Leveraging Leadership

Addressing Team Turf Wars: Leadership Lessons for Chiefs of Staff

• Emily Sander • Season 1 • Episode 214

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This episode covers how a Chief of Staff can address two teams stuck in a blame game at a biotech startup. Emily shares examples like holding one-on-one meetings with managers and team members, presenting anonymized feedback, setting clear expectations for team behavior, and publicly reinforcing new team norms. He explains how to reset the group dynamic so everyone understands the new way forward and knows “pointing fingers” is no longer acceptable.


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Who Am I?

If we haven’t yet before - Hi👋 I’m Emily, Chief of Staff turned Executive Leadership Coach. After a thrilling ride up the corporate ladder, I’m focusing on what I love - working with people to realize their professional and personal goals. Through my videos here on this channel, books, podcast guest spots, and newsletter, I share new ideas and practical and tactical tools to help you be more productive and build the career and life you want. 

 

Time Stamps:

00:36 The Rigorous Interview Process
01:32 Scenario: Teams in Conflict
03:02 Initial Steps: One-on-One Meetings
03:45 Gathering and Reporting Data
04:40 Facilitating Understanding and Communication
08:48 Reiterating Departmental Changes
10:49 Setting New Team Expectations
20:44 Reinforcing the New Structure
26:01 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

