Hoe een team subgroepen ontdekt en leert waarderen

How a team discovers and learns to appreciate subgroups

The coach is already in the room, half an hour before the start. A group of 12 team members and a manager arrive. She moves the tables aside and makes a circle of chairs. This way there is more room and everyone can see each other clearly. By nine, the team members trickle in. Coffee, a chat. A little uncomfortably, everyone waits for us to get started, including her.

At intake, the manager indicated that the team appears to be in a crisis of trust. Team members distrust management, other departments and each other. The team also has little trust in the coach.
The leader introduces the meeting and then hands the baton to the team coach. She asks the team what they want to know from her in order to work well with her today, and what she needs to know from them. A charged silence falls. One team member does bring something in, cautiously and tentatively. But there is hardly any response.

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The coach notices that she herself is tense. She tries not to take that just personally. What does her tension tell her about this team as a system, right now? Every team is a bit cautious at the beginning of a meeting like this, tends to run away from the task at hand. But the charge of silence, combined with what she has heard from the leader, also gives her the impression that there is a lot of fighting energy in the group.

What stage of system development is this team in? The flight phase they think (Bennis & Shepard, 1956), the starting phase of any system development. In this phase the participants are holding back, withdrawing, keeping their energy to themselves and not sharing it with the group. The coach also knows that there is anger and frustration in the group; she thinks it is too early to work with it. First she wants to help the group get out of that flight energy; offer tools that will enable them to do this themselves and with each other. In doing so, the team lays a foundation to better deal with differences in the fight phase when the energy level is much higher.

The coach introduces an experiment to the group. "It is apparently difficult at this time to engage each other in conversation I have a working form that can help with this. That includes some guidelines for how to communicate in a group. Is it OK for you guys to try that out?" Some participants nod and say it's OK. The team gives a hesitant "yes.

The working form the coach introduces is called "functional subgrouping" and was developed by Yvonne Agazarian. It is one of the methods from her theory of living human systems, an elaboration of general systems theory (Bertalanffy, 1968). Living human systems survive, develop and transform, by discerning and integrating differences. That development stagnates when the differences seem too great to face, as seems to be the case in this team. In functional subgrouping, differences are made manageable by prioritizing the communication of similarities in the group over the insertion of differences.

"If you want to contribute something, you do so as succinctly and clearly as possible. Then you say "who is next?" to indicate that you have finished speaking and to invite another person to connect to your input. Connecting means that you clearly show that you have heard and understood the person to whom you are connecting; only when that has actually happened do you add something of your own, again concluding with "who follows?" It is your role as participants to share what is going on in you, and to connect with the one who has spoken for you. It is my role as coach to coach you in following the guidelines. OK, who wants to start?"

There is silence for a moment, then someone takes a breath and says, "I don't feel very safe on this team at all..." "Nice start," the coach says. "If you say, who follows? we can see who can join this." With that, the coach supports this input and sends the message that everything on the team has a claim to recognition. "I don't feel that safe either, I recognize that," says another participant. And continues: "I also don't know at all if this discussion makes sense. We've talked about this so many times, nothing comes of it anyway." And then, "who will follow?"

The coach sees that the team gets to work, the silence is broken, more life comes into the group. In this process, the team develops the ability to collectively explore the situation in which it finds itself. In doing so, it lays the foundation for later handling mutual differences in a productive way. The coach's interventions are only aimed at helping to remove noise in the communication -such as vagueness, repetition or contradiction. This enables the team to face the situation it finds itself in and explore it together. This is more effective than withdrawing or engaging in bickering.

It is the team itself that turns the course of the conversation. "We can't go on like this either." "I do feel the will to make something of it." "I have so many good ideas, but I don't feel supported and not seen." The team realizes that everyone is here today, even the part-timers for whom it is not a workday. The level of frustration seems to be the mirror image of the enormous commitment that is also there.

Then the differences also surface. The unspoken team norm seems to be that all team members are equally committed to the team, part-timers as much as full-timers. But there are also part-timers who draw clear boundaries: two days of commitment and the rest of the week away. Using the functional subgrouping working form avoids fruitless discussions and recriminations back and forth, and leads to both positions-maximum commitment versus distance on the days off- being explored in turn, with a minimum of interruptions. The team gets divided into subgroups, but the subgroups take turns working in front of everyone. So whoever is in one subgroup can follow exactly how the thinking is going on in the other subgroup. They don't close themselves off from each other.

The team discovers that the differences between them also have advantages. There are juniors and seniors, so the juniors can learn from the seniors. There are team members who develop tremendous depth in their work and can get completely bogged down in a particular theme. There are team members who are flexible and can easily join projects in which their effort is temporarily needed. The team says goodbye to the norm that everyone is equal and should put in equal effort. In its place emerges an appreciation for the differences between them, and a desire to make them productive for work.

Dealing with mutual differences is the challenge of all teams. This can involve going through several phases. In the starting or flight phase, teams tend to deny differences. In the fight phase, differences become visible and the tendency arises to split them off. A team in the together phase has accepted the differences between them and knows how to use them effectively, but may tend to idealize its own team in relation to the outside world. In the work phase, the team looks beyond its own boundaries and focuses on its task in the context of the bigger picture, the organization,the world.

This team managed to break this meeting into the back-and-forth between flight and fight phase and into the together phase. What helped were the "subgroup" guidelines (see box), which led to recognizing and appreciating the differences between them. And the actions of the coach, who trusted that using these guidelines would lead to the team taking steps forward on its own.

Where does SCT come from? It is a theory of group dynamics with an associated therapeutic model, developed by Yvonne Agazarian in the U.S., outlined in her book Systems-Centered Therapy for Groups (1997). She integrates insights from various psychological streams into a clearly structured whole. The use of systems theory aligns with Bertalanffy (1968), the notion of the group-as-a-whole with the work of Bion (1961), the distinction of phases of system development with the work of Bennis and Shepard (1956) and the use of force field analysis with the work of Kurt Lewin (1951). The way she drew from these sources is carefully documented in Autobiography of a Theory (Agazarian and Gantt, 2000). Appreciation for her work is high, as evidenced by, among other things, the extensive attention paid to it in the review work Group Development in Practice, a in which (Brabender and Fallon).

In the US, the development of SCT is promoted by the Systems-Centered Training and Research Institute, which organizes training courses and conferences in the US and Europe and coordinates scientific research. Since the publication of Senge's book "The Fifth Discipline" (1990), it has been widely recognized that systems thinking makes an important contribution in the way organizations are viewed. At the same time, few methods have been developed in which systems thinking can be truly implemented in everyday practice.SCT has developed practical and theoretically sound methods for this.Applications of SCT in organizations and education are documented in SCT in Action (2005).

As our example shows, SCT methods (of which functional subgrouping is one), are tailored to the context and with a view to strengthening the autonomy of the participants. In doing so, it is important to pay attention to the developmental stage the group is in. The methods of SCT are useful in any system in which people work and live together.

Lotte Paans and Roelof Langman

Lotte Paans is a (team) coach, trainer and supervisor, operates independently and works closely with School for Coaching www.lottepaans.nl

Roelof Langman is a teacher and organizational coach in Amsterdam.