The secret to a high performing team is a unified team.

We know this, but there's a key variable.

Teams are built by the strength of relationships that we have.

Talking is the key variable of relationships.

Talking bonds us, but it also reveals differences.

Those differences can be what stop us from talking.

When we stop talking, we've stopped trusting.

These dynamics work invisibly in all relationships.

One variable that affects this is the make up of your team.

People of different styles, attitudes and emotional maturity.

Some bring the team closer and some divide it.

There's going to be three types of people on your team.

Some are going to be team players who work to bring harmony and include others.

Some are going to be divisive forces who work for their own ends.

And most are going to drift to whichever dynamic is most dominant.

Dividers are typically self interested.

So their relationships rarely last.

Conflict activates their fight or flight syndrome, or

they'll manipulate situations.

then they tend to look out for themselves or those they consider their own.

There is the dark triad, which is psychopaths, sociopaths,

narcissistic people.

About 1 percent of the population are what psychologists call psychopaths, about

2 percent are sociopaths, and somewhere from 2 - 7 percent are narcissistic.

Now, psychopath doesn't mean that they're about to go and kill people, it

means, That they're devoid of emotion.

They're only concerned about themselves there's a certain set of criteria,

but all of those dark triad Can't work well with others and yet they're

somewhere from seven to ten percent of the population So these people are

always going to be a divisive force.

In any workplace of any size About ten percent of your work

force are going to be divisive.

This means that they're going to be actively working against the

team being as a whole, because it's not in their interest.

Aside from those people that there's not really anything you can do about,

aside from those people that you can't actually engage and that you really

can't do anything with in terms of they don't want the interest of the team

they want the interest of themselves.

But aside from them there's people who are situationally divisive maybe

they're disengaged maybe they don't like the boss, maybe they got some

resentments but the key fact is that they're going to be divisive.

We can see some of those effects if we look at football.

Ronaldo has often been claimed to, to have been more interested in his own glory.

Often some of the best players are divisive in teams.

We can look at this season, chelsea had a very young team of all stars,

but weren't Really gelled as a team and we can see incidents where they were

fighting amongst themselves for Their position their personal aggrandizement

and we we can see other instances.

There's examples of leaders who are like that.

Donald Trump is a classic divisive leader.

One of the criticisms of Margaret Thatcher is that she turned society

into strivers and scroungers Richard Nixon was known to hate the press and he

called them in the enemy of the people.

He Had his own agenda.

In football, we've got Jose Mourinho who is kind of Master of the dark

arts and very divisive force.

Ruud Gullit in his his time at Newcastle was very divisive

wasn't playing his best players.

It was felt it was his ego affecting The ability to work as a team

But the se, the second group is what I call the drifters.

The mass of people, go and they get along depending on the situation.

If they go into a situation where they're able to thrive they'll tends to flourish.

They can work well with others.

Their relationships tend to work about half the time.

Marriage works in about 50 percent of the time and it ends

in divorce about half the time.

And that's really because we're reacting to situations rather than

having a defined relationship strategy.

We don't really have a relationship, a communication, conflict strategy.

And so, It all depends on the situation as to whether it works out or not.

So how we respond to conflict.

How we communicate depends on the situation and the

individual's emotional maturity.

Their concern is dependent on how engaged and how committed they are to the team.

If they're not really bought into the team, if they're not really feeling

engaged, if they're not really feeling included, if they don't really care about

the results of the team, then they'll kind of drift more to the divisive leaders.

Whether they're actual leaders in the pack or whether it's just

someone who's creating the gossip, someone who's creating the factions.

The drifters will just tend to go to wherever is the

dominant force at that time.

So what we see here is lots of relationship studies of

how relationships go and it's particularly about how relationships

go after the birth of children.

And so we can see initially there's a honeymoon period and then there's a period

where the relationship becomes challenged.

What typically happens is we dip right down and most marriages don't last that

long because most marriages don't last because down in that dip, we feel it's

a problem with the person, when really what's happened Is that we've stopped

communicating we've become distanced and all because we had we met differences

that We weren't ready to deal with.

Because we never knew how to talk our way through it We blame

each other and we decide that the relationship hasn't worked.

They mustn't be the one.

We need to be in a better relationship.

So we leave the relationship.