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What do you do as chief of staff when two teams are playing the blame game and pointing fingers and you as chief of staff, are sent in to facilitate a way forward? This is the case with the chief of staff that I'm going back and forth with who is actually in the interview process for the role of chief of staff. This has, this is a, a biotech startup. This is a pretty thorough interview process that I'm quite impressed by. To be honest, most startups are, are moving fast and like just get someone in here and like maybe we'll spend some extra time.'cause it's an executive, but this process has been weeks, if not I think almost two months now and there's been. Virtual meetings on Zoom. There's been in-person meetings, multiple in-person meetings. It's been with the founder, it's been with the executive team, and it's even been with select members of the management team. That's impressive to me. a previous episode we had on here talked about how top performers and high achievers want a rigorous and selective interview process. So I think this is a great example of that happening here with just with this chief of staff. One item that's been coming up in this part of the interview process, she's pretty far along the interview process in final rounds, and they've given her an actual scenario that's happening in the company, which is, Hey, we have these two teams and they're not getting along. They're defensive, they're territorial, they're always pointing fingers. It's just like a blame game all the time. They're were some recent. Departmental changes. So structural changes that that ex exacerbated this basically. So that's the high level context of what she's walking into. They, they said, meet with the two managers as part of this interview process. Meet with the two managers of the two teams, and then give us your high level debrief notes from that. And they like that and they wanted more. And they said, okay, so now we want more information about how you would approach this for you to come in as chief of staff. So what would you do in your first 30 days with this particular issue? So talk to us more about what you would need in order to help solution this the best going forward. She and I were going back and forth, back and forth on ideas and different ways to structure and position the recommendation and go forward plan. I wanna share some highlights of those exchanges with you here because I know this is a common topic with aspiring chiefs of staff in the interview process, or with existing chiefs of staff who have two teams who are at loggerheads and can't find a way to move forward together. So here's some of the things that we went back and forth on, and you can pick up ones that resonate or are relevant to you. And then obviously discard anything else that isn't helpful So the first thing is she already had the one-on-ones with the managers. I think that's the first step. In this process, uh, fast follow would be having one-on-one meetings with individuals on the team. Now, if you're at a larger company, this might not be as feasible if there's like hundreds and hundreds of people on the team. You don't, might not have time, but if you're in a situation, in this case, there's um, couple dozen people, so it will take some time, but it's feasible to do so. Taking the time to meet individually with all the team members and really getting a sense of how they're perceiving the situation Let's dig into those and open those up a bit. So really getting some on the ground data points from people doing this day to day and the management team. From there, you can do an anonymized roll up report. So meaning what this is not is a blow by blow of like, well I spoke with Emily and she said this, this and this, and then Raul was like this, this and this. And then Sean was like, this, this, and this. It's not a play by play like that, it's here are the main themes that came out of all these conversations I just had. Here are the main. Patterns, and here's clearly a pain point. Every person said this over here and over here, like 90% of people were talking about the same situation, same scenario. They get really frustrated by. So those thematic pieces come up. You can do the report out to the leadership team. I would recommend that I would also do it to the managers and the teams themselves. I think this is important, and this is where you can frame this up in a way where the initial debrief of the findings from the report is not to do anything. It's not to assign blame or declare a winner. It is simply to understand the situation more fully at the end of the meeting than you did walking in at the beginning of the meeting. Another way to say that is if I know more about why the other team has that perception, don't have to agree with it necessarily, but I understand how they get there, and I didn't understand that before. That's a win. That's all we're doing in this meeting. You don't even have to participate in this meeting. You just sit there, team A and TB, and you listen, and you take in and you hear the report out and the anonymized rollup of all these conversations. That might be a next step. So you're not defending it, you're not saying Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But or like, no, no, no. In that situation, like, don't forget like you did this over here. No, no, no, no, no. We're not talking about. It might be a, i, I had a former colleague who was like, this is a shut your lips and learn meeting. Uh, I love that phrase. So it might be one of those, you might not use that phrase, or you might use that phrase where it's like, Hey, this is not where we say anything. I'm gonna talk and you're gonna listen. It might be one of those, but to better understand. So the goal of this meeting is just to understand more at the end of the meeting than you do right now. That could be the preface of the thing. Then subsequent meetings could be around. Okay. Now that you've had a little bit of time to digest that, maybe get people's thoughts or general reactions. Maybe you give them some prompts on some language to use though, where like, we're not going to, we're not gonna say you and point a finger'cause that just triggers people. But maybe talk about a situation or, when this type of thing happens that makes me feel like this. Or shared observation or just experience or a factual set of data. So, you know, if I receive a slack message that says this, this, and this in this tone, this is how I respond. This is how I, I receive that. You don't wanna linger there. You don't wanna spend a whole bunch of time there and get into like blow by blow, let's beat each other up and get all riled up about this thing. But you might need to hold space and leave room for that. And all of this