Every team has a culture, whether or not it has chosen one. Somewhere between its first meeting and its first difficult quarter, a set of agreements forms: who speaks first, whether disagreement is welcome, what happens to the person who admits a mistake. Few of these agreements are ever stated rather learned by watching what is rewarded or punished.
These agreements are largely invisible when things are going well. They surface under pressure, and by then they are hard to change. A team that has never discussed how it handles conflict will handle it the way its members’ habits dictate. In most organisations, those habits are likely to be defensive.
What changes when the agreement is deliberate
The alternative is to make the agreement explicit. When a team decides, before a crisis, how it wants to work together, norms that were assumed become choices. We see this in our work with leadership teams every day. The same patterns recur across sectors. Teams that appear aligned in the meeting disagree sharply after it. Leaders who say they welcome challenge are rarely challenged. Problems that everyone privately knows about reach the leadership table late, if at all. One of the clearest public illustrations of this comes from Ford.
The green charts
In 2006, Alan Mulally arrived at Ford from Boeing and introduced a weekly business plan review. Every Thursday morning, each senior leader reported on their initiatives as green, yellow or red. Ford’s automotive business was heading for a loss of about $17 billion that year. Yet week after week, the charts were almost entirely green.
The pattern broke when Mark Fields, who ran Ford’s operations in the Americas, reported a red. A faulty tailgate latch had forced him to halt production of the new Edge SUV. Fields later recalled the tension in the room. Mulally applauded, said “Great visibility, Mark,” and asked how the team could help.
Within weeks, the charts reflected reality, and the leadership team could finally work on the company’s actual problems. Fields went on to lead the same meeting as chief operating officer and, in 2014, succeeded Mulally as CEO.
An agreement no one had made
Ford’s executives were not dishonest. Each was acting rationally within an agreement the team had never discussed but everyone understood: whoever brings bad news pays for it. It had been learned from experience and reinforced by what happened to those who spoke up. Because it had never been stated, it could not be challenged.
Mulally’s applause did more than any policy could have. It showed the team, in public and at the moment it mattered, that the old agreement no longer held.
The Designed Team Alliance
In Organization and Relationship Systems Coaching (ORSC), the practice of making these agreements explicit is called a Designed Team Alliance (DTA). With a coach, the team decides what culture it wants to create, what it needs from its members, and how it will work through disagreement.
One of the questions at its centre is the one Ford’s leaders had never answered: how do we want to behave when things get difficult? Most teams can agree easily on how to work together when results are good. The value of the alliance lies in agreeing, in advance, what happens when they are not.
The alliance is not a one-time exercise. Teams return to it, test it against real situations and revise it as their work changes. An agreement that is never revisited soon becomes another statement of values on a wall.
Where Ford stopped short
Mulally did much of what a DTA sets out to do. He made the team’s norms explicit and, crucially, honoured them the first time they were tested. But the norms were largely his. They held because he held them.
That is the limit of norms set from the top. They depend on one leader’s presence and consistency, and they are fragile when that leader is distracted or replaced. A DTA makes the team the author of its own agreement. When members have named for themselves how they will behave under pressure, any one of them can invoke it, and the agreement outlasts any individual.
What it changes for an organisation
The effects show up where unspoken agreements usually do their damage. Problems reach decision-makers earlier, while they are still small. Disagreement becomes a source of better decisions rather than a risk to be managed. When behaviour slips under pressure, as it will, the team has a shared reference to return to, and the conversation moves from blame to whether the team is honouring what it agreed. New members learn how the team actually works, rather than inferring it over months.
None of this comes from the document. It comes from the conversation that produces it and the discipline of returning to it. A question worth asking at your next leadership meeting: what happens on this team to the person who brings bad news?
If your team would benefit from designing how it works together, we would welcome a conversation. Write to us at hello@thecorequestin.com
