KASUS WEEK 12 : KP B (KURBA – 2 sks)

How to Manage an Unmanageable Team

Dory is the corporate communications manager for a biotechnology company, where
she inherited a wildly dysfunctional team. They’re particularly bad in staff meetings, but
they’re also too unruly to even hold a simple check-in meeting. They commandeer discussions
by questioning every move Dory makes. And outside of meetings they generally need a lot of
handholding to keep them on task.
Dory’s journey from struggling to thriving took many months. She decided to make their
meetings the focal point for change. In her words, “I have to meet with them at least three times
per week as a team plus one-on-ones. Why not make meetings the lever to change the team?”
Dory was to concentrate on three big skills for improving her team performance:
Self-awareness and regulation, focus on the right things in the right way and cultivate goodwill
within the team and with stakeholders
Her goal was to get her team to collaborate with energy, enthusiasm, and respect. She had
to help them understand that they were acting irresponsibly in three ways:
1. Playing the blame game. Individuals came to her and told stories about how someone
else was to blame for the breakdowns or the broken promises.
2. Taking their negative emotions out on each other. They waited for meetings to have
emotional outbursts of anger, criticism, and defensiveness.
3. Letting their emotions—not facts—dictate decisions.
Dory told me that this was the hardest thing she had to do in her career: to confront her team’s
unacceptable behavior and end it. She said,
“I’d rather brush my teeth with dirt than get tough with people. But it was that or put up with
their dysfunctional behavior.”
The highest leverage action that Dory could take was to build an agreement about how the team
was going to act towards each other in the future. She started with her own “Rules of
Engagement,” a set of acceptable interpersonal norms.
Rules of Engagement
Here are the Rules that Dory came up with and proposed:
 Accept responsibility for your own actions and reactions.
 Look for how you might have been involved when something goes wrong. What you
could have done to prevent the breakdown?
 Give positive feedback as often as you can. Here’s the formula: offer four kinds of
acknowledgments for every criticism.
 Come to the team with solutions, not complaints.
 Step back from your emotional responses. Try to achieve a neutral state before opening
your mouth.
No one was thrilled by the Rules of Engagement and there was plenty of pushback.
Dory decided to ask for a provisional period to test out the efficacy of the ground rules. “Let’s
run an experiment for one month.
She also suggested that they implement them by setting the agenda to include two new items:
1. At the start of each meeting, give each other positive feedback. Express appreciation for
how others helped us this week or note what they did well for the department.
2. At the end of the meeting, review the ground rules and evaluate how we did during
the meeting. What did we do well? What could we improve upon at the next meeting?
Dory does some coaching. The specific focus for coaching initially was to train her staff to know
how to “self-regulate.”
3 Steps to Self-Regulation
You might try these yourself over this next month.
How to self-regulate:
1. Imagine that you have an internal observer who can watch your responses and reactions.
Notice when you are having an emotional response to things in your environment. For
example: notice and put a name to frustration before it boils over.
2. Use your internal observer in important situations. Practice in meetings or one-on-
ones. Be as objective as possible.
3. Stop putting your reactions out in the public eye. Hold them inside until you are sure
that they are not going to be detrimental to your relationships or work.
Follow Up
Two months later Dory called me to discuss the results of the ground rules on the team.
“It hasn’t been easy, but there was a turning point last week. At first the team was stuck in the
same old habits of behavior. I found myself reminding them a hundred times during meetings of
what we had agreed to but often too little impact.
And then, about a week ago, two team members began to take over my role of the team
conscience. They were reminding others of the agreements with much better success than me.
It seemed that was a real change moment. Instead of me being the leader the leadership for the
change was becoming a group thing. It has really accelerated since then. I rarely have to be the
enforcer now. The team is regulating itself!”
Pertanyaan :
1. Apa permasalahan utama yang dihadapi Dory dalam tim kerjanya?
2. “I have to meet with them at least three times per week as a team plus one-on-ones”
merupakan salah satu cara yang ditempuh Dory untuk mengatasi permasalahan timnya.
Apakah car aini efektif menurut saudara? Jelaskan!
3. Apakah cara Dory memdapatkan antusias, energi dan respek dari tim nya sudah tepat?
Beri argumentasi saudara!
4. Cara Dory mengkonfrontasikan perilaku anggotanya yang tidak dapat diterima adalah
dengan membuat rules of engagement. Menurut saudara , efektifkah cara ini?
5. Menurut saudara apakah cara Dory merubah dysfunctional team menjadi functional team
dengan self-regulation sudah efektif? Beri argumentasi saudara!
6. Apakah cara yang Doty lakukan pada kasus di atas juga akan berhasil bila diterapkan di
perusahaan di Indonesia? Jelaskan!