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October 19 - October 24, 2022
Not finance. Not strategy. Not technology. It is teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and so rare.
“Great teams are honest with one another,” she said. “They are unafraid to air their dirty laundry. They admit their mistakes, their weaknesses, and their concerns without fear of reprisal.”
I see a trust problem here in the lack of debate that exists during staff meetings and other interactions among this team. But I don't want to get ahead of myself, because that's a separate part of the model entirely.”
his job is to create the best team possible, not to shepherd the careers of individual athletes.
“If we don’t trust one another, then we aren’t going to engage in open, constructive, ideological conflict. And we’ll just continue to preserve a sense of artificial harmony.”
committing to a plan or a decision, and getting everyone to clearly buy in to it. That’s why conflict is so important.”
from now on, every staff meeting we have will be loaded with conflict. And they won’t be boring. And if there is nothing worth debating, then we won’t have a meeting.”
You have to decide what is more important: helping the team win or advancing your career.”
your first team. And all of this relates to the last dysfunction—putting team results ahead of individual issues. Your first team has to be this one.” She looked around the room to make it clear that she was referring to the executive staff.
The first dysfunction is an absence of trust among team members. Essentially, this stems from their unwillingness to be vulnerable within the group.
Teams that lack trust are incapable of engaging in unfiltered and passionate debate of ideas. Instead, they resort to veiled discussions and guarded comments.
Without having aired their opinions in the course of passionate and open debate, team members rarely, if ever, buy in and commit to decisions, though they may feign agreement during meetings.
Without committing to a clear plan of action, even the most focused and driven people often hesitate to call their peers on actions and behaviors that seem counterproductive to the good of the team.
Inattention to results occurs when team members put their individual needs (such as ego, career development, or recognition) or even the needs of their departments above the collective goals of the team.
Teams that lack trust waste inordinate amounts of time and energy managing their behaviors and interactions within the group.
By building trust, a team makes conflict possible because team members do not hesitate to engage in passionate and sometimes emotional debate, knowing that they will not be punished for saying something that might otherwise be interpreted as destructive or critical.
Great teams understand the danger of seeking consensus, and find ways to achieve buy-in even when complete agreement is impossible. They understand that reasonable human beings do not need to get their way in order to support a decision, but only need to know that their opinions have been heard and considered.
As simple as it seems, one of the best tools for ensuring commitment is the use of clear deadlines for when decisions will be made, and honoring those dates with discipline and rigidity.
A good way to make it easier for team members to hold one another accountable is to clarify publicly exactly what the team needs to achieve, who needs to deliver what, and how everyone must behave in order to succeed.
The enemy of accountability is ambiguity,
