How individuals can become highly effective team members and how we can all transform our organizations through individuals becoming highly effective team players.
In this post, a transcript of the video below, we will:
– Define competitive advantage and its application in teamwork
– Review The Five Behaviors™ framework and its impact
– Provide insights on The Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team Assessment
– Share Examples of The Five Behaviors experience
– Highlight Words of wisdom from The New York Times best-selling author, Patrick Lencioni
Overview of The Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team™
Background
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by New York Times best selling author Patrick Lencioni, is the foundation of The Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team. This is a fable about a dysfunctional leadership team, which has been a best seller for over 15 years. If you’re struggling with teamwork right now, just knowing that this book has been a best seller for all these years, is a great indication that you’re not alone.
Patrick Lencioni, from all his years of working with Fortune 500 organizations, is often quoted as saying:
“Not finance. Not strategy. Not technology. It is teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and so rare.”
Teamwork is often an untapped and under leveraged resource. When organizations focus on getting people to work together on productive and cohesive teams, they will accomplish great things. In many cases, teamwork can be and is an organizations ultimate competitive advantage.
Teamwork Defined:
“The work done by people who work together as a team to accomplish something.”
Teamwork is one of those words thrown around, and we often don’t take the time to stop and think about what it really means. Teamwork may be a simple concept, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to do. It’s hard to do. Teamwork can mean something different to many individuals and organizations. To this day, many teams and organizations struggle with the concept of teamwork.
Competitive Advantage Defined:
As many business books will state, in order for anything to be a competitive advantage:
“…It has to be both rare and not easily repeated.”
When organizations can develop peoples capabilities to contribute to cohesive teams that becomes a competitive advantage, because cohesive teamwork is both rare and not easily repeatable.
Benefits of a Cohesive Team
When you’re able to create a common language and system for teams to work through many issues that come with working on teams, you are able to create cohesive teams, which lead to extraordinary teams. Cohesive and extraordinary teams:
– Make better decisions.
– Avoid revisiting topics because of lack of buy-in.
– Tap into skills and opinions of all team members.
– Avoid wasting time and energy on politics and conflict.
– Are more fun to be on.
Your Teams Can Do Better
The Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team is for any team – no matter where the team falls on the ‘functioning spectrum’ – whether the team is highly dysfunctional with no clear way through or highly functional wanting to maintain and elevate further where possible.
Characteristics of a Dysfunctional Team:
– Lack of trust
– Unhealthy competition
– ME focused
– Finger pointing
– Poor results
– Pessimism
– Blame
– Few opportunities to learn
Sometimes dysfunction feels like an elephant in the room. We know that the team is not functioning properly, but no one is addressing it, no one may no how to address it, and people may even be trying to ‘sweep it under the rug’. Today, there are potentially countless elephants roaming around offices and amongst teams around the world.
To go from dysfunctional to functional, or functional to even higher functioning, wherever you might fall on the functioning spectrum, it takes time and hard work, and for some teams, it takes an intervention. It takes help.
The whole idea of a team, although very simple in theory, is actually really messy in practice. Think about all of the various personalities and differences of opinion and egos that have to be balanced for a team to work at its peak. One way to look at this messiness is as a burden and/or as a headache, which can be perfectly normal.
But another way is actually as an opening – because if you can get one, five, ten, twenty teams in the organization past the drama, politics and the wasted energy, that’s a tremendous competitive advantage.
Teamwork has a real effect on people lives – at work and at home. For your organization to be more effective, your people need to get REAL with themselves and REAL with each other.
Characteristics of a Cohesvie Team
– Trust
– Transparency
– Healthy conflict
– Accountability
– Goal-Focused
– Results
– Direct
– Optimism
– Support
– Learning Environment
The Five Behaviors Framework
The Five Behaviors is a framework to get to a competitive advantage.
The process doesn’t have to be complicated. In fact, keeping it simple is critical. The reason why The Five Behaviors is so successful is because it’s sticky – meaning it’s easy to use and easy to remember.
Assessment-Based Learning Experience
One of the reasons The Five Behaviors is so powerful is that it is built with two successful models:
– The principles of behaviors that lead to effective teamwork laid out in Pat Lencioni’s bestselling book—The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.
– Personality assessment, called Everything DiSC® or All Types™, that helps you better understand yourself and how you relate to others.
