Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team:
Most work within organizations occurs through teams. Placing groups of people together to accomplish a goal does not necessarily constitute a team. Teams require individual members to work toward goal collective accomplishment. The Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team development program provides your teams with the skills necessary to achieve collective greatness.
The program requires the team to take an anonymous team survey to uncover the current level of team engagement. The assessment provides feedback to the team about how well the team dynamic occurs for the group. The assessment sets the stage for the development of the Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team.
Trust:
Trust forms the foundation of effective teams. Without trust, the team becomes mired in distrust and conflict, or team members go silent to stay out of harm’s way. The Five Behaviors program uses team exercises to enable participants to develop vulnerability-based trust that creates the capacity to admit mistakes, ask for help, and apologize for missteps. Vulnerability-based trust helps team members engage with each other without worry and fear. Our program adds exercises to develop psychological safety to help team members engage in the lively and direct debate of ideas. Trust and Psychological Safety create the foundation for the second of the five behaviors: Productive Conflict.
Productive Conflict:
Production and sometimes contentious discussions need to occur to develop the best plans and solutions. Productive Conflict focuses on the generation of concepts and ideas to enable the creation of the optimal solution. To engage in productive conflict, team members must develop psychological safety and enough trust to engage in open and honest dialogue. The Five Behaviors training program will provide the team with the insights necessary to participate in constructive and productive conflict to generate the best possible solutions to the organization’s pressing problems.
Team Commitment
By engaging in productive conflict, the team comes to a common understanding of the direction, priorities, and actions required to achieve the goal. Team commitment occurs naturally after the team actively debates the ideas while allowing all team members to weigh in on the discussion. Without the ability to weigh in on the discussion, commitment becomes problematic as team members feel unheard or dismissed. Commitment involves creating clarity and buy-in about how to move forward. Commitment does not mean consensus necessarily. If all team members weigh in, they often accept the decision even if it differs from their own. When the team is committed to and agrees to a course of action, the team can engage in the third discipline: accountability.
Accountability
All three behaviors of developing trust between teammates, engaging in productive conflict, and committing to a course of action are necessary to enact the fourth behavior: holding each other accountable. When all team members commit to the achievement of a common result, the team can hold each other accountable for accomplishing results. In the highest-performing teams, teammates hold each other accountable rather than deferring the the leaders. That being said, the leader must demonstrate a willingness and ability to hold the team to account. If the leader fails to hold the team accountable, the team often defers accountability to the leader. In an exceptional team, the team uses peer pressure to encourage and hold the team members accountable, for meeting the agreed-upon objectives. The accountability module provides activities to help the team and the leader develop the skills to hold one another accountable. Development of the first four behaviors enables the team to engage in the fifth behavior: collective results.
Collective Results
Team members often place individual results, meeting individual goals or objectives ahead of the results that truly matter, the collective results of the team. By creating a culture of accountability where team members hold each other accountable, focus on the individual falls and the results of the team take on increased importance. Through this module, your team will develop the skills necessary to see that the collective team results take priority over individual results. Using a football analogy, if the offense is blocking for a passing play, and two players choose to do their own thing and block for a run, the play and team will fail. Each member of the team should be focused on the collective goal. With a focus on collective results, the team and the organization will achieve the results necessary for success.