Creating and maintaining high-functioning teams requires leaders willing to try new approaches. We’re all familiar with the saying that nothing worthwhile is easy — but data shows that high-functioning teams offer organizations a higher return on their recruiting, training, and retention investments, making the effort worthwhile. Did you know that high-functioning teams have been measured to…
Achieve more with less, demonstrating enhanced productivity and efficiency.
Take risks, share ideas, and foster innovation and creativity.
Have strong collaboration skills with greater problem solving capacity.
Feel valued and empowered, leading to greater job satisfcation and employee engagement.
Inspire trust and mutual support through a postive workplace culture.
Learn from setbacks and become better equipped to handle unexpected challenges.
Build stronger customer relationships.
Author Patrick Lencioni describes a few basic team-building principles in his work, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. While simple to understand, consistently applying these ideas takes commitment. Lencioni’s framework creates a structure with each principle building on the one before, creating a step-by-step strategy for mastering one concept before moving on to the next. Below, we summarize the key principles as a complement to EnsuriseHR’s webinar session on Building High Functioning Teams.
Trust is Foundational
Trust is the foundation of leadership and teamwork, as anyone who has participated in an exceptional team environment knows well. While building trust takes time, the process can be greatly accelerated when these three factors are consistently present:
Competence. The team sees the leader as an expert, and one who generously spotlights the expertise and confidence of other team members.
Integrity. Leading by example, the team leader is transparent, trustworthy, and reinforces positive team behaviors.
Benevolence. The leader creates an environment where people want to be, with respectful social activities that establish emotional ties and build relationships.
Sometimes, individuals bring past negative workplace experiences to the team. These team members will need to see that the leaders and the rest of the team are trustworthy before they can believe it — and that won’t happen overnight. Make a commitment to earning their trust, then be patient. Building trust takes consistent, positive actions over time.
Constructive Conflict is Essential
Without debate, good ideas are missed and bad ideas are executed. Even a very low-conflict workplace needs to support constructive disagreement about ideas. When your team always agrees, you can be sure that they are either disengaged or holding back. Engaging in unfiltered, passionate debate around issues— not personal attacks— may be a little uncomfortable, but it’s possible to disagree without being disagreeable. Healthy conflict among team members requires trust.
Establish your organizational culture’s norms and expectations around conflict to keep fear of disagreement from deterring regular, productive debate. A skilled manager will facilitate the discussion through focused listening, finding common ground and coaching the team through the collaboration needed to achieve resolution.
Failing to build these skills causes the team to work around the leader, creating frustration between team members and unhealthy conflict. Utilize these strategies encourage healthy conflict:
1 | Recognize the natural conflict styles on your team, and reference them openly. Offer generous praise for participating in constructive discussions about ideas and taking the risk to share differing points of view.
2 | Establish common ground rules for expressing opinions in an open, honest, respectful way. Then practice using them, ecouraging and supporting your team in healthy debate about ideas. Listen carefully to the ideas and acknowledge them without judgement.
3 | Remind the team that conflict around ideas is a creativity generator! Productive conflict allows a variety of perspectives and ideas to be heard so a winning solution can come to the forefront. At it’s core, conflict is always about solving a problem.
4 | To keep the conversation constructive, ask open-ended questions that keep people engaged, and maintain calm, solution-focused behaviors. Inquire about why to really understand and guide the conversation towards common ground that most can genuinely support.
5 | Highly competitive team members care deeply, but score keeping between one another is counterproductive. Don’t be afraid to pause or parking lot sticky issues and try again to get everyone growing in the same direction.
While one of the hardest steps to actualize, once a team has some direction on how to handle conflict they are prepared to consistently achieve commitment.
Commit to an Idea
Everyone craves unanimous agreement, but this can slow the pace of work to a problematic level. Leaders coach their teams to achieve alignment, not agreement. It requires understanding a decision has been made and each member of the team is committed to implementing that decision. These are actionable strategies that allow the team, even those with dissenting opinions, to achieve commitment.
Communicate.The leader must clearly communicate the big picture goal, the rationale for the decision, and the individual deliverables needed to meet the goal.
Support. Provide the resources and support to help the team succeed, and celebrate achievements along the way specifically and authentically.
Track. Update deliverables in a structured, consistent way. Use the tools that your organization provides to ensure agendas, deadlines, action items, and follow ups are clear and understood by the whole team.
Review. As a leader who has achieved commitment, ensure that these commitments are confirmed.
Commitment & Accountability Go Hand-in-Hand
A desire to avoid interpersonal discomfort often prevents team members from holding one another accountable. On high-functioning teams, accountability occurs directly among peers while the leader demonstrates a willingness to confront difficult issues. The best opportunity for holding one another accountable occurs during regular reviews of individual and team scorecards.
Regardless of your style, find a way to ensure each person on your team knows what is expected. The work starts with establishing job duties, deliverables, and team goals — making sure that the team knows both what needs to be done and the standards for delivery. Once there is clarity in these areas, there’s a foundation for regularly discussing progress (or lack of progress). An employee-driven one-on-one creates a cadence of accountability. The employee owns responsibility for the deliverables while the leader reconfirms strategies and deadlines. When someone misses a deadline or task, reference this agreement to discuss how to fix it.
Ensure Everyone Works Toward the Same Objectives
Goals help connect daily tasks to the larger organizational strategy. When the team understands the purpose of their work and has a say in setting the goals, they become more engaged, motivated, and invested. The desire for individual credit erodes the focus on collective success, so the leader must focus on what the team is trying to achieve, rather than any members’ personal interest.
Keeping score creates structural tension — the gap between where you are and where you want to be – and it’s a known motivator for high-functioning teams. Establish a scoreboard that makes progress visible, fosters accountability, offers benchmarks for improvement, and enables celebration of the achievements.
If leaders are going to invest in developing high-performance teams, they need to exercise some important skills that make winning more unachievable. Applying Lencioni’s strategies will guide your organization in unlocking precisely the sort of leadership that gives birth to high-functioning teams.