Say Goodbye to These 5 Harmful Team Habits

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Because the harmful behaviors your team tolerates become the standard.

The new year is the perfect time for your team to reflect on their habits and behaviors – particularly those that are overlooked. Small slips, often dismissed as ‘harmless,’ gradually erode trust, collaboration, and productivity until it becomes too late.

As a leadership coach and trainer I frequently witness or hear about how minor misdeeds become normalized and tolerated. Whether it's the CEO's regular tardiness to meetings or a top performer consistently multitasking during a call, bad habits send the wrong message to team players.

Here’s how to replace to these harmful team habits with better habits. Remember, If you change your habits, you'll change your results.

1. Arriving Late to Meetings

As a former CEO juggling back-to-back meetings, arriving a few minutes late seemed like a small, often-unavoidable concession. However, over time, I realized I was sending the wrong message to my team.

We often dismiss the importance of punctuality because it feels uncool, unlike flexibility. However, showing up on time has nothing to do with rigidity but with productivity – and respect.

Research highlights the significant consequences of starting meetings late. A study in the Journal of Organizational Behavior found that even a 10-minute delay can decrease meeting effectiveness by 33%, substantially reducing the quality of ideas and resulting in more interruptions and side conversations. Furthermore, it diminishes participants' perceived meeting satisfaction and effectiveness.

Even worse, normalizing arriving late indirectly punishes those who always show up on time. They must wait until everyone arrives, often repeating conversations so everyone is up to speed. As a result, the flow and focus of the meeting suffer.

This not only wastes the team’s valuable time but also fosters a culture of disrespect and inefficiency.

How to get rid of meeting tardiness:

Start on time, always: Be obsessive about starting meetings exactly on time, like Netflix does. Respecting punctuality sends a clear message about the value of everyone's time. Record the meeting so late arrivals can catch up later.

Have smaller meetings: Inviting only essential attendees improves the quality of the conversations, reducing meeting tardiness. The fewer the invitees, the smaller the chances of people arriving late.

Keep meetings short: Shift to shorter, more frequent meetings using 5-minute increments, ideally capping at 15 or 25 minutes. This change makes meetings more manageable and focused.

Add cushion time: Having more time than you need not only reduces the likelihood of tardiness but also allows for necessary breaks to recharge or prepare for the subsequent discussion. Also, if a meeting runs longer than expected, you can use the buffer time without arriving late to the next call.

Prioritize deep work: Promote and protect time blocks dedicated to focused, undisturbed work. Prioritizing deep work helps shift the emphasis from being perpetually "busy" to being meaningfully productive.

2. Always Seeking for Consensus

In order to be inclusive and consider all perspectives, many leaders fall into the trap of involving everyone in the decision-making. However, by trying to please all parties, they end up slowing the process and pleasing no one. What may seem like a democratic or open-minded approach is actually indecisiveness – leaders are afraid of looking unpopular or making the wrong call.

This approach promotes buy-in, allowing all voices to be heard and considered. It appears to be a fair practice that ensures no one feels left out or marginalized. In reality, seeking consensus is often a convenient and politically correct way to diffuse accountability across the team.

Peter Drucker believed that disagreement stimulated the imagination, leading to better solutions. Having options is crucial to avoid approving the first idea that comes to mind. Most importantly, consensus can result in poor decisions when subject matter expertise is neutralized by groupthink.

Consensus is not always wrong. It can be effective for simple, day-to-day decisions and is more effective in small team settings. However, most of the time, consensus is expensive. It can slow the process and crush creativity, prioritizing safety choices over small experiments.

Stop looking for consensus:

Decentralize decision-making: Delegate small-risk, day-to-day decisions to frontline employees. People closer to the problem, customers, or subject matter experts are better suited to make the right call. This approach speeds up decision making and promotes ownership and accountability.

Seek for advice, not votes: Consultative decision making is much more effective. Seek input from those affected by the decision or from subject matter experts. Clarify expectations: People are informing the decision, not making it.

Disagree and commit: Invite teammates to voice their differences rather than rush into alignment. However, a never-ending debate isn’t productive either. Once a decision is made, everyone must commit to its successful implementation, regardless of their previous viewpoints.

Is it safe to try? Most decisions are reversible. Rather than aiming for the perfect decision, consider it a prototype. What’s the Minimum Viable Decision (MVD)? Implement it, test it, and iterate.

Use consensus occasionally: Reserve it for getting everyone on board – such as for alignment – and speed is not an issue.

3. Multitasking During Team Meetings

Team members often feel pressured to handle multiple tasks simultaneously to keep up with their workload or respond promptly to every email or Slack notification. Multitasking is often worn as a badge of honor. However, research shows it impairs performance and communication, raising stress levels.

Moreover, it signals to teammates that they’re not worth our attention.

Contrary to popular belief, smart teams don’t multitask. Just because society has normalized it, that doesn’t mean it’s effective. Multi-tasking equals multi-nothing. When we try to be in too many places simultaneously, we end up nowhere.

Attention and focus precede quality results – multitasking is the illusion of doing too many things simultaneously without accomplishing anything. And the price you pay is steep.