The couples that last out You can see that upward Trajectory because either

they've learned how to live together or they learn how to talk through things

and they're able to get through it.

While this graph is specific to relationships, the same kind of

thing happens in every relationship.

If you look at business partnerships, 70 percent of business partnerships

fall apart because of lack of trust and a lack of communication.

When we have points of conflict which we always will have we disengage.

We disengage because we don't like or we don't know how to deal with conflict.

So what happens is we stop talking.

We either fight for our point in which case we stop listening

Or we decide to keep quiet for a peaceful life and we stop talking.

But the end result is a lack of communication creates

a lack of connection.

With a lack of connection, the relationship dies.

The key to success is your unifiers in the team.

The unifiers build strong and sustainable relationships.

They tend to transcend conflict and they find mutually agreeable solutions.

And they're concerned with the well being of the team.

These are people who know that we join with others to get more and the

interest of ourselves as an individual and of the collective are aligned.

So unifying leaders are those leaders that hold us together as one.

And Barack Obama, I think it was in his first inauguration speech

after being elected is said that his job was to unify America.

Nelson Mandela, of course was famous for Unifying South Africa

after the age of apartheid.

Mahatma Gandhi again unified everyone around the Non violent

protest for Indian independence

And back in the civil rights days Martin Luther King unified the civil rights

movement around his I have a dream speech.

More recently in football Jurgen Klopp took over a failing and

struggling Liverpool team that was a shadow of themselves and unified

everyone from fans to backroom staff to team as one unified club.

And over nine years they won everything while spending about

a quarter of their main rivals.

Unifiers are very few and far between

There's always going to be a few that will disrupt.

You're always going to have a divisive element, but whether you have a

unifying element is down to either luck or having a defined strategy

that creates a more unified team.

The more conscious you are about having Unifiers on your team to

unify the team, the more likely you are to have a team that acts as one.

So the qualities of a unifier is having emotional intelligence and maturity.

It's having the ability to Keep talking through conflict and not to go to war.

Basically not to put your own interests or your own ego above that of the team.

I wanted to share what I call the unifier strategy.

If you talk to most leaders and most managers Typically,

they don't have a strategy For how their team begin to unify.

They kind react to situations

The unified strategy is based on the idea that we can't manage people,

but we can manage relationships.

Typically organizations try to manage people.

Now, if you look at the root word for manage, it comes from, Animal husbandry.

It's about manipulating and moving cattle.

And in this day and age you don't really want to be manhandling people.

So what we want is instead we want to win hearts and minds.

We want people to willingly join us.

And the reason that they do that is because they get more from being

part of the collective than they would from their own self interest.

People want three key things.

They want to belong, they want to be valued within that tribe, and they

want to feel that the tribe is striving to achieve something meaningful.

Now when people feel that they get everything, that they want, From their

workplace They're energized and so they give more because it's for them.

The problem with most teams is people have been told don't be selfish and What

it feels like then is you sacrifice for the team and you lose, but the team wins.

People might go along with that because of social pressure, But when

no one's watching, deep in their heart, they're really out for what they want.

So the unified strategy is about giving people what they need, so that they

willingly choose to be part of the group, and they want the team to succeed.

When you're managing people, it tends to feel personal.

It leads to resentments.

But when you manage relationships, what you're really managing

is how well people feel.

What you're really managing is the bonds that connect the team.

But most people have been given a relationship and communication and the

conflict strategy that doesn't work.

So we need to change the way that people think of relationships.

We need to give them tools to measure and benchmark what is a good

relationship against a bad relationship.

We need to be able to understand why conflict happens, why it's stressful,

how to override that stress and where are the answers, where are

the clues that are going to give us the resolution to that conflict.

Conflict is so critical because it's the breaking point for connection.

When we handle it poorly, that it means that we stop communicating,

we lose connection, we lose trust and we feel more detached and

more disengaged from each other.

When we handle it well, we talk through it.

We connect because we understand what each is wanting.

We have more clarity.

And eventually we bond in a shared experience.

And this is what makes the unify strategy so powerful when we can teach it to

members of the team so that they know how to build strong relationships.

They know how to communicate through conflict and they see their identity as

being more invested in the collective good than in their self interest.

That's when we build a strong culture, which is where we build

the bonds that build the team.

And that is the key to the unified strategy.