Teach & Serve IV, No. 14
Echo Chambers of Our Own Design
November 7, 2018
Sometimes … when we build teams and, as those teams continue to function, we can begin to listen only to ourselves, to conclude that our team is the best team – the only team – to which we need to listen.
Leaders can live strange lives and much of that has to do with the types of people with which they surround themselves. Confident, strong leaders tend to seek out those who are, likewise, confident and strong. They tend to build teams of people who might and will challenge them, who think for themselves, who generate and create on their own without the leader pressing them to do so. Confident leaders want people around them who are confident, too.
Sometimes, however, when we build teams and, as those teams continue to function, we can begin to listen only to ourselves, to conclude that our team is the best team – the only team – to which we need to listen. For, if we have constructed good teams, should it not follow that those selfsame teams will remain good in perpetuity? Is it not logical that our teams, woven together with considered thought and careful foresight and appropriate intention, will work perfectly well for a very, very long time?
We should be careful.
All too often, the best of teams the longer they work together, especially those teams whose players like and respect each other, become echo chambers of our own design. Typically, high functioning teams come to expect high function of themselves. They have typically done good work. When teams do good work with one another over long periods of time and they are praised for such work, it becomes very challenging to believe that they will ever do anything but good work. It becomes almost impossible to believe that breaking up the band, that deviation from the norm is necessary.
But breaking up the band may well be critical. It is, at a minimum, necessary to open the doors on these teams, to bring in other voices, to challenge the echo chamber.
High functioning teams that wish to remain high functioning do not simply gaze around the table and say, every part we need is here, right? Everyone is in place. Right? Yes, sure. Right. Right back at you. You are here. I am here. What else do we need?
That kind of echo chamber does not grow leadership in a building and it does not grow to face new challenges. Rather, high functioning teams look around the table and say, we are good. How do we get better? What is missing? Who else should be at this table? How do we engage others?
High functioning teams break open the echo chamber. That is how they continue to grow.