A study by the University of Sussex found that multitasking decreases IQ scores, similar to if they had smoked marijuana or stayed up all night. While the cognitive impairment from multitasking is not temporary, it has lasting effects. MRI scans revealed multitaskers had less brain density in the region responsible for empathy and cognitive and emotional control.

When one team member multitasks, the entire team suffers. According to psychologist David Meyer, shifting between tasks can cost up to 40% of our productive time.

Say goodbye to multitasking:

Increase awareness: The first step in breaking a bad habit is becoming aware of it. Invite team members to reflect on how multitasking – individually and collectively – hinders performance and communication.

Educate team members: Share studies and resources on time management to increase awareness that multitasking is an illusion.

Ban multitasking: Make it official that your team does not welcome multitasking. Reward those who are focused and paying attention and call out those who don’t respect the norm.

Remove distractions: Set clear expectations and rules. For instance, establish 'no device' or 'single task' periods during critical team interactions or brainstorming sessions. Encourage team members to turn off notifications.

Revisit team priorities: Often, multitasking results from changing priorities that force people to be on top of everything. Focus on one task at a time versus trying to accomplish everything at once – and failing. Monitor workload to ensure a fair distribution among team members.

4. Avoiding Conflict and Disagreement

On the surface, a team that seems to operate without conflict might appear harmonious and efficient. However, beneath this calm facade often lies a culture of avoidance, where the reluctance to address issues piles up, increasing "conflict debt."

In The Good Fight, Liane Davey highlights the insidious nature of conflict debt. The longer a team avoids discussing an issue, the more this debt accumulates. Like financial debt, unresolved conflicts within a team can compound over time, leading to larger and more complex problems.

Conflict is the disagreement or difference of opinions between team members. While it might seem counterintuitive, embracing conflict is vital to building a healthy team.

The Conflict at Work research shows that 1 in 4 people think their managers handle conflict poorly or very poorly. The more they avoid conflict, the lower their job satisfaction.

Addressing conflict early is not only crucial but also less painful.

As Rian Thomas wrote, “Addressing conflict early on is most advantageous for individuals and organizations to address their disputes. This is because the heartache, anxiety, psychic pain and suffering, as well as the monetary costs associated with the dispute are still minimal.”

How to stop avoiding team conflict:

Redefine conflict: Start by reframing conflict as valuable data for learning and growth. When approached constructively, conflict strengthens team bonding and psychological safety.

Identify the root cause: Recognize what contributes to conflict debt within your team. Is it assuming negative intent, miscommunication, avoiding conversation, or not addressing issues in the open? Tackling the root cause will help prevent future issues from repeating themselves.

Track conflict debt: Develop a scale to assess the severity of the conflict and evaluate progress over time. You can create a simple heatmap like the fire danger forecast to identify potential threats and, hopefully, celebrate improving conditions.

Address the Stinky Fish: The ignored issues won’t go away – the longer they're ignored, the more they stink.

Be proactive: The best way to deal with conflict debt is to prevent it from happening in the first place. Encourage team members to discuss issues early on, no matter how small.

5. Rewarding an Always-On Mentality

Are we working more than ever? That depends on who you ask. In most countries, people work much less than in the past 150 years. However, Americans are an exception: They typically work 400 more hours per year, many between 10 pm and 6 am.

People are not just expected to do their jobs but to always be available.

Most teams reward those who respond to emails at midnight, take calls on weekends, and work well during formal office hours. It’s no surprise, then, that virtual presenteeism is on the rise. Employees work 67 extra minutes daily to convince their colleagues they’re hard-working.

The always-on mentality seems harmless. However, the expectation of being constantly available 

The always-on mentality seems harmless. However, the expectation of being constantly available and responsive is driving stress and mental exhaustion. 77% of employees have experienced burnout at their current job.

Being always on doesn’t mean performing well – on the contrary. While managers penalize employees who work fewer hours, research has found no evidence that working more equals increased productivity. A study by Stanford University discovered that productivity decreases sharply when we work more than 50 hours per week.

Switching off is not only good for personal health but also for business. A positive workplace culture and higher pay are better predictors of productivity than being always on. Taking a break and knowing when to switch off drives happiness and better results.

Bid farewell to an always-on culture:

Set Clear Boundaries: Encourage employees to set – and respect – availability hours, especially for remote or hybrid team members. Leadership should model this behavior by not sending emails or messages outside of agreed collaboration hours.

Focus on impact, not input: Shift the focus from hours worked to the quality and impact of the work. Recognize and reward efficiency and productivity, not just long hours.

Establish a response protocol: Define the expected frequency per medium to neutralize immediate response expectations. What’s an acceptable response time for an email or Slack messages? It also helps to have a line on your email signature that clarifies how often you check your email.

Share the pain: Remote jet lag is a big deal. People must always adapt to the ‘central office time,’ extending their workday. Share the pain by rotating time zones for meetings so every team member gets their turn to attend at regular hours.

Implement collective 'time off’: Some organizations have days when everyone simultaneously takes a mandatory break. This protects team members, as they’re all taking the same global day off.

The new year is a clean slate. So, why carry over harmful habits when you have the chance to work better?

To your greater success and fulfillment,

 

Peter Mclees, Leadership Coach, Trainer and Performance Consultant
SMART DEVELOPMENT

 

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