See if you’ve had this experience or something similar.
You’ve just concluded a meeting with your team. Some crucial structural and strategic issues were covered in the meeting. You’d hoped for more energy and conversation but you took the lack of fireworks as affirmation that everyone is in agreement and headed in the same direction. Uneventful is good. Everyone was polite, positive, and seemed eager to get back to work.

At the end of the day, you observe several members of your team having an animated conversation in the parking lot. The contrast between their passionless participation in the conference room earlier with whatever is going on in the parking lot now could not be starker.

A sinking feeling overtakes you. What if they’re saying to each other what they did not want to say or felt they could not say in the meeting? What if they’re having the real meeting now?

What is the Red Zone?
Polite agreement in the conference room and passionate debate in the parking lot is one sign of an organization stuck in the Red Zone. There are others. But for now let’s focus on what the Red Zone is and then I’ll give you a quick checklist for getting out of it.

“Red Zone” is the term that describes the least effective zone of organizational health. It is marked by a state of dependence on the leader for everything. Team members might lack clarity of the organization’s mission and goals or they might lack a commitment to the mission or goals. Either way, in the Red Zone, the team expects the leader to carry the ball – while they may or may not cheer him or her on.

In the Red Zone the leader is expected to keep everyone focused on the goals, make all major decisions, solve day-to-day problems, and resolve conflicts. Sometimes this is the result of the unrealistic expectations of the leader. Sometimes it’s the result of the unrealistic expectations of the team. And sometimes it’s a mixture of the two. The bottom line is that an organization that is dependent on the leader is not growing leaders as it should, nor getting much done.

There is a better way.
Vince Lombardi, the legendary Green Bay Packers coach, said, “Winning is a habit. Unfortunately, so is losing.”

He was right. Bad habits lead teams to perpetual losses. Good professional habits – both individual and corporate – can set an organization on the path from dependence to independence and ultimately to interdependence (the highest expression of organizational health).

Here are six great strategies — good habits, if you will — that you can use to help grow and develop your team members. Being aware of these habits and putting them into practice in day-to-day operations will move any team out of the Red Zone.

Habits for Getting Out of the Red Zone

1. Confront the issue, not the person. In the Red Zone people often lose sight of the issue and make things personal. When a team member brings a problem or complaint to you, be careful to confront the issue and not the person and to insist that the team member do the same. “What is the issue?” is a key question to ask when the conversation veers into personal attacks.
2. Search for win-win strategies. Remember that in the Red Zone teams are dependent on the leader. This is not healthy and it spawns a lot of turf wars. When team members come to the leader with a Red Zone mindset they want the leader to be a “fixer” – to solve a problem in a way that advantages the team member regardless of how it might disadvantage another team member or the organization. To get out of the Red Zone, leaders of leaders must re-frame these requests for win/lose solutions with win/win strategies.
3. Provide open, honest feedback. We have an obligation to listen to our team members when they come to us with a problem – even if that problem is couched in tattling. We also have an obligation to re-direct that energy from tattling to collaborating.
4. Establish clear procedures. Structure. Structure. Structure. The first thing we should look at when there’s a persistent problem within the organization is whether something in the organizational structure is causing that problem. Establishing a clear procedure can work wonders at reducing confusion, stress, and loss of productivity. By the way, eliminating a procedure that’s outlived its usefulness will do the same.
5. Follow the guidelines you set. Allowing a team member to consistently ignore healthy, agreed upon, group norms and guidelines is a recipe for disaster – no matter how talented or gifted that team member may be. Make it a habit to follow the guidelines yourself and coach your team to do the same.
6. Develop new skills. This, like all the other items on this list, is simple and straightforward but not always easy to do. Maybe you think you don’t have time to teach new skills when your organization is stuck in the Red Zone. But the opposite is true: You can’t afford not to take time to teach a new skill if that skill will develop a healthier team, break the organization’s dependence on the leader, and grow new leaders from within.

Where This Leads
None of these habits are complicated, and none require new funding or a new initiative.
What they require is consistency — practiced by the leader first, then reinforced throughout the team.

As they take hold, a school or district moves from Red Zone dependence toward Yellow Zone independence, where individuals and teams function effectively on their own, and eventually toward Green Zone interdependence, where leadership, systems, and people carry the organization’s success together.

A Closing Question
The next time a meeting ends quietly and cleanly, it’s worth asking: is that quiet the sound of agreement, or the sound of a team waiting to have the real conversation somewhere else?

That question — asked honestly, and acted on consistently — is where the move out of the Red Zone begins.

 

This article originally appeared as a Culture Code Letter in October 2017. If you’d like to continue the conversation,  A Conversation About Leadership is published twice each month. [Join the conversation →]