Getting your team on the balcony
Does your team spend enough time "on the balcony"? Photo by Alexander Popov on Unsplash
In their book, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership, Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, Marty Linsky state that:
“To diagnose a system or yourself while in the midst of action requires the ability to achieve some distance from those on-the-ground events. We use the metaphor of “getting on the balcony” above the “dance floor” to depict what it means to gain the distanced perspective you need to see what is really happening.”
One of the main reasons that teams don’t get time to reflect and review with perspective is the same as the reason they need to. They are busy. A team’s capacity – more than its skills or ability to work together – is often the limiting factor for its performance. This means that there is limited time available and the idea of stopping to reflect on how the team is performing seems like a luxury that they can’t afford.
Another reason is that when teams do carve out the time to stop, they often don’t have a clear sense of what they are hoping to achieve through that time. It doesn’t feel like real and valuable work. Hence, they will continue being busy on the dancefloor instead of gaining the perspective from the balcony that can guide better decisions and actions for the team. As such, the reflective time seems ineffective and makes future attempts at reflection harder to get into the calendar.
In a workshop with a leadership team recently, one participant suggested that her team was "addicted to the dancefloor". Her assessment seemed to resonate within the team - and that's unsurprising. It's an easy pattern to fall into. It's also a pattern which holds a lot of teams back from being productive instead of just busy.
Here are a couple of questions for you to consider this week:
Might your team be addicted to the dancefloor?
Does your team spend enough time "on the balcony"?
How can you make reflection a more regular and valuable part of how your teams operate?