should be under the umbrella of and in alignment to, we're trying to better understand. We're not trying to make people angry, we're not trying to defend ourselves. It's just simply a data point. So other folks can better understand. And maybe you kind of front run this with some folks and say, Hey, I think you had a really good example here. Would you mind sharing that in, in a, in a, in a way, you know, talk to them about what you're trying to do. And if they're like, yep, I can do that and not escalate things, then maybe you have one or two folks on team may and one or two folks on team B. And then if you wanna get like, really kind of, uh, executive therapist e on this, which sometimes you play as chief of staff, right? You're, you're a full chief of staff, you facilitate things and sometimes you gotta lean pretty hard on the wall of executive therapists, sometimes with your principal, sometimes with members of the executive team. And sometimes when you are facilitating and almost mediating to teams, so. You have folks say, here's an example of what's come up for me. Just so you better understand, you have some other folks say, here's an example of what happens to me, or how I feel when this happens. Just to better understand. And then you might have those folks reciprocate, meaning they say something like, I understand how, if I felt like no one was helping me and they had the information to help me, how that could be extremely frustrating and just acknowledge the other side's point of view. or I acknowledge that when, when this slack message goes out. And no response happens that could be taken as someone withholding information. Even if it's just like people are busy or there's multiple reasons I can understand. I acknowledge that one reason is'cause people have read that and choose not to reply. Something like that. The next thing I would move into is reiterating or reconfirming why the departmental changes happened. So if there was a big piece of the background here, a piece of context where, okay, this is kind of what precipitated this latest round or this latest spike of we're not getting along, then let's remind folks and maybe they didn't know for the first time. So tell folks why these changes went through, why leadership thought it was a good idea to make these org structure changes with these departments and teams. Putting that in the big picture of where we're trying to go. And you might have already said this to folks, or you might, you might feel like you've already said this to folks like Emily, I sent the fricking all company email newsflash. Not everyone reads your emails and not everyone reads your emails word for word. Also, some people might have been out that day, it accidentally went in their like junk folder or they deleted it really quick'cause they were going through emails to catch back up. You don't know, some people might not like to read long, long air, uh, emails and paragraphs. Maybe they like to hear information, like to have people tell them and have a discussion about, that's how they take in information best. So, you know, just putting it out there. If you feel like I already said this, they should know why this happened. They should know why this occurred. Maybe they should, but maybe they don't. And so you have to repeat it. So I would reiterate. Why the departmental changes went through. And again, some people can disagree with that. I don't, I I, I hear what you're saying, but we shouldn't have done that. But if they understand why it happened, and they're like, okay, I hate this, this is stupid, but I could see how they logic their way over to this departmental change. that's baseline what you're looking for. If it's a, oh, no, shoot, okay. I know she said something like that in her all hands email, but now that he's saying that again, no. Okay, I understand. Big, like, long term, long term. This makes sense. Okay, we're gonna grow and long term, we gotta set that up like this. That's the kind of thing you're looking for. Okay, next piece of this, which is the big piece like this, is this is the, the inflection point or the tipping point where you can, you can change the dynamic of these teams. So you wanna set up a paradigm shift of basically, here's the old way of doing things and here's the new way of doing things. And a prime example of the new way we're gonna do things is this is what it means to be on this team now. If you can use a term that includes both of these teams. Maybe it's the department, maybe it's the company, maybe it's like whatever term or phrase works for your particular company and setup here where you're including everyone on, on both team A and B. What it means to be part of this team now is this, this, and this. You give them north stars, you set a direction. These can be somewhat broad terms, maybe they're more specific, but you know, just as an example here, like team player, um, proactive, solution oriented, problem solving, um, helpful. Like these are, these are just examples off the top of my head, but find kind of thematic things that you can hook your hat on and say, this is what it means to be on this team now. By the way, what this does not include is pointing fingers and keeping grudges and making life difficult for people. That's not included here. So you give them one, two, maybe three North stars, big directional pieces. Then I would have two or three specific examples, and these could come out of the individual conversations you had with folks from managers, from the initial kind of exchanges between the teams. If you've had that from initial conversations with the leadership team in that rollout. So you can pull these from different places, but if there was clearly like, okay, everyone is pissed about, this Slack channel or what happens over here, these client calls, or whatever it is, if you've picked out like, look, all of Team B said this and 90% of teammates said this. These are clearly things that bug people. You could use those as examples. So for instance, this is, this is for example, um, what it means to be on this team now is to be a team player. One example of that is if someone asks a question in this slack channel, where it's, supposed to be, or escalations go or whatever urgent items go, and they've done the initial pull of data they can from their side, then there should be, informative, helpful, prompt, and professional reply back. and that can be just one example. It could be on client calls, We need to have a united front for our external clients. It doesn't matter what's happening internally. We're the company to this, to these clients. So we need to make sure that we have prep calls, internal prep calls as much as possible. And if we don't have time for prep calls, when we get on the call with the client, everyone internally needs