Shaking up the Team: Everybody Can Win

By Dr Mike Talbot

I was reading about the rapidly-evolving events in mainland Europe this weekend, in particular Keir Starmer’s ‘Coalition of the willing’ (leaders of 26 nations, including Ukraine, plus the EU and NATO), and how they can go about ending the war in Ukraine. This example of pan-European co-operation and the striking way that European unity appears to have taken a giant leap in these last couple of weeks reminded me of a mediation we did some years ago.

The team mediation was in a European technological centre and involved about 15 scientific researchers. Their (generally assumed) way of working was to pool their ideas, expertise, and intellect in most projects, and they found that this worked well for them. Inevitably, there was also a little rivalry over who owned which ideas, who was going to publish more papers, who would get the annual prize, etc.

The reason they called us in was because the department had some unresolved conflict, and everyone was pointing their finger at one of the researchers in particular (let’s call him Juan). Juan was said to be ending his participation in most team and collective events; he was no longer sharing ideas and insights, preferring to keep his intellectual property to himself, and he had even started locking up his own small lab during the day so that none of his colleagues could use it or see what he was working on.

To cut a long story short, the mediation worked well and some possible legal action amongst Juan and the team members was headed off. Juan decided to continue to operate quite independently and the others met his decision with a shrug.

However, the better part of the outcome was that, given Juan’s reluctance to be a team member any longer, the others all came up with some new resolutions about what to do in his effective absence. They agreed to pool their residual research money to open a new and advanced lab so they would no longer need to use Juan’s; they started a rota to chair the committees and meetings that Juan now had abandoned, they drew up a new charter to really specify how their ongoing co-operation would work and how they could all benefit equally from it, and wrote up some pointers for what they would do if they ever found themselves struggling to manage conflict again. They underwent a real boost.

Back to the European situation and what I am describing as a new sense of European unity. What has set all this off? Well, a certain Mr. Trump. He has courted Russia, undermined faith in the Nato alliance, and threatened the EU with tariffs. He has said Zelensky (the ‘dictator’, in his words) is ‘more difficult’ to deal with than Russia, he stopped delivery of US military aid to Ukraine, and has suspended providing them with military intelligence.

And all of this has clearly had this galvanising effect on the EU and UK: the ‘coalition of the willing’ have between themselves raised a European Defence fund of €150bn to spend on defence so they do not need to rely on the US as much; they have used their collective financial weight to build up the Euro as an alternative to the dollar as a global reserve currency. The UK’s level of co-operation, particularly in the ‘triumvirate’ with France and Germany, has not been this high since Brexit drove a massive wedge between the UK and those two countries.

So, whether in a research lab or in transatlantic relations, whether it is down to one scientist ending his participation in the team or a world leader deciding to divorce his long-term partners, a positive and creative response to conflict can often be found. When someone leaves or checks out because their needs have become incompatible with the needs of the rest of the team, that does not mean the rest of the team have to suffer: managed well, the newly-reconfigured team might actually be better off for it.