How Self-Reflection Can Help Your Team

Your team exists to achieve a mission. Hopefully, everyone on the team is clear and aligned with one another on what that mission is. And your team has a secondary mission, intricately interconnected with the first: to make itself the best team possible.

What percentage of time is your team working on itself—having conversations about how it wants to operate and how the individuals on the team want to treat each other?

I was talking to a friend the other day who is deeply involved in a startup team. There have been some interpersonal breakdowns in trust lately. From talking to this person, I got the impression that the team had never had a conversation about what kind of team it wants to be. It had only ever talked about the product it was trying to bring to market and ways to do that. Everything about how the team members worked together had organically evolved and remained implicit.

That had worked ok until this point, but now that there was a tough conversation potentially on the horizon, and there was no foundation upon which to have that conversation as a group. One-on-one and side conversations were easier, but to get the whole team together and address the issue head-on seemed impossible.

It's easier for a team to begin the process of self-reflection before a conflict arises. Mining for potential misalignments and articulating values is important team work.

This self-reflection can happen at regular team meetings simply through the process of "checking out," which means going around the room at the end of a meeting and hearing each team member articulate what they thought of the meeting. It can also take place at semi-annual offsites dedicated to the team’s learning and development.

Self-reflection should be occurring at both scales, really. It should be part of the day-to-day so that it becomes normal and easy to talk about ways the team can be better. It should be part of the bigger-picture conversations because it is that important. This is how the best collective intelligence gets harnessed for not only the team’s mission, but also team and individual well-being. Individuals will, if given the forum, speak up and say what they need from their teams. And the team will be best for it.