to give other team members the benefit of the doubt. And it might be covering for folks if they don't happen to have that information right there and they should, or they have access to it, but you have that information'cause you've happened to pull it. These are just examples, but you hopefully, you know what I'm saying here. So giving some of some specific examples off of the key thematic elements. Importantly, when you give these examples, try to make it so it's not, oh, she's just going with side A or, oh, I guess she's on team B side. Don't make them blatantly just like, okay, I'm picking this side, I'm picking that side. They're right, you're wrong, type of thing. If the solution that team B tends to lean toward is the most logical one and given objective criteria, you would come to that conclusion as well. I would say that, and then give the reasons why you're coming to that conclusion or why you're making that an example, which is not because Team B said so, it's'cause of these different objective markers. And then if it's super touchy and super tricky and you kind of have to use that example, I would try to pick another example where it leans heavily toward team A. So if you have to kind of play that game, at least make it even and fair in that sense. Hopefully you can find an example where, hey, I'm not talking about side A and side B, I'm talking about how we get to a good decision, like objectively like this is, this is an appropriate and fair and reasonable way to go where, hey, you asked this in the Slack channel, you've gotta make sure you've pulled all the information that you can so you're not asking people to do work that you could have done. And then if that's the appropriate spot to put it in and people need this information to maybe help a client out, then if another team. Has access to the other part of the information. They need to supply that and do so in, in a team-like manner, in a collaborative manner. They don't need to be nasty. They don't need to be like, how stupid and how lazy are you for not pulling your, your stuff? you can talk about those exchanges in, in a way that's neither I'm going with this side or I'm going with that side. This is just how we're gonna do things. This is just an example of how we're gonna do things going forward. Okay? So you have those. Here's where it means to be a team member on this new team. Here are the expectations that we have of people. And you're saying this in front of everybody, right? There might be a few select people you're really talking to, but honestly, this is for everybody. I'm talking to everybody. Everyone's hearing the same thing. There's no, he said, she said, da, da, da. You're hearing it from me across the board. Here's what we're looking for, for top performers, for high achievers, for people who wanna be successful on this team. All those types of words people can pick up on, right? We're looking for this type of thing, inherent in that, and sometimes you're bla, you're gonna blatantly say this, what we're not looking for is X, Y, and Z. We're not looking for people who point fingers. we're not looking for people who don't give others the benefit of the doubt, who assume ill intent. We're not looking for who cause more trouble than they're worth. Like whatever phrasing you wanna use there. But sometimes it's a, it's a implied thing where you don't have to say it, but you're kind of saying it and you're getting the point across. And if you have to hammer it on the head, then you go, what we're not looking for is X, Y, and Z. I would do like a dramatic pause if you need to throw that out there. I would do like a pause to really let that sink in. Oh, okay. Okay. They're kind of calling me out here. Okay. But they're setting the expectation. They're resetting the expectation, and you wanna have this be a catalyst, an inflection point. This is the line of demarcation. before we were doing it that way. And now we're doing it this way. And sometimes I've heard people say this too. I've said this at times, like, you need to get on board or you're gonna get off board. Sometimes it's to that level. I'm not saying like default to there. If everything's like, Hey, like Emily, like we're having a little problem on the team. But it's, it's casual. You know, it's, it's the normal course of business. We're not a DEFCON one. I wouldn't go in there making ultimatums, but sometimes you get to a point where it's like, look, just to be clear, I'm saying this in front of everyone. I can have follow-up conversations with people individually, but this is what we're looking for for this new team. So people can get on board with this program or they can get off board and getting off board can be a voluntary quit. It can be a self optout, Hey, this is not for me. Cool. No problem. Beautiful. I wish you well. And it can also be a hey, as an individual conversation or series of conversations as a follow up. We've, we've set these new expectations here. You're not meeting them in these objective ways. We need you to get on board with this and give them opportunities, give them awareness, give them tools, give them whatever. And if they can't do it, then they might need to be off the team. They might need to be exited off. The team terminated. Fired. That is part of being a good leader and being a good manager. All right. Another element in all this is when you move from the old to the new, you, you almost wanna not startle people. That's kind of the wrong word. You, you wanna pull the tectonic plates out from under people. You wanna pull the carpet out from under people. You don't have anything to stand on anymore. The old grudges and the old world order, so to speak, you were standing on before is gone. It's just gone. It dissolved, it got taken away. It should be like a little bit jarring to people. And in doing that one, one thing that come out can come out of that that's beneficial is there's no winners or losers anymore. You've just kind of level set everyone and you've baselined everyone and you're doing a clean slate. So there's no, there's, there's, hmm. You're helping people save face. If there's winners or losers in the old battle, then I wanna know who won. And I wanna know who lost. I wanna win. I don't wanna be wrong, I wanna be right. I wanna be declared the victor. If there's a final battle going on here, before we split this, I wanna be declared the victor. And you just, you just wipe all that away and you redefine what winning is in a collective sense. Here's what it means to be a team member. Here's what it means to be a top performer. Here's how this team wins now. And you make that very clear. And so you get rid of all the other stuff. And it allows people to just let stuff go. And in that, it allows'em to save face and a lot of times make people's pride