Building Teams

Many organizations do not have the resources to provide robust onboarding for new leaders. I’m amazed at some of the talented leaders I work with who are essentially self-taught, learning management and leadership on the job by watching and learning from others without any formal training.

Many teams do nothing formal to build the team culture and strengthen collaboration. Today, I’ll provide a low-cost, high-reward strategy I’ve seen several leaders use to help build a high-performing team.

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

I recommend using Patrick Lencioni’s timeless classic, The Five Dysfunctions of A Team, as a resource for strengthening your team. Lencioni is a master of the leadership fable, illustrating his model for high-performing teams with a fictional story that brings the model alive. I recommend buying each team member a copy of the book and leading a series of working sessions around the dysfunctions.

Session 1 – Building Trust (Absence of Trust)*

Pre-Read: Chapters 1-4

Building high trust across the team is foundational to the rest of the model. Lencioni talks of vulnerability-based trust. Each team member is willing to be vulnerable in front of the others. They are willing to share things that could be used against them and trust their team members not to do so.

For example, on a team with high trust, when someone makes a mistake, they are comfortable sharing it with the team, looking to them for support in overcoming it and allowing everyone to learn from it. When trust is low, the team member may sweep their mistake under the rug, and another team member could make the same mistake the following week.

My Understanding Trust blog post offers an additional resource to support your discussion.

A great exercise to build trust is Lencioni’s Personal Histories exercise, described in the back of the book.

Session 2 – Mastering Conflict (Fear of Conflict)

Pre-Read: Chapters 5-7

Team members can engage in unfiltered, constructive debate when you have high trust. A team that has no conflict is not a high-performing team. There will always be conflicts. Effective teams surface the conflict and have a healthy debate to resolve the conflict. Ineffective teams avoid conflict and leave the issue unresolved.

Lencioni suggests identifying someone on the team to “mine” conflict, deliberately identifying and surfacing conflicts that are not being discussed. You can also work with your team to create ground rules to support healthy conflict.

I’ve found a DiSC workshop to be particularly effective in helping team members understand each other’s style and more readily engage in productive conflict.

I also encourage team leaders to make it a habit to speak last, not first, to allow for ideas to be surfaced more readily. My Great Leaders Speak Last post is a cautionary tale in this area.

Session 3 – Achieving Commitment (Lack of Commitment)

Pre-Read: Chapters 8-9

When team members can offer opinions and debate ideas, they will be more likely to commit to decisions. Sometimes, the team does not reach consensus, but the discussion creates clarity and supports buy-in for the team.

Sometimes, a leader decides to spare their team the time and energy of debate on an issue and declares their decision up front. While this may feel like the best use of everyone’s time, if some team members disagree, they may not be committed to the decision. This scenario is ripe for passive-aggressive behavior.

The fist of five is a technique I love to achieve commitment when a team can’t reach a consensus. Ask each team member to hold up one to five fingers, showing their support for the decision:

• Five: I love it.
• Four: I like it and support it.
• Three: I have reservations, but I can live with it.
• Two: I have concerns that the team needs to discuss.
• One: I have serious concerns that I need to discuss with the leader one-on-one, not in front of the team (hopefully, the “one” finger is not the middle finger).

If there are any one-finger responses, the group takes a break, and the leader talks with those team members individually. If there are two-finger responses, the team discusses their concerns.

A simplified version of this is thumbs-up, thumbs-down, or thumbs-neutral.

Session 4 – Embracing Accountability (Avoidance of Accountability)

Pre-Read: Chapter 10

When everyone is committed to a clear plan of action, they can better hold one another accountable. Team members must be willing to call one another on behavior or performance that isn’t up to agreed-on standards or hurts the team.

I consider this to be the most challenging area of the model. It also brings the greatest rewards when done well.

Many teams look to the team leader to hold everyone accountable. If there is an issue, a team member reports it to the team leader and asks them to solve it. If someone is underperforming, team members look the other way and expect the team leader to address it (whether or not the team leader is aware of the issue).

In high-performing teams, everyone is committed to the same shared result, and team members are willing to speak to each other directly and hold each other accountable without pulling the leader in. This requires high trust, and when done well, each team member supports others far more effectively than reporting issues to the boss.

Strengthening the team's feedback muscles is a great way to reinforce this. This includes creating an environment that encourages feedback and being mindful about how we deliver feedback.

I knew I had a team that had mastered accountability when my leaders took it upon themselves to schedule a weekly meeting that didn’t include me. They recognized they could resolve many of their issues more effectively if I was not in the room, freeing my time up for the handful of the problems that truly needed me. They held each other accountable. I’m sure many of those leaders are reading this now. You know who you are. That was one of my most memorable teams.

Session 5 – Focusing on Results (Inattention to Results)

Pre-Read: Remainder of the book

The ultimate goal of building greater trust, healthy conflict, commitment, and accountability is the achievement of results. Team members need to make collective results their top priority.

Lencioni describes the notion of your First Team. As a leader, it is human nature to think of the team that reports to you as your first team and consider the team you are a member of as a secondary team. Lencioni suggests we switch this thinking around. Your first team is your peers and your boss. Your second team is the team that reports to you.

With this notion of first team, we can more easily focus on collective results for that team rather than thinking in silos about the results that matter to the team that reports to us.

A powerful tool to support this thinking is creating a team dashboard or scorecard that reports collective metrics for the first team rather than separate metrics for each “second” team.

Consider the leadership team for a customer support organization. With first-team thinking, we look at the metrics for the entire support organization. Everyone is focused on how to improve those metrics for the organization. Without this thinking, we might report support metrics for each product independently. This results in each team only worrying about their product and not focusing on the collective results of the entire organization.

Putting It Into Practice

Use this post as a guide for a do-it-yourself series of team-building sessions. If you’d like the support of an experienced facilitator, schedule time with me to explore options.

Walkabout Corner

This weekend, I visited Taos on my way to Colorado. Taos is known for its energy vortexes, and I wanted to see if I could connect with them. As the Universe does, my vortex appeared in an unexpected way.

I hiked the Devisadero Trail, and as I neared the peak, the sky filled with 100 ravens** (if you struggle to identify birds as I do, the Merlin app is a must-have). They emerged from the far mountain, and many flew overhead as I continued to hike. I watched a pair fly together in what alternately looked like dancing, playing, and fighting, coming together and apart as they flew. Ravens sat in the trees above me, and ravens circled overhead, calling. It was magical, and I wanted to stand and soak in the experience all day.

Odin is known for his ravens. I think he's sending a message that he's watching over me, and the dance of the pair of ravens symbolizes the dance of duality between body and spirit as we seek to integrate the two.

As I finished my day exploring the town, I was met by one last raven, reminding me to remain open to whatever the Universe brings.

I am an executive coach and life coach with software executive roots in higher education and EdTech. I coach because I love to help others accelerate their growth as leaders and humans. I frequently write about #management, #leadership, #coaching, #neuroscience, and #arete.

If you would like to learn more, schedule time with me.

* I prefer to describe the model positively, so I’ve listed each section with a positive framing of the “dysfunction” followed by Lencioni's language in the book.

** As always, my cinematography leaves much to be desired. The videos and photos do little to capture the experience.