Team Morale

Team morale is closely related to team spirit discussed earlier. But where team spirit is about creating a cult of special-ness for your team, team morale is about being able to manage the intensity of the cult. You need to be in a position to control it like a tap, today more, tomorrow less.

You begin by identifying the “neutral” position. This will tend to depend on the individual personalities within your team and needs to be achieved through observation, not manipulation. Then you need to try out the controls, in the same way as you need to learn to drive a car.

“Up” is achieved by allowing them to persecute you a little more. Let them win a few more arguments than normal, or perhaps ridicule a you little more in public than the you would normally permit. Better still, create some artificial issues in which you take a patently ridiculous position, ideally one which can be painted as a “management view”, and let them talk you out of it. Then admit you were wrong. (If your organisation practices 360-degree appraisals or some relative of it, practice “up” before assessment time.)

“Down” is achieved by transference. All teams have one or more individuals who are either generally resented as more incompetent or obnoxious than the rest, or alternatively have individuals who are under stress as a consequence of their unfortunate home lives and therefore behave somewhat eccentrically at work, particularly if you can put them under pressure. Most of the time, these individuals serve a purpose within the team for letting off steam and/or holier-than-thou-ism, in a harmless sort of way.

However it is straightforward to encourage it to turn into something a little more sinister, by supporting the persecution of such individuals behind their backs. As it contains a lower element of risk than persecuting the boss, staff will tend to prefer it to persecuting you. Persecution can soon be turned into resentment. And from there, they are no longer resenting you so much, as they will have transferred a part of their quotient of resentment on to their alternative victims. It requires a little practice to get this right, since it can’t be overdone without becoming illegal or bullying. Make sure you try it out before you really need it, since the last thing you want at a difficult moment persuading people to take on tasks against their will is the distraction of a harassment case.

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Management, leadership or morale?

So, you need to find a way of causing your team to produce some minimum basic output?
 

The two styles of achieving this are known as management and leadership. The latter is usually considered to be better, but for entirely the wrong reasons. Leadership is a better style because it takes less time. Remember all this is mostly about getting unproductive necessities, such as work, done. You do not want to invest your precious time in it.

Consider for a moment. Management requires you to proactively monitor people and their progress, coach them, appraise them, hold regular review meetings of various kinds, track statistics, write reports etc etc etc. Time-consuming. Tedious. Missing the point (namely you). Leadership ensures that your people will do all this for you. If there is any management needed, that’s what Extension staff are for.

Large tomes have been written on the subject of leadership. They all boil down to the same thing: leadership means getting people to do what they want to do anyway. Unsurprisingly this is not too difficult.

Most people have an expectation that in the workplace they do not have complete freedom of choice about their activities. They can see a number of possible activities which they might be required to carry out. Some of them are clearly productive and sensible, occasionally even desirable. Many others are obviously pointless or unpleasant. Your task as a leader is simply to sell the ones you want carried out as productive, sensible or desirable, whilst painting all others as unattractive.  Then you place your staff in a position where they can select their work. Wonder of wonders, they will shy away from the unattractive tasks. If they should stray too far, and start inventing attractive tasks of their own which do not fit in with your plans, you can fall back on their expectation of not having complete freedom of choice. Naturally they then revert to the most attractive of those left, which is what you wanted them to do in the first place.

Some tasks are naturally attractive. Others may need a little spinning first. Tasks become attractive if they are “responsible”, “important to the wider business”, “strategic”, “developing”, “a logical career development step”, “only you have the range of capabilities necessary to carry this through”, “have high visibility with the Board”, “will increase your profile”, “major” and so on. Choose a suitable line, and remember to stick consistently with it. As before, avoid measurable targets in these areas so that the individuals strive to exceed their own expectations, since no one else’s are available.

Occasionally, you will come across a necessary task which is not susceptible to such spin. These are of course more difficult. Happily you still do not have to resort to management, you can still get by with just leadership, but the process is more complex.

There is little choice in this situation but to resort to telling people what to do, at least at a high level. They will inevitably resent this, since they are no longer choosing their activity through free will. This in turn will project itself into resentment against you. Once you are resented, you are no longer a leader. You become a mere manager. At this point, you need team morale to see you through.