and ego get in this stuff. Myself included, I've been here, we're like, I don't like to be wrong. Guess what? I'm sure shit not gonna be wrong in front of this person. No way I'll dig my heels in. But you allow people a way out. So part of this is just reframing this whole thing at a fundamental level where you just take all that old stuff away and here's what we we're looking for going forward. Then as a fast follow and as a continued follow to all this is, you've gotta reinforce the new structure, So little slack messages, little client calls that you overhear, little email exchanges, little things that you hear where like a team member is backing someone else up and giving someone the benefit of the doubt and helping their teammate out and covering for folks on a client call or whatever. You pick up on these things. You listen for these things, both the good and the bad, where it's like, Hey, hey, hey. Remember, remember nudge, nudge, nudge? And it might be like, Hey, remember? Okay, got it. Just remember, just remember we're good, but just remember, and it might be, oh my gosh, here's some examples of people getting on board. Here's some examples of this team really moving forward together. Call those out. Call those out on like a kudos Slack channel. Call those out on a team meeting, like week to week team meeting. Call those out on an all hands meeting if that's appropriate, but make sure people know you are looking for. You are highlighting and you are rewarding and recognizing when people get on board with what it means to be a new team member on this new team. All that stuff has to be reinforced in big ways. Medium ways and little tiny day-to-day ways where it's like, whoa. Oh, she saw that. Okay. I mean that's kind of silly. She's calling that out on an all hands meeting, but I'll take it. I'll take it. I did back up Maria on that call, so I'll take it. Cool. Yeah, I'm a good team member. So reinforcing it in all those little ways, what tends to come out of this whole process over the subsequent weeks and months is three groups will emerge. Group one is, I'm on board, this makes sense. I can do this. Uh, I might have disagreed with a little bit about the departmental change. I might have been one of the people like kind of playing along with the side A against side B, but I totally get what we're doing now. If we're gonna grow as a company, we've gotta grow up, we've gotta mature as a team. I'm on board. Second group is Mm mm I don't like the new world order. I think it's stupid. I think it's silly. I think it's woo woo. I think it's soft and I think we're gonna stay right where we are. So guess what? I'm gonna set up camp here. I'm gonna lean back. I'm gonna dig my heels in and you try to move me. Group three is, I don't really care. Like I, we've had these team meetings. You did the one-on-ones, you did the debrief. I was there for it. I listened. It was fine, but I don't really care either way. You want me to do something new in Slack? Cool. You want me to do a client call a different way? Cool. I don't care. I like this job, but I don't really care about this stuff. I don't have a deep dog in this fight. Great. Like group three is awesome. They're like, yeah, you're fantastic. Lemme just give you a hug. And like, you go on your way and it's, and it's fine. You're neutral, you're fine. What tends to happen, not always, but what tends to happen is leaders will emerge from group one. So you might say, okay, let me keep an eye on. Who can see the big picture? Who can see long term? Who can connect those dots? Who is helping their team members get on board with this? Who's helping the team move forward? Who's raising their hand? Who's making the first move? When it's hard? Those tend to be your potential future leaders. It might be, oh, let me keep that person in mind to be a lead on the team. As the team grows, we're gonna need leads, and we're eventually gonna need managers and maybe directors and VPs and all these things. Let me keep an eye on these folks. In group two, you might be like, okay, we've got some people who are entrenched. Let me talk to them one-on-one. Let me try to get them on a one-on-one basis and get them on board. Sometimes this works and sometimes it just takes time, and sometimes it takes one-on-one attention. Sometimes it doesn't work because someone is incapable or unwilling to make the change needed, and in that case, sometimes a change is needed. The, the getting rid of under performers is equally as important as recognizing and promoting your top performers. Because if you have a team where people are doing a good job and doing an honest day's work and working hard, and they see, well, this person who's not doing their job, who's causing all sorts of trouble, who is a pain in the butt to work with, every time I have to interact with them, if they're allowed on this team and they're being like, maybe even recognized for being good at this, like, what are we talking about here? So it demoralizes the team in that sense. So part of your job and part of your job all the time. Is to look for and recognize your top performers and under performers and address those accordingly. But especially in these inflection points where, okay, we've, we've had the conversation, we've done the paradigm shift, we've set expectations in that aftermath, those weeks and months afterward. This is where you kind of like have shaken things up and then you watch where things settle and you watch where people settle too. It's like, oh, okay. Oh, dark horse. Hey, okay, didn't expect that, but let's keep an eye on that for sure. And like, okay, yep. Nope, she was never gonna get on board. Now she's making it worse, and now she's going crazy. Okay, now I have to address that. So you kind of can, can see these in a different light. And it's just something to keep an eye on. When, uh, when things like this happen, who emerges, who steps up and who just gets complacent or entrenched in the old way of doing things and can't bust out of that, Alright, so those were just some of the highlights that, uh, that happened in this exchange with this chief of staff in this interview round. And I know, like with everything I say, take what's relevant and useful and resonates with you and discard the rest. I know there are, there are different combinations and permutations and ways this rolls out and yeah, but Emily, what about this? Or no, Emily, like that didn't happen in my case type of situation. So I, I understand that if you have a specific question or a specific scenario, feel free to shoot me an email, Emily at next level coach, you can find me on LinkedIn or just drop something in the comments. But, um, hopefully some of this has been helpful or at least food for thought for you and I will catch you next time on leveraging leadership.