A HEALTHY TEAM HAS THESE DYNAMICS

Recently, I have had the opportunity to dismantle two existing teams and create one team – one that will deliver our vision of business impacting partnering and HR excellence. Whilst my initial focus was on ensuring and selecting team members who have the right level of aptitude and attitude, with the team members now on-board, I have begun to shift to (1) creating a healthy team and (2) readying my successor.

My personal belief is that we are now living in world where collaborating is a premium and is a must have super-ingredient to deliver business or performance success. I believe that creating a healthy team goes beyond my competence as a leader, but it would need me to behave – first, as best as possible select the right team members; second, lead more, manage less; and third, it’s an evergreen leadership model I learnt during my Procter & Gamble days, i.e. envision, engage and enable the team.

I do not know absolutely everything about building the healthy team, and honestly despite voluminous literature about team effectiveness and dynamics, we have only made some advances. I have just read about Leadership-Team dynamics that existed in great and fallen companies in the book, How The Mighty Fall by Jim Collins that I thought is worth sharing – because I am definitely heeding what Jim wrote in ensuring a healthy team to deliver sustained business success.

Here are the team dynamics ‘on the way up’ as Jim put it.

• People bring forth unpleasant facts – “Come here, look, this is ugly” – to be discussed; leaders never criticize those who bring forth harsh realities.
• People bring data, evidence, logic, and solid arguments to the discussion.
• The team leader employs a Socratic style, using a high questions-to-statements ratio, challenging people, and pushing for penetrating insight.
• Team members unify behind a decision once made and work to make the decision success, even if they vigorously disagreed with the decision.
• Each team member credits other people for success yet enjoys the confidence and admiration of his or her peers.
• Team members argue and debate, not to improve their personal position, but to find the best answers to support the overall cause.
• The team conducts “autopsies without blame,” mining wisdom from painful experiences.
• Each team member delivers exceptional results, yet in the event of a setback, each accepts full responsibility and learns from mistakes.

I hope the above stirs deep cognitive dissonances in you as much as it did in me. One thing that is clear, as a team leader I need to bring to the team the right questions more than the right answers – an epiphany for me??.

Going forward, with these in mind I plan to be a student who observes these dynamics played out in my team – building healthy teams is not just an aspect of ensuring sustained business success, it is sustained business success. Have fun with it.