Healthy, high-performing teams are the critical factor in winning and losing in business today. Here’s how to make your team better.
I sat down this past week to make a few notes on upcoming Snippet topics when my 12-year old daughter, Jane, popped into my office. She asked me what I was doing, and I told her.
I said I was specifically thinking about what I could write on the subject of teams. Teams have been a hot topic lately among clients.
“You know what team stands for, Dad?” Jane asked.
“No, what?” I said.
“Together Everyone Achieves More,” she said. “We have it up on the wall in our classrooms at school.”
Simple, clear and memorable, right? Applicable for 6th grade, or any grade in life for that matter. Thank you, Jane.
This little exchange reminded me of another authority on the subject of teams: Patrick Lencioni. Lencioni’s The Table Group consulting firm uses the tagline “simple wisdom for organizations.”
His 2002 best-seller “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” describes some classic team problems, and ways to combat them.
The Five Dysfunctions are:
- Absence of trust. Stems from a lack of vulnerability and genuine openness about mistakes and weaknesses.
- Fear of conflict. Teams that lack trust aren’t able to engage in a unfiltered debate of ideas.
- Lack of commitment. Without honest opinions and trust, team members rarely buy in and commit to decisions.
- Avoidance of accountability. Without trust and buy in, it’s difficult to call peers on counterproductive actions and behaviors.
- Inattention to results. Team members put status and ego above the collective goals of the team.
Lencioni has since added to his body of work on the subject by publishing a new book “The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything.”
Here’s his business case on why organizational health is key:
All the competitive advantages we’ve been pursuing during our careers are gone. That’s right. Strategy. Technology. Finance. Marketing. Gone.
That’s because virtually every organization, of any size, has access to the best thinking and practices around strategy, technology and those other topics. In this age of the internet, as information has become ubiquitous, it’s almost impossible to sustain an advantage based on intellectual ideas.
However, there is one remaining, untapped competitive advantage out there, and it’s more important than all the others ever were. It is simple, reliable and virtually free. What I’m talking about is organizational health.
How do you overcome the dysfunctions? According to Lencioni, there are four simple but difficult steps. They include:
- Build a Cohesive Leadership Team – If the people responsible for running an organization behave in dysfunctional ways, then that dysfunction will cascade into the rest of the organization and prevent organizational health.
- Create Clarity – Leaders need to be clear on topics such as why the organization exists and what its most important priority is for the next few months. Again it’s critical to be clear at the top, so that people one, two or three levels below have complete clarity about what they should do.
- Over-Communicate Clarity – Leaders of a healthy organization constantly repeat themselves and reinforce what is true and important. They always err on the side of saying too much, rather than too little.
- Reinforce Clarity – Finally, leaders must ensure that the answers to the questions “Why do we exist?” and “How do we behave?” are repeatedly reinforced using simple human systems. That means any process that involves people, from hiring and firing to performance management and decision-making, is designed in a custom way to intentionally support and emphasize the uniqueness of the organization.
Healthy organizations weather storms better, attract the best people, and finds ways to win no matter what.
Create clarity, communicate early and often, and build human systems around core beliefs and goals in order to build your company’s one true competitive advantage: an environment for success.
Have a great week.
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