duncan was surprised by how much internal competition there was between different teams inside businesses: “That is a facet [of work culture] that organisations need to get better at. How they manage those gaps between teams. Competition would happen even between very intelligent and very well-intentioned people.” By taking a step back, staff can see they should be co-operating, rather than competing 🏇🏻.

What’s Duncan’s advice to help any team leader effect immediate change? “Create some space . . . [teams] should be spending time to reflect. How does it feel to be part of this team? Give the team intentional reflective space together. People will say ‘we are too busy to do that’ — and then we end up with people not really communicating with each other, duplicating work, things getting lost.” Umm, guilty.

Ultimately, the sum of all the parts of a team should be greater than the individuals involved. Duncan calls that “alchemy” and when it works, it really is magical.

Got an idea for what makes teams work better — magically, even? Let us know: [email protected]

This week on the Working It podcast — and a request 👇🏽

We spend a huge amount of time communicating at work — by email, in person, and in meetings (real or virtual). But we spend far too little time thinking about how we get our messages across for maximum impact 📣.

Into this void comes Ros Atkins, BBC analysis editor and presenter of the brilliant explainer videos that are all over your social media feeds. He’s distilled everything he’s learned about clear communication into a new book, The Art of Explanation, and in this week’s Working It podcast he talks me through it. (It’s a concise episode, too — we just take 13 minutes of your time.)

*I’m teaming up with my wonderful colleague Jonathan Black — author of the ‘Dear Jonathan’ careers advice column — to answer all your workplace and career dilemmas, big and small, on the podcast. You can still email me for your Office Therapy, but now you can also send in voice notes, using this link. Just click through, record your question, and send it on.

 We may play your audio on the show — but you can be (otherwise) anonymous if you’d like🕵🏻‍♀️.

Office Therapy

The problem: I’m late 20s and recently joined a team growing a new line of business within an established company. Most people are great but one “old hand” has been frosty and overreacted alarmingly when we had a disagreement over a business decision. We are decades apart in age but at the same level of seniority. Should I confront them, tell my manager — or ignore?

Isabel’s advice: We’ve all had those career moments when we arrive as excited newbies, only to find cynical old-timers are ready to put us down at every opportunity. You need to be aware — and this applies to almost everything in life — that this other person is bringing their own life baggage to this situation. It’s them, not you.

Unless your colleague views work merely as a way to pay for the rest of their far more meaningful life (and I am guessing this isn’t the case), then they are going to be pretty peeved at your arrival. It’s a stark “note to self” that their own career hasn’t flourished 🥀.

I’d strongly advise the “ignore” route, unless their hostility escalates. If you have another colleague you can talk to — perhaps they had the same experience when they joined? — then do so.

Be super-polite to the rude colleague. Do not rise to their mean emails and snarky meeting interventions. Stay on that moral high ground. This will have the double benefit of making you look good — and it will really, really annoy them 😏.

Got a question, problem, or dilemma for Office Therapy? Think you have better advice for our readers? Send it to me: [email protected] or via a voice note. We anonymise everything. Your boss, colleagues or underlings will never know.

Five top stories from the world of work

1. Why don’t people leave bad jobs? At the bottom end of the UK labour market there is too little movement as people are worried about losing benefits and entitlements — and the next job might be worse. Sarah O’Connor explains the problem.

2. How shrinking budgets, Covid and AI shook up life in consulting: A fascinating snapshot of life as a consultant and the pressures facing a formerly cash-rich industry. Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson, Silin Chen and Anjli Raval sift through responses from more than 300 FT readers in a fascinating deep-dive.

3. Sex, lies and magical thinking about CEO behaviour: After Bernard Looney left BP last week, having failed to fully disclose his past relationships with staff at the company, Brooke Masters examines questions around CEO behaviour — how much of their personal life does the board need to know?

4. ‘When I say I’m deaf, people panic’: For deaf awareness month, HTSI magazine interviews creatives and sports people with hearing loss, in an insightful article with beautiful photography by Lily Bertrand-Webb, who has a cochlear implant.

5. Look out when the B-team is left in charge: As summer ends, Pilita Clark examines the perils of organisations having long periods where the deputies are running the show.

One more thing . . . 

Investigative stories covering sexual abuse allegations inside institutions follow the same grim playbook: victims brave enough to come forward will hit a wall of silence and dismissal, designed to protect both the reputation of the institution, and that of the powerful man or men accused of wrongdoing.

“Protecting a Predator” follows exactly this course. This meticulously reported joint Pro Publica/The Information story outlines what happened at Columbia University, where obstetrician Dr Robert Hadden sexually abused hundreds, and probably thousands, of patients, over decades. He’s now in jail. Guess what? “The university’s own records show that women repeatedly tried to warn doctors and staff about Hadden.”

A word from the Working It community

Something different this week: I wanted to share extracts from an email from Working It reader Tetiana Pleshivtseva, a comms professional. Tetiana is a refugee from the war in Ukraine, and wants to highlight the fact that “after many years of ongoing corporate promises of inclusivity, few workplaces are yet ready to tolerate people with trauma, let alone those who are traumatised by war”.

Tetiana says she is hearing of an increasing number of Ukrainians losing their jobs abroad because of uncertain immigration status, or because their trauma and distress is unwelcome in workplaces — colleagues just don’t want to see it or be reminded that the war is ongoing. And she gives an insight into what millions of Ukrainians are dealing with at work every day.

“Invisible to others, our workday may start with the news of our home city being under shelling and end with the news that our house is gone or that a friend was killed. In most cases, our colleagues will notice nothing. We catch quick breaths in between work calls and cry, and we may not be always camera-ready and joyful as expected, but regardless, we do our work well because that’s how we always did and there’s no other way. Many are afraid to mention any of their experiences at work out of fear of losing a job, and this painful fissure is only getting deeper and wider.”

Do follow Tetiana on LinkedIn. And let us know your thoughts on her experience. How can workplaces continue to support Ukrainian staff? Email: [email protected].