How to align your team

Unlocking your team's true potential requires diving deep into the realm of unconscious commitments. These hidden drivers, often overlooked, hold the key to the actual results your team produces.

Why It Matters

If a team doesn't achieve its goals, it indicates that team members' subconscious commitments are not aligned with their conscious commitments.

The Big Picture

Team controversies appear in their conversations, decisions, and executions. When teams struggle to identify and align their unconscious commitments, they also struggle to make decisions they are subconsciously committed to. Consciously, they’ll commit or “disagree and commit,” but their subconscious commitments will haunt them during execution, leading to unmet goals.

Context vs. Subtext

When I engage with leadership teams, they invest all their energy in the context—the visible issues of what, how, who, and when. Each team context is different, whether it’s software, biotech, pharma, retail, fintech, etc.

Yet, the subtext—the profound underlying significance of the context, the unspoken truths, individual hidden motives, and unexpressed relationship dynamics—holds the key to their transformation.

Teams always come to me with problems in the context. I always find their misalignments in the subtext. The results are the true indicators of our subconscious commitments. For example, I committed to losing 10 pounds but gained 5 pounds instead. My conscious commitment was to lose 10 pounds. My subconscious commitment was to gain 5 pounds. Yes, I know. It doesn’t make sense even to me, but it’s the inconvenient truth. The actual result is the actual commitment that we are not aware of, which is why we call them subconscious commitments.

Team members, especially the CEO, were very upset after I responded to their unachieved 50% growth goal by saying they committed to NOT growing. Once they started talking about the subtext—how they were discussing their 50% growth goal—they discovered that team members were committed to different directions. Let’s look at a few common subconscious commitments I come across.

Commitment to disown

Most teams say they own their results. That’s true when they are successful and accomplish their goals. However, when they don’t, they blame customers, employees, management, the board, the business environment, the economy, competition, and blah, blah, blah.

The single most important team transformation is to 100% own everything, individually and collectively. Every team member and the team as a whole must own every failure, delay, or loss.

The team has to co-commit to owning everything. Not achieving the sales target is not just the responsibility of the VP of Sales; it’s everybody’s responsibility. Only when the team adopts this baseline responsibility, although they think it is radical, they will challenge each other at the first sign of misalignment between expressed and actual commitments.

Commitment to Be Right

When teams bump into disagreements, members advocate for their position with little time spent showing that they listened to other points of view. It’s assumed they hear each other, but nobody feels heard. It’s painful to watch and even more painful to see how nobody cares because they have been operating this way for decades.

To get out of this vicious cycle, team members need to let go of the need to be right. If you have read earlier articles such as Augmenting Potential and CEO Potential, you know that Domain-Centric Potential is an early developmental stage in which we develop as we become experts and professional authorities. Even leaders who have become Vision-Centric still fall back to being Domain-Centric, especially when they come together as a team. Therefore, most leadership teams default almost on autopilot to being Domain-Centric, arguing endlessly, leaving “no choice” for the CEO other than exercising their authority power and making a final decision. The team “resolved” the controversy by “agreeing” on conscious commitments, but their subconscious commitments didn’t change a bit.

The commitment to be right is like early-stage cancer that, without quick detection and decisive intervention, becomes a performance killer. Such intervention requires curiosity and empathy, and the best tool to follow through is the reframing framework I elaborated extensively on in earlier articles, How to Build Trust in Tough Conversations, and the ‘Carefrontation’ model in the article, How to Start a Tough Conversation.

Commitment to Be Inauthentic

Take a blank paper, split it into two columns, and write on the left side your thoughts from your last team meeting and on the right what you actually said. The bigger the difference, the bigger the inauthenticity.

Now, take another piece of paper and repeat the process for the last conversation with your life partner or your kids.

From personal experience, I know that there is no difference between our authenticity at home and at work. At face value, we believe we are more authentic at home because we feel safer. I have done this with hundreds of clients, and when they are truly honest with themselves, they realize that they are not courageously authentic in tough conversations at home and work.

The #1 commitment individuals and teams make, probably more than 80% of the time, is the commitment to become courageously authentic. That means:

• Being open about what you think and feel
• Surfacing the issues others are reluctant to talk about
• Speaking directly to the issues without smoothing over them
• Being courageous in conversations
• Engaging in conflict effectively
• Providing complete and direct feedback to others
• Confronting peers and superiors when needed
• Working out tough agreements
• Dealing with problems directly and honestly without delay
• Advocating an unpopular decision
• Admitting mistakes
• Speaking directly, even on controversial issues

Subconscious commitments are the elephants in the room

Teams bring me to tears when they finally make a breakthrough and start exposing issues they have never dared to discuss with anybody. Some team members' subconscious and distruptive commitments are formed outside of the team. I hear team members confess about their partners' pressures or how life circumstances get in the way of their contribution.

Such sensitive, heartfelt experiences require a level of care, love, and empathy that team members often don’t have the capacity to engage with. But once they cross this threshold, they transform into a level of effectiveness and performance they couldn’t imagine a few months earlier.