Together, you get The Five Behaviors. It’s an assessment based learning program. It’s proven to help companies get business results.
How is The Five Behaviors Different?
At Wiley, product testing is taken very seriously. Products, like The Five Behaviors, are taken through vigorous beta testing.
The Five Behaviors beta testing included three rounds of beta tests, using 300+ teams, 200 organizations, all over 18 months!
If you’re wondering if this is a program you can count on, more than 3,000 participants would say ‘yes’, which is 90% of the beta participants.
The Process of The Five Behaviors
The Five Behaviors Assessment
The assessment takes approximately 15 to 20 minutes to complete online. Each team member will be emailed a link to respond to three sets of questions:
– DiSC OR All Types – what is their behavioural style.
– Questions about the specific team.
– Team culture questions.
Once the online assessment is completed, everyone on the team will get their individual and team results.
To assess team cohesion, you not only need to ask questions, but you need to ask the right questions, and The Five Behaviors gives you the right questions to ask that will lead to team discussions and action plans to improve performance.
The team culture results will provide insights on the dynamics of the group that will set the team up for success to establish team norms and a common language for future engagements with one another as a team.
As we know, behaviours only change when we take action. The Five Behaviors fosters discussion on what is going on, the current state, and helps establish plans for the future desired state. The best action planning starts with asking the right questions, facilitating dialogue around the right questions and then establishing action plans for progress.
Experience The Five Behaviors
An Overview of The Five Behaviours: Trust, Conflict, Commitment, Accountability and Results.
Trust: When team team members are genuinely transparent and honest with one another, they are able to build vulnerability-based trust: when they can admit their mistakes and their weaknesses, and when they can ask for help and say they’re sorry. As Patrick Lencioni says:
“Members of great teams trust one another on a fundamental, emotional level, and they are comfortable being vulnerable with each other about their weaknesses, mistakes, fears, and behaviors.”
Conflict: When there is trust, team members are able to engage in unfiltered, constructive debate of ideas. To achieve constructive conflict, we need attention to healthy and unhealthy behaviours, and then, as Patrick Lencioni’s says:
“Teams need to be ‘minors of conflict’ and provide ‘real time permission to engage in conflict’.”
Commitment: When team members are able to offer opinions and debate ideas, they will be more likely to commit to decisions. Committing to decisions can be transformational to teams and organizations. To be able to commit, and to avoid “unproductive discussions about an idea or a project when you leave without a clue of what the next steps are”, we need clarity and buy-in which are part of Commitment in The Five Behaviors.
Accountability: When everyone is committed to a clear plan of action, they will be more willing to hold one another accountable. The emphasis is peer-to-peer accountability, which involves giving and receiving feedback. When teams engage in The Five Behaviors, they have the opportunity to set up norms and discuss what acceptable and unacceptable feedback looks like, and provide and give permission for feedback amongst the team.
Results: For a team to excel, all members must be willing to put the team’s goals ahead of any individual goals. Teams that focus on collective results:
– Avoid distractions.
– Minimize individualistic behaviours.
– Are bothered by losses to competitors.
– Take personal responsibility to fix problems.
– Celebrate success.
– Retain achievement-oriented members.
– Point out each other’s contributions.
– Are willing to sacrifice for the team.
How Can You Implement The Five Behaviors with Your Team?
We can help with all the resources:
– Facilitation
– Videos
– Participant resources
– Facilitator resources
– The Five Behaviours Assessment and Report
– The Five Behaviours Progress Report (recommended to do between six and 12 months after the initial program delivery)
How To Get Started Using the Five Behaviors?
Two options available:
– We have programs that can certify you or someone within your organization to facilitate the program.
– You can have Hone Consulting accredited facilitators facilitate the program for your team and organization.
Why Does The Five Behaviors Work?
– It surfaces issues.
– It gives the team a common language and process to talk about issues.
– Builds trust and courage on teams.
– Helps team members take and internalize ownership.
Next Steps
Please contact Hone Consulting any time, with any and all questions that you have.
Vancouver: 778.370.5555
Victoria: 250.413.3170
TF: 1.855.438.9565
clientcare@honeconsulting.com
We look forward to any future opportunities that we have to connect and to work together, and for us to be able to serve you and your organization with making your team(s) more cohesive, more extraordinary and developing teamwork as your competitive advantage.