If you have been following over the past few weeks, we have been exploring the team building model made popular by Patrick Lencioni through his book “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team,” looking specifically at the five behaviors of a cohesive team that he identified as : Trust, Conflict, Commitment, Accountability, and Results. In short, a cohesive team is one where members openly trust each another, embrace constructive conflict, commit to team decisions, hold each other accountable, and focus on achieving collective results.
Results can be defined in different ways, leading to team members chasing different priorities, which is why it is important that this model is used holistically. When the team has gone through the process of rigorously identifying what to invest resources in, and as you can imagine this process may well include some degree of conflict, it has to get to that point where the final decision is identified and promoted (or dictated) by the sponsor, and if the team has a healthy degree of trust in each other, even dissenting members can respect the final decision and go with the majority. Go with the majority towards the desired results, whether that is financial gain, market share, product launch, anything that speaks to the scorecard.
According to the Five Behaviors™ model, results are defined by collective accomplishments. Where the main focus in your team is on individual results, collective results are put at risk. In any team there is always that member who seems to shine brighter than the others, but the team has to be careful not to allow that member to focus on his or her own areas at the expense of other team members. This is where the ability to hold each other accountable comes in. Imagine, the CFO is very articulate and commands attention in the team meetings, he or she makes compelling presentations and gets favourable resolutions pertaining to his or her desired financial indicators at the expense of strategies and programmes that say for instance Marketing and HR bring to the table. You can conclude how lop-sided the result sheet would be in that scenario. Thus it is critical that if a team wants cohesion, the drive should be towards collective results.
Consider the following three factors to help in the drive towards collective results:
1. Focus on what you can control.
The one guarantee is that there will always be external factors you can’t control or even influence as a team, so let us resolve to focus on what we can control and install management mechanisms to deal with what we can’t control.
2. Gain clarity on the priority deliverables
What is that goal you need to achieve as a team to fulfil your vision and deliver on the strategy?
3. Do what matters most.
Finally, reflect on the most important goals that need to be accomplished in the next 3, 6 or 12 months. What are those? And what three specific actions can you take as a team to get closer to that goal?
It sounds very simple to do when you read it, doesn’t it? It does not have to be difficult to achieve when doing it either. Build the team according to this model and reap the results.
