I had an interesting conversation with one of my colleagues the other day. He came to me and asked a rather simple question but little did I know it would transform into an internal journey of evaluating how I’ve changed my perspective on the working team environment. To my surprise, he asked with a confident tone, almost certainly convinced of his ideas, a question I can shortly paraphrase: “How can I help this team to be more productive?” “Our colleagues seem not to be very engaged because they cannot take full ownership of the problems we face”, he added. So easy to state as a question. Nonetheless, the answer got entangled with my internal reality very quickly. Inside my head, many warnings and thoughts voraciously spun towards my mouth, willing to give a quick answer. It was hard, but I had to bite my tongue and hold them a bit. I’ve made an effort to get back to him and focus my attention on his concerns.

After much internal silence, the willingness to answer transformed into curiosity. I had numerous questions hopping one after the other in no particular order but with a clear intention: to try and understand what he meant by "helping the team?” I could not avoid certain inner chats asking myself a couple of questions: What makes you think people are not fully engaged? What have you noticed? Why is it that important for you to help the team? And what makes you believe the team is not productive? I can observe that he has the intention to help his colleagues and improve the team's productivity. Still, I would need to clearly find where he is coming from in his request and if data support his underlying premises because we are at the risk of starting an intervention on the team based on beliefs and not actual data or feedback.

I asked a few more questions and took mental note of his desire from his impressions. It seemed to me, at that point, that he sees there is room to improve the team's productivity, but I would need to check with the rest of the team to ascertain their points of view on this topic. After our meeting, I took a few days to let this information sink in to reflect on it. All this time, something bothered me about his request, and I could not stop thinking about it. A few days later, it was a rather cold morning when I woke up from confusion to a realisation: I would need to check his assumptions first. He may be assuming something that I no longer believe in, and I could not wrap myself around his request anymore. I noticed the question, “how can I help the team be more productive?” may be assuming, for example, that the team is not productive without data backing it up. He might have also assumed that he could help people be more productive by merely realising their lack of productivity (Just noticing something gives me the knowledge to change it for good). The most alienating of this belief I could identify dangerously lurked in the notion that I know better than my colleagues. Meanwhile, I'm not aware if these are his actual beliefs. But I'm fully aware I used to have those beliefs, and I saw how operating under those beliefs hurt my colleagues and me rather than help things move forward.

Luckily, I discarded those beliefs a few years back. I formed two teams to deliver three projects about two years ago and noticed how the change in my belief system enhanced my team management ability resulting in great team success. Unfortunately, I see how beliefs like those I held before could still be found among my team members, and I know the consequences of those beliefs running the show if not discussed openly. I’ve noticed that I’ve come to terms with the convictions that: Managing a team is helping people to achieve goals, productivity is a personal effort, my colleagues are fully responsible for their performance, observation is enough to understand what happens in a team, and I know what to do to help people to get better at their work.

I guess I inherited those beliefs from my previous experience as an individual contributor based on my interaction with other teams. Fair enough, I indulged in these ideas as they are not uncommon in the industry. In spite of that, they are not beliefs I can hold on to after realising the practicalities of being responsible for a team. Just a few years of being responsible for a team and formal coaching helped me to see the role from a completely different point of view. As a team manager, I've realised that my ultimate goal is to help the team succeed, but that’s not my actual job.