What’s Preventing You From Building Effective Teams?
Even if you are not a Basketball fan you may have learned about Michael Jordan’s best leadership quote which is “Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships”. A team brings a lot of energy to the organization moreover it is the greatest driver of long-lasting success. As an African proverb goes by “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” Very few can be accomplished by working alone when compared to what a great team can deliver. A successful business has a huge capacity for merging diverse talents into a diverse team where every teammate trusts himself and his peers, brings up the best in him, and commits to what he’s doing delivering great results. Without shared commitment, gathering the best talents in a team renders them into a group of talents, enthusiasts, highly energetic, but without a common goal thus ineffective.
Patrick Lencioni, the author of famous management books among them The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable, emphasizes that in order to have your team members aligned towards a common goal you need to have five elements put together in a mandatory sequence. The absence of any of these elements prevents you from getting to the next level and thus becomes a dysfunction of the whole process of reaching a successful team. Putting together talented employees, experienced executives, renowned experts, great processes, and the latest technology does not guarantee great results.
The Lencioni model consists of 5 elements that build cohesion in a team and makes it functional. Those five elements include in order of priority Trust, Conflict, Commitment, Accountability, and Results. Each element is a necessary condition for the existence of the next element. Any missing element will affect the consecutive ones and makes the team dysfunctional.
Trust is the most essential element of building a team and therefore should not be absent. Teammates must be open to each other, understand each other, and each other’s weaknesses in order to stand for each other. The fear of conflict should be overcome when we have trust and it shifts into becoming a passion for the pursuit of truth and bringing up the best possible answer in every situation. Without becoming able to break the fear of conflict teams cannot have commitment and teammates become passive in every situation where a conflict arises. When you have commitment everybody buys in and tackling accountability becomes common practice where everybody has the courage to confront others when they are performing badly or behaving in a way that is not aligned with the common interest. Finally, when teammates hold each other accountable they have greater attention to the results that collectively improve the team’s ability to achieve and deliver.