Question

In order to have effective team meetings and effective team success, it is important to address the power and political behaviors of the team members and how to properly handle them. This is the job of the team leader. How can a leader properly manage the team's power and political behavior during team meetings as well as outside of those meetings?

Answer 1

For any team to be effective the leadership should be right. A right leader should always focus on ensuring that the team`s potential is maximized, be it for the current work or for the future ventures. It is a common occurrence that teams will have few members who have a tendency to go against the rules, speak up more in meetings and create a political bias in the team. In such cases, it is up to the manager to the manager to ensure such tendencies and identified at the initial stage itself and appropriate steps are taken to ensure such behavior is slowly eradicated.

If such cases do occur, manager can speak to such team members about the recent changes in the attitude and behavior to identify whether there is some latent issue due to which such scenarios rise. If there is no such issue, manager should have an honest open conversation with the team to ensure such issues are clearly tackled. It is possible that teams may not open up and speak up their issues but will discuss all things behind the manager`s back. In such cases, it is vital that the manger gives no room for such conversation by being a role model in terms of work ethics rather than a task master who micro manages.

Manager has to accept that no matter how much effort is put into it, there will always be some politics in the team. To ensure problems do not get too much out of control, it is essential that manager builds relationships with the team.

If in spite of open communication channels if the issue is still present, then manager should start taking strict actions against such members. Manager can talk to the employee along with HOD to ensure the consequences are properly understood. If in spite of such serious actions, issues continue to rise, it is always possible for the manager to speak to HR and move such employees to other teams.

This can be done during the routine day sessions. If during meetings, such issues arise, manager can take the discussion offline and speak about it alone with such employees. It is always wise to deal with off cases separately rather than address it in a big forum making the entire team uncomfortable. Outside meetings, having a one to one honest conversation and doing constant team building activities can help in reducing the office employee power and politics issue.