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Inferior staff

Inferior staff are what you were before you were promoted to be the team boss. You can do their jobs better than them, that’s one of the ways you got promoted.

Happily, the containment strategy for Inferior staff is a much more straightforward task than containing Extension staff. There are four reasons for this.

First of all, you will have created a team spirit. This will usually be based on the peculiarities of the Inferior staff, as these will generally be the bulk of your staff. So they will already be, to some extent anyway, “bought in” to you and what you are trying to achieve on the surface.

Secondly, you can do their jobs. This means you know what they are up to, and they are going to find it difficult to slip anything past you that you won’t find out about, probably beforehand.

Thirdly, one of them is probably someone who was one of your close peers not long ago. He or she will tend to want to retain that special relationship with you, and part of his/her strategy for doing so will be to tell you what is going on. This is called “keeping you in the loop”, not “sneaking to the boss”, by the way. The street-credibility of the Inferior in question is best maintained by referring to it as “keeping the boss’s feet on the ground before he/she disappears into the management ivory tower”.

Fourthly, they all believe they were better than you, are still better than you, and therefore they will be next in line for your job after your next promotion. As it is clear that you are likely to have considerable say in who gets promoted under you as your replacement, they will tend to want to stay in line and better still, to emulate you.

All of these considerations will tend to ensure that Inferior staff contain themselves, with little effort on your part. If they ever step off-message, you will know about it immediately, if not before, and be able to address it quickly with minimum damage in any case.

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Extension staff

Extensions exist to replicate you, and to actually do what the outside world perceives as your work. As such they are important. They will represent you in meetings, they will write your output, your reputation is directly in their hands.

The key containment strategy to apply to extension staff is relatively complex, and known as Censorship.

 

Usually, Extension staff are relatively high calibre individuals with significant skills and initiative, with whom a “do this do that” management style is unthinkable. In fact, you want them to be so. They are going to do your work for you, after all, so you need quality individuals.

To control such individuals, you need religion. Just as the company as a whole will have its full-time gods (e.g. cost control) or temporary gods (e.g. Quality Assurance Teams), you need to create a department or team god, for your Extension staff to worship. Obviously you can’t tell them that the team god is really yourself, so a proxy is needed. This is usually called “team spirit” and set up with care will neatly fill the role of Holy Ghost for you, watching their every move even when your back is turned.

There are a number of ways to create a team spirit, but the simplest and most effective is normally to rely on people’s need to feel “special”. Find a few adjectives which describe how your unit is, or could be, slightly different from those around it. “Free thinking and intellectual”, “non-politically correct”, “disciplined and efficient”, “calm and professional” for example. Amend or exploit the working environment just slightly to reinforce these. This is usually possible by changing desk layouts, relaxing or tightening flexi-working arrangements, bringing in a plant or two, adding a sofa, whatever. Keep reinforcing these.

Having established that the unit is special, you need to work on these individuals to feel like the elite, the high priests of this specialism. Again the need to feel special which exists in almost everyone, probably coupled with the urge to know limited-access information or to be trusted, gives you an easy route into this. Then, as with all cults, you initiate them into the secret rites or knowledge, which you call the Hidden Agenda.

The Hidden Agenda is what your team is “really” trying to achieve. Of course it is actually trying to achieve your personal glory, but you can dress that up. How? By identifying your success with the Hidden Agenda, and by simultaneously identifying the success of the Extension Staff with the Hidden Agenda.

This is not so difficult in practice. For example, you perceive you will gain credit or importance if Project X is successful. How do you represent this in terms of the Hidden Agenda? “Project X will allow us to grow the team, creating management development opportunities for all of you”. Project Y is not good news: “Project Y is in danger of relocating our unit to the northern office”. This latter may of course be too cynical for some Extension staff. In which case you need a more “corporate” opinion: “although Project Y looks on the surface like it improves efficiency and reduces costs, in practice it is bound to reduce customer service and consequently drive down sales in the longer term. I really think it is our duty to try and get it stopped before it does real damage to the company”.

Once you have set this up, Extension staff will act as Censors on your behalf, promoting your agenda because they perceive it as their agenda. Better still, they will develop the team spirit themselves, and the team or department as a whole will tend to drift towards your agenda, even if they don’t realise they are doing it.

 

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