Interaction Agreement

When working with a new team or even joining a new team, it can be useful to get some sort of agreement in place regarding how team members choose to interact and engage with eachother.

The value of this is the following:

• Create common ground.
• Have an objective reference to point to when you experience that the agreement is being violated.
• Create transparency of what is important to the team.
• Stimulate open communication and help develop the team’s unique way of communication (communication dynamic).

Conflict

When trying to get to some sort of basic agreement in place, conflict can easily get in the way. What we would like to do, is to call a ‘ceasefire’ long enough to try to de-escalate the conflict and restore a point of reference of how we choose to interact with each other. Often in teams, everyone has good intentions. If this is not the case we have a whole different set of challenges.

Levels of Conflict by Speed Lease

The model presented by Speed Lease can help you gain some quick insight into the level of conflict in the team. A very simplified view of the model is presented below. Although there are 6 levels to this model, I believe once the conflict escalated beyond level 3, the exercises mentioned in this article would not be that helpful in de-escalating the conflict.

Level 1: Problem to solve

• Healthy tension in the team. Helpful for problem solving and collaboration.
• Different opinions and misunderstandings, minor conflicts lead to constructive discussions.

Level 2: Disagreement

• Self-protection becomes a point of focus.
• Members start distancing themselves from each other in order to be ‘OK’.
• Team members prepare themselves for a compromise they believe will come.
• Words move from specific to general.
• Facts play second fiddle to interpretations and create confusion about what’s really happening.

Level 3: Contest

• The aim is to win.
• Clear ‘us’ and ‘them’ focus.
• Conflicts compound as previous conflicts stay unresolved (issues cluster together).
• Fertile ground from which misunderstandings and power politics arise.
• People begin to align themselves with one side or the other.
• Emotions become tools used to “win” supporters for one’s position.
• They make overgeneralizations: ”You never listen to what I have to say.”
• Start seeing the each other as the ‘enemy’.

Exercise

The following exercise can help in de-escalating the conflict and helping the team call a temporary ceasefire in order to establish some common ground and shared understanding.

• Ask team members to sit in a relaxed position.
• Ask them to picture a situation that really upset them in the past while they were interacting in the team or a team.
• Each member should then write down a summary, word or make a drawing that represents the experience for him.
• After writing the sticky, ask them to close their eyes and visualise the situation. The environment is very important for this. Make sure that you find yourself in a quiet place where everyone can relax.
• Ask the team members to embrace and experience the emotions associated with the experience and not shy away from what they feel.
• As they focus on the experience, instruct them to symbolically tear up the sticky.

In the past, this exercise worked successfully for me. I hope it does the same for you and your teams.

The agreement

In this section I will help you guide a team through a process of understanding each other better and making clear how each team member would like to be interacted with.

The question is, how?

This is where you need to get a bit creative by telling a story. The aim of telling the story is to engage the team members with an experience that is separate from what they are currently experiencing in the team. In order to share something about themselves, it is important for them to first do some self-reflection.

The exercise contains the following steps:

• Share a story about yourself that shows vulnerability and allows the team members to associate with you.
• Help them visualise a story of their own to stimulate some self-reflection.
• Ask some probing questions.

Your story

As an example, I used the following story to engage the team.

In South Africa, I used to go to a lot of hunting trips with my family. When thinking back on this I have very fond memories. I remember the comfort of being together. We used to sit around the campfire. I can almost smell the smoke and the smell of braaivleis on the fire.

I miss taking safari rides with them and sharing the joy of seeing all sorts of exotic animals. If I think back on this time, I realise how unique and how special this was.

This story is a VERY abbreviated version. What is important is to take your team on a journey that is very personal and relevant to yourself and contains positive interactions that you had with friends or family.

Their story

Ask your team members to visualise an experience that they shared with loved ones or friends which was very pleasant and enjoyable. The story above can serve as a guideline.

You can ask the following questions to help facilitate the process:

• Remember the environment where you found yourself.
• Picture the faces of your friends or family around you.
• Picture the delicious food.
• Can you recall the smell?
• Remember what you felt as you enjoyed their presence.
• Think about what it is that you miss when you’re not with them.

Exercise

Ask the following question while encouraging the members to keep the above mentioned experience in mind :

• How would you like people to interact with you, engage with you, speak to you? (3 stickies)

Let all the team members put up their stickies on a central board where everyone can see all of them.

Ask the following question:

• Considering your team, what do you see as a healthy way to interact with them? (3 stickies)

Although the questions might seem similar, it is constructed in such a way as to help the team members project what they would like to experience on to what they would like to see in the team.

It will also challenge existing perspectives that they might have regarding how a team is expected to interact in a ‘business’ environment.

Again, let all the team members put up their stickies on a central board where everyone can see all of them. You should now have a board containing a total of 30 stickies if you assume a team of 5 members.

To round off the exercise do the following:

• Let each team member describe his stickies in the group.
• Group stickies based on commonalities.
• Decide on the 5 most important outcomes of the team.
• These 5 outcomes, constitute your agreement.

The outcome

The outcome of this session should be an agreement clarifying and solidifying the way that team members interact with each other. The exercise is very much focussed on eliciting an emotive response but can also be adapted to help create a working agreement which can include tools and processes.

Example outcomes

Some common terms that are usually included in agreements like these are:

Conclusion

By establishing this basic agreement, you can quickly gain some momentum in a team. In the teams where I did this, they quickly became more open, comfortable and accessible to each other. If the relationships within the team thrive, it will be evident in the happiness and productivity of the team.