The Elite Team Strategy

From box ticking to true teamwork

When it comes to teaming and improving collaboration, the following scenario appears quite common:

— The request: “We need something in order to improve collaboration…”

— The solution: An “off-site” team meeting with a team social contract at its end.

— The result: Quite often a few initiatives and then after a while, things erode.

— The problem: Missing criteria and missing metrics to measure the real outcome.

By all means, team events are essential and important. And the more the Covid situation forces us to stay in isolation and social distance, the more our human brain asks for being social. But the real problem is the following: You can’t build Elite Teams in a few focused hours. We define Elite Teams as teams, where exceptional results are the outcome of a 100% alignment of:

• The joint vision and understanding of the value the team creates
• A joint & resilient strategy and a plan how to execute
• A clear understanding and agreement on how the team get commissioned
• A commitment to joint learning and improvement
• A place where personalities meet and thrive

In our experience having worked with 100+ teams, you cannot get there as a by-product and in environments, where team-constellations are changing frequently. If that strategy worked, every football club would replace daily training practice with a two day offsite at the beginning of the season. Strong teams are the result of daily practice: Training + real life execution.

The Truth About Elite Teams – They Train Daily

Teaming is more and more important. Organizations are required to become more adaptable to external effects and need teams that can mobilize themselves across any boundaries quickly. Strong organizations are those where hierarchies are replaced by virtual networks of teams—or in the words of Author Stanley McChristal: A team of teams.

To weather a crisis, build a network of teams – McKinsey

A lot has been written and researched about the characteristics of elite teams. It all comes down to unlock the potential of human beings—and based on how our brains work, the formula is simple: Elite teams are the outcome of repetitive and focused strategizing, problem solving, reflecting and strict execution. Team members know each other in and out. They know each others' strengths, weaknesses, passion and they are OK to be vulnerable and admit mistakes.

In order to achieve this stage of team building—we mean a team which is eager, capable and allowed to win gold—you need to make team building the focus of daily interactions and reflections. Therefore—like a sports team—you need a training field, where teams can practice and where it is OK to experiment, to reflect, to fail and to repeat, repeat, repeat—therefore it needs to be “fun”.

Organizational performance: It's a team sport – Deloitte

CinQFive – Your Elite Team Academy

CinQFive is a game-based simulation for building highest-performing teams—your training field. CinQFive is called an ELITE TEAM ACADEMY. A place to practice while the team continuously measures its own performance while transferring the lessons learned directly to the workplace.

OK, let’s get started explaining why this works and how it works:

#Training: Operating an everyday training ground for leaders and teams

Designed as a testing ground for leaders and teams to work with coaches, CinQFive is a challenging, deeply collaborative, exciting action learning, 5?person coach-led video game which tests the participants ability to think creatively across a range of problems, collaborate and communicate effectively, take risks, make decisions and persevere when faced with failure. Teams can play as often as they like. It is their training field.

#Teamskills: The aim is to close the “team-power skills” gap

Leadership, teamwork, collaboration, communicating, planning, learning-to-learn, action-orientation, adaptability, agile thinking, are often called soft skills. We call them “team-power skills”, they are the DNA which enables transformation, growth, creativity, innovation, revenue growth and success. It is a misnomer that they are soft.

Let’s Stop Talking About Soft Skills: They’re Power Skills – Josh Bersin

CinQFive is designed to prepare your people in the mindset and “power skills” necessary to operate as a high-performance culture. Our aspiration is to humanize leadership and teamwork for the sake of better outcomes; it is not to turn you into a gamer, it is to enable individuals and teams to thrive.

#Humanizing: A place where teamwork and leadership is humanized

Our approach was to create a place, where “the true self” comes out and where there is laughter, critical thinking as well as team and individual reflection. Our approach to combine coaching and gaming invites for leadership- and team conversations that deepen relationships while breakthrough-thinking happens. A place where hierarchy and ego is replaced with the essence of collaboration: Dialogue.

#Design: CinQFive is designed for non-gamers

The game is a vehicle. Like a football player does not need to be an expert in green-keeping, leaders and teams do not need to be gamers. In the moment, we observe that participants let go of their reservation against “gaming” on hold and explore its possibilities, surprises happen. They show similar behaviors like in real life and they see how quickly they make significant progress as they suddenly see real data measuring their team performance.

#Coaching: Coach your team from within CinQFive

Great teams have coaches. We have built into CinQ an additional role for Coaches—be it an external coach and/ or a team member. The coach has access to all the player screens as well as the audio and text chat, and can see where they are throughout the game workflow, including when they complete the built-in 360 team and individual feedback module. The coach is facilitating high quality reflections and connects the in-game behaviors with the real world.

#Scalability: Building a network of elite teams

We are big fans of scalability: You can play this game as a single team solution, or you can scale it throughout and entire organizations. You can compare results across teams. You can rotate team members from team to team with the objective to build one cohesive and coherent team culture.

The temptation to lead as a chess master, controlling each move of the organization, must give way to an approach as a gardener, enabling rather than directing. A gardening approach to leadership is anything but passive. The leader acts as an “Eyes-On, Hands-Off” enabler who creates and maintains an ecosystem in which the organization operates. – Stanley McChrystal

The solution is giving you the flexibility to both choose the scale of the roll?out from, 5 to 1 000s, and the time and place, 24×7; CinQ is designed to run on most computers and with dynamically changing content it is “like ten games in one”.

