Our model is a comprehensive framework for transforming workgroups into Powerful Teams. The model consists of five categories: Change, Conduct, Communication, Championing and Trust. The model is grounded in what teams do: how they respond, react, and treat each other. When all of these behaviors are present at the highest level, along with the right mindset, you get a Powerful Team.
The goal of our model is to bring performance to the peak on all sides of the pyramid. When a team has ascended one side of the pyramid, the Powerful Team starts to emerge. When they have scaled them all, they have become a Powerful Team.
Communication is how team members pass information to one another, including how they speak, the common language they develop, and the updates they share. To build Communication, teams need to practice new ways of conversing. The more straightforward, open, and honest team members are with each other, the higher and faster they can climb up the pyramid.
On Powerful Teams, every member weighs in on every decision, even those beyond their expertise. Powerful Communicators are Powerful listeners. They can tune in to what their teammates say, absorb new information, and roll with it.
Base-level Communication: Teams build their common language with vocabulary from various sources, including team goals, organizational mission statements, and team members’ catchphrases.
Moderate-level Communication: Members begin to feel free and comfortable being themselves. Counterintuitively, we see more disagreement at this level since people can be honest. Debate is constructive, a pursuit of the best idea. Members spend more time being authentic and less time choosing their words.
Powerful Communication: The evolution of healthy disagreement emerges. Team members deliver feedback without worrying that the person will become defensive or escalate the situation. Reciprocally, team members learn to take feedback as non-personal.
This is how the team behaves. Powerful Conduct is a collection of important actions that increase team effectiveness. Attaining Powerful Conduct takes a commitment to act with respect and dignity and to abide by a shared code.
Base-level Conduct: The team agrees to operate by a set of rules tied to their mission. In the early stages, external forces are still the main drivers, rather than an intrinsic desire to be part of the team.
Moderate-level Conduct: Team members begin to hold each other accountable. They engage in difficult conversations and vocalize their expectations and needs. Accountability mitigates enabling behavior, and the team shifts to a want-to mentality. As they witness the positive results of their new behaviors, the team’s motivation shifts inward.
Powerful Conduct: The team consistently follows the rules of the road, executing every action with evidence of intentionality. When Change rocks the team, be it a missed commitment, restructuring, or organizational force, the standards are resumed and refined quickly, efficiently, and with an enthusiasm that shows the underlying motivation.
Championing means supporting your teammates. This happens through words and actions inside and outside the meeting. When opinions differ (which often occurs on a Powerful Team since members are empowered to speak their minds), teammates methodically work through challenging debate. When the dust settles, members get on board with the agreed initiative, supporting the effort as if it were their idea. The process involves forfeiting ego and prioritizing team success. Outside the room, there is total unity – all teammates, even those who disagreed passionately, Champion the decision.
Base-level Championing: The awkwardness of joining a new group eases. Everyone starts to operate together, build an internal sense of community, and stop worrying about outsiders’ opinions. Team meetings become more interactive and lively. Each member takes space to voice their ideas and the opportunity to vote on the next steps. These ideational back-and-forths, conducted with intention and respect, begin to build camaraderie.
Moderate-level Championing: Team members begin to realign their loyalties. Silos disappear as team members stop battling for their self-interests. Interaction between team members continues to increase, becoming informal and friendly. These dynamic changes begin to extend to the support departments and eventually throughout the company.
Powerful Championing: A Powerful Team responds to personality clashes by ensuring that the team stays intact and functional. Consistently supporting good ideas, despite interpersonal friction, characterizes Powerful Championing. Members can say, Although I disagree with this idea, we agreed on it, so I am all in. They emerge from the conference room (in person or virtual) as a united front.
The Change domain defines a team’s ability to respond to internal and external forces that shift the team’s direction, form, and attention.
Base-Level: They start to get into a groove, establish a cadence, and agree on rules. After deciding on the rules, the next and more difficult step is changing how they act.
Moderate Level: The adjustment to membership Change becomes faster and easier over time. Angst, churn, distraction, and disruption in the face of Change also decrease (although they never disappear entirely). They are willing to take on new responsibilities and hand over old ones. Titles are checked at the door, and decision-making becomes increasingly egalitarian.
Powerful Change: Team members are willing to sacrifice for the team, putting individual priorities on the back burner and acting in service of the greater good. While everyone maintains their constituencies, often in the form of support teams, team members come together, assume a collective purpose, and realize that the bigger mission transcends individual achievement.
Trust is the fuel that powers the journey. Built slowly and easily damaged, Trust is our way of describing psychological safety. Each member of the team has a different propensity for Trust. Trust builds as a product of the interaction of the four Cs in this model.
Trust unlocks ascension. The team cannot climb the pyramid without it. It facilitates risk taking, and many risks arise when building a Powerful Team.
Finally, Trust is the mortar that binds together the four previous domains.
Base-level Trust: Team members are willing to share their opinions with the entire group. They do this out of faith, acting with vulnerability despite lingering fears of retribution. As individual team members begin to act boldly, they inspire others to do the same. Team members start to feel safe enough to participate, and the emerging flow of ideas leads to innovation.
Moderate-level Trust: Team members start to bring their personal lives into the room, offering amusing anecdotes and profound revelations. Emotions, positive and negative, filter into the space. A sense of warmth builds. Team members start to let each other into their worlds.
Powerful Trust: The team checks their egos and titles at the door, and each member feels respected and valued. The leader becomes an integrated member while maintaining authority. Disagreements do not shake the faith that each member is devoted to the team’s mission.
Teams handle essential tasks that require irreplaceable resources. Their development cannot be left to chance.
Teaming is the arrangement of businesses into work teams, organized around a specific function or cluster of functions, to accomplish discrete, high-level business goals. Successful teaming is a multifaceted, long-term process that requires intention and expertise. It is a delicate operation demanding focus, commitment, and hard work.
Many workgroups make a mistake by thinking they “aren’t at work to make friends.” Interpersonal relationships are a critical component of team building. Even though these relationships are friendly and casual, they take effort to build and maintain.
Teaming isn’t only fun. It’s about driving hard for results, executing efficiently, and changing organizations from the inside out.
To form the types of connections necessary for Powerful Teaming, members need to bring more of themselves into the room (be it in person or virtually). Only when team members feel safe – confident that no one will use their vulnerability against them – will they be able to climb the pyramid.
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