It has been nearly 6 months, but the newsletter is back.
I am revising the newsletter’s focus a bit to make it more practical and useful for folks, but still keeping the philosophical edge. Please let me know what you think. This will be back to coming out once a week on Fridays.
I recently read an essay by a seasoned manager about the need to get rid of bad potatoes. He started with a joke:
I was out to dinner at a nice restaurant, and something wasn’t right. I called the waitress over and said, “This potato is bad!”
The waitress picked up the potato, smacked it with the fork, and put it back on the plate. Then she said, “If that potato causes any more trouble, just let me know.”
The moment this turned to talking about teams, it got ugly. The moral of the story was that you have some bad potatoes on your team, and the sooner you deal with them, the better. And that the mistake of the waitress was in treating the bad potato as anything other than what it was, a vegetable, and vegetables are incapable of change.
The comparison to vegetables is insidious, but it points to something that many in the business world believe: if you have a team that is underperforming, the issue is some bad potatoes, some people that will never change, and, if you just remove them, the team will function better.
By seeing the problem as an individual, the solution also becomes individual. However, the real challenge is that the problem isn’t individual; it is relational. And as a manager who believes the solution lies in the individual, you will never be able to solve the real relational problem.
If this is so wrong, why is it the dominant view?
This view is comfortable; it allows you to avoid seeing yourself in the problems you are creating. When you do blame yourself, you often say things like I should have removed that person sooner. You aren’t acknowledging that the issue was as much with you and the team as with the individual. But by focusing on the individual as a problem, you get something you can do, something you can solve. By creating a scapegoat for the performance, there is a person who can be removed to improve things. And sometimes it works: the fear of firing someone can get people to try to up their game (at least in the short term), but eventually the issues will return, as fearful employees tend not to be as committed in the long term. And those actions become business, and if you squint hard enough, it looks like progress. At the end of the day, you still get to be in charge, avoid blame, and feel like you are fixing it.
What about that person who was let go, and suddenly everything got better?
I was recently talking to an old colleague who shared a story about how, when a toxic person joined their team, what had been good quickly went bad. And it got me thinking, yes, a disruptive person can disrupt a well-functioning team. But of course, there is a question of how well that team was functioning. A strong and healthy collective can metabolize disruptive behavior either by integrating it, redirecting it, or establishing boundaries around it. But this team couldn’t. The new team member exposed what was already inherent in the team: they functioned well as individuals but not really as a collective.
What this colleague didn’t realize was that the team was also responsible for this person’s disruption.
And so, while it seemed like things improved when the person was removed, what it really did was change the relational dynamic. The team learned they’re vulnerable, learned to police themselves, and learned what happens when you become marked as the problem. That’s not fixing weakness; that’s installing fear as a management technology. They saw a disruptive influence removed, but now they are waiting for another shoe to drop.
Ok, but how do I attend to relational dynamics?
We are so used to focusing on the individual that it can seem strange to focus on the relational dynamic. Let’s use the example my colleague described to look at this at three levels:
First level:
- How does the team’s interaction pattern shift when this person is present vs absent?
- Who speaks/doesn’t speak around them?
- How do people react to the disruption?
In our example, at the first level, the team was always quiet, but it became even quieter around this person. When the person lashed out or spoke, people drifted into their own work. The team started gossiping among themselves and complaining about their manager for not taking action.
Second level:
- What role/function does this person’s “problem” serve for the team?
- What gap in the collective does their behavior fill or expose?
- What antagonism or conflict were they slotted into when they arrived?
This is where things get interesting. The team was always quiet, and there was a void within it. This space allowed someone with certain disruptive tendencies to become disruptive, and as people grew quieter and more reserved, more space opened up. It revealed that the group was not cohesive and couldn’t handle collective norm-related challenges.
Third level:
- How does the organization require certain people to fail to maintain its structure?
- What antagonisms are playing out?
- What ideology is at play?
The team looked to the manager to solve the problem, abdicating their own responsibility to the manager, and the ideological belief that the manager could solve the structural and relational issue individually was also the problem. It also neglected the realization that the manager’s quiet and conflict-averse approach was what the team had enjoyed and promoted, and was part of that overarching issue.
Finally, the organization saw the individual as a “bad potato,” which prevented the issue from fostering positive growth for the team and instead deepened their patterns. By treating employees as “bad potatoes,” the organization views them as interchangeable parts in a machine, not as complex social individuals with needs working within a context. This benefits the organization by aligning with its use of firings and layoffs to address economic, organizational, and structural issues. Changing structural issues might mean loss of their own power.
Seeing yourself in the problem
Now here is the hard part. You are one of many forces shaping team dynamics. This means you are complicit in whatever is happening within the team, even in things that appear to be at the individual level. And you can’t entirely shift those dynamics on your own by simply changing your approach or removing problematic team members.
But there is good news: You can help the team see the dynamics you are collectively creating. This requires vulnerability from both you and the team members to see your own role in it. You can change the questions you ask and the approach you take to see the team as the level to solve at, instead of the individual. You can’t fix it alone, but you can attend to it together.