Module 26 – High Performing Teams

How did you get on yesterday thinking about teams and the team that you are in? Hopefully you’ve got some ideas now about the strengths and weaknesses of your team and are ready to start. Looking at what good teamwork really consists of and the areas that you need to focus in on. Now we’re going to draw on the work of Patrick Lencioni again, adjusting it slightly to look at the five essential behaviours of a team, and today it’s about getting to grips with those and understanding those before we start to look at how we might apply those. And what is perhaps the areas for you to focus in on with your team, so running through them, the first essential behaviour of a good team is trust. Trust between team members that allows them to be totally open and honest. That allows people to feel part of the team, feel unthreatened, feel close to their team members that they can share, and the test here is whether they feel able. To be really open, almost vulnerable in their openness with their colleagues, and when we get to a state of that level of trust, we know that we’ve got a solid team. The second area of the second essential behaviour, then, is the ability to use constructively conflict within the team and what we mean by that is the ability to be able to challenge colleagues, to discuss things robustly. And that is essential. Uh, sorry. And then big trust is essential so that we can achieve that state where we can debate robustly but then agree at the end that we can move forward having had that debate, had that creative use constructive. Use of conflict and then build on that, having achieved A deeper level of understanding and commitment to whatever the team’s answer is. And that is the essential behaviour. #3 is commitment once we’ve achieved trust and we’ve used constructively conflict, it’s then the team is able to commit, commit deeply and powerfully to the agreed course of action. And everybody does that. Fourthly, then, is accountability and this is fundamental in terms of a team going from an average ordinary team through to being a really high performing one. It’s that everybody holds each other accountable to the commitments that they’ve made. They bring them back online. They hold them to that higher standard and they get them all focusing in. And indeed it reaches a situation where people will want to let down the team. They will feel it’s essential that they perform and they perform as they’ve all agreed. And finally, the 5th essential behaviour is a results orientation. The it’s the attention to detail. That gets people focusing on the results, the results of the whole team have agreed and everybody works towards that being held to account by their colleagues, not just being busy but actually delivering the results that have been agreed. So we’ve got. Trust. We’ve got constructive use of conflict, commitment, accountability and attention to results. If those five areas are present. Then you’ll have a high performing team, but let’s not underestimate it. These are not easy to achieve. So tomorrow we’ll talk about in the next segment, the next module we’ll talk about. How we might get there and where the importance lies. But for today, read the material, understand. And as you go around your business, look and learn and see if you can see these things in work or in action, or whether there are areas to improve. So go observing and tomorrow we’ll wrap this up with how we move forward on making your team into a really high performing. Best of luck with today’s activity.