#Monitoring: CinQ is a reflection of the team’s collaborative capabilities

CinQ is a high-performance leadership & teamwork scenario. How you operate and work together is a reflection of the team’s collaborative capabilities. In fact, the actual scenario begins before the game starts:

• How does the team organize itself prior to playing the game?
• How does the team make the transition from preparation to execution?
• How does the team actually determine success?
• How does the team deal with set-backs, communication issues and unexpected new situations?
• Does the team have a plan B? Do they have decision-, communication-, learning protocols?

We usually see after 5-10 min in the game the gaps and we can also identify the team’s ability to move the needle quickly. Each time we see teams playing we are sitting there and are fascinated. And: The real excitement for the coach comes when the first round of reflection starts with the question “where else in your daily life does this show up?” …

#Growth: Stepping out of your comfort zone

Both for the team and the coaches locating yourself in the learn to learn cycle and forming/storming/… process is important because it gives context to the feelings of negativity, doubt and fear that can arise when you are learning something new for the first time. Feeling that you are like a fish out of the water, feeling deskilled, scared to make mistakes, not wanting to make errors is quite normal at this stage. Helping people find the confidence to stay with it and work through their feelings and regain their confidence is the key to developing new skills.

#VUCA: Being able to deal with new situations where pre-configured answers are not available

The CinQFive workflow then offers a mirror of how you will operate in the real world, it asks questions from you, such as “What do you do when it doesn’t work?” and equally “What do you do when there is no one to tell you what to do?”, “What do you do when nobody is listening to each-other?”, “What do you do when somebody loses communication?”, “Where else in your daily life does this behavior show up?”.

CinQFive further provokes questions of you such as “Can you create workarounds?”, “Can you work together?”, “Can you establish routines?”, “Can you agree a direction?”, “Can you make a plan?”, “Can you agree an objective?”, “Can you execute a plan?”; it is above all a test of your resilience and perseverance when faced with failure and things going wrong.

#Monitoring: Holding up the mirror: The skills-matrix

To put this into context, we created a skills matrix across 4 dimensions that are measured 1–5, 1 being no visible demonstration of behavior, 5 being “best in class”. These are:

1. How well did the team in creating a joint direction/ vision?
2. How well does the team communicate and collaborate?
3. How well did the team problem-solve and decide?
4. How well have they executed their strategy?

And here is the clue: The skills-matrix is flexible, adjustable and customizable to reflect the competency and leadership framework of any organization.

Three Observations and Insights:

1. Fail to plan, plan to fail

In our experience CinQFive’s value for clients, through teamwork and leadership coaching for high-performance, is based around whether you have or don’t have routines and protocols to plan and execute and be disciplined about them. This is the key difference.

The traditional concept of leadership, with its emphasis on hierarchy and command-and-control, is now being replaced by self-directed teamwork. This doesn’t mean to say that there aren’t leaders or managers, but that leaders and managers now become coaches and facilitators and that the governing DNA of the team is soft skills protocols, meeting processes and decision-making structures. The job of the manager-coach is to help teams implement and traverse the operational side of their business using these protocols. Whether it is a supermarket, a factory or a financial organization, the very process of teamwork is the same.

2. The role of difficulty in business coaching and sports coaching

Why is it that in business we focus on making training and workshops easy and that the measurement of a successful training session is that the participants give a positive review and are happy in their feedback?

Can you possibly imagine a scenario in which the job of a sports coach was to ensure that the participants were happy? If you wish to improve performance to a high level, then you have to train hard and frequently. Making mistakes is the only way that you improve performance. Every mistake is a step on the journey towards high performance.

3. Great teams are practicing, practicing, practicing

The CinQFive solution brings business training in line with sports training: Proven leadership and team frameworks, highly experienced (Executive) Coaches and a game that identifies the gaps between an “OK team” and an “Elite Team”. A scenario where the moments of truth are happening through coaching-like conversations. Safe places where routines, habits, development and needs and strengths are reflected, analyzed and execution happens. A training field, where transitions are made into real life and where regular measurement and pulse-checks let you know where the team is standing on its way towards becoming an Elite Team.

So-What ?

In our experience of being leaders of businesses, being coaches and trainers and even sports coaches at an Olympic Center, we got energy and fulfillment from those who embraced the challenge to crack the code of leadership- and teamwork. In essence: Those who were committed made it. Those who wanted to call themselves a team or a champion but were assuming that this is the byproduct of hard work, failed. Guess what creates more fun—for both, the coach and the “athlete” …

With CinQFive we are entering the world of esports and we bring this multi-billion dollar “thing” to the business world. While working with the first Elite Teams, the next iteration of training fields for leaders, teams & special units is under construction—to allow them to become as good as the idols and heroes they watch on TV: the pros under the athletes.

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About the authors and CinQFive

Disruptive Learning Solutions: A Paris based tech-company creating a new low cost (SaaS based pricing) tool focused on collaborative learning and soft skills at scale, for Coaches, Leaders and Teams to work remotely and enter the 21 Century.

QFIVE95: A Munich based Leadership Development company with the aim to humanize & futurize leadership through better interactions. A global network of highly experienced facilitators and coaches creating evidence-based learning experiences through innovative learning design.

CinQFive is the result of a multiple-year journey, here is our story in 30 seconds:

2 people calling themselves Tobi (one with an i at the end the other, Toby Coop with a y at the end met and clicked and moved forward along their passion to make a difference to individuals, leaders, teams.

2 organizations with a Q in the center of their name have been created and both have created amazing solutions and love to demystify leadership and teamwork. CinQFive is not coincidence, it is the result of purposefully challenging the status quo for the sake of better leadership.