Impromptu Team Meeting in the Conference Room

Is venting starting to turn everyone too negative?

Bob the Engineer <very agitated>: “Geez, that project ‘critical path’ regroup meeting was a huge pain!”

Sally the Engineer <visibly frustrated>: “Yah, if only the project managers were listening to us all last month when we were telling them their schedule was ridiculous!  There was no way back then the work was going to get accomplished when their fancy project plans said it would and we told them!”

Joe the Engineer <rolling his eyes>: “How many times are we going to have to attend these silly ‘we knew were going off track a month ago but we did nothing so now we need to have a meeting to chat about why we are suddenly off course  …’”

Bob the Engineer <speaking over Jo>: “We are going to have these meetings as long as the PMs keep ignoring our work estimates.”

Sally the Engineer: “Yah, when will they ever learn?”

Groupthink is any easy trap to fall into.  Yet, in my opinion, fostering a team climate for which there is an opportunity for such venting provides benefit to the entire team.  With a team sense of shared success and shared pain, the team climate evolves to allow team members to be open with their teammates and their manager on problems, issues, challenges and successes with more candor.  The openness breeds more open communication and cooperation plus ultimately leads to high quality output in less time with problems surfacing and resolving earlier in the work processes before they become disasters.  Yet, left unchecked, this venting can take the team as a whole deeper into the short term comfort of the shared pain and away from the need to look at opportunities to avoid the situation that causes the pain in the first place.

It is time for someone to be a leader and jump in and pull the team back from the precipice of groupthink.

Boss/Engineer: “OK, OK, ok … we all know the PMs get themselves into this situation more often than seems warranted.  How about we brainstorm on some creative ways we can do things differently going forward so we don’t have to sit in these useless regroup meetings?”

As an Engineer, this is a great opportunity to demonstrate leadership skills in front of your boss with real credibility.  As a Manager, if no one on your team is stepping up and the level of negativity is rising, you may have to step in with similar comments to redirect your team to focus on positives before the negatives further spiral the team down a bad path.

Anyone have any perspectives to share on groupthink?  Anyone have a technique or example where groupthink was avoided or not avoided resulting in a bad situation getting worse?

1. Janis, Irving L. Victims of Groupthink. Boston. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1972, page 9.

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