5 Characteristics of Highly Effective Teams

The Advantage: Teamwork Model

In The Advantage, Patrick Lencioni articulates five behavioral principles that all team members must embrace. As indicated in the image to the right, the 5 principles are  trust, conflict, commitment, accountability and results. These principles build off one another, which is to say, if a team doesn't have trust they also won't have conflict, commitment, accountability or results. Just the same, if they have trust but shy away from conflict, they won't achieve commitment, accountability or results.

This is the first in a 5-part series of reflections aiming to use Lencioni's Teamwork Model to detail the importance of each principle as it relates to Mounds View Teacher Development and Appraisal Process (TDAP). I intend to provide strategies for teams that need to establish or refine any or all of these principles as part of their quest to become a highly effective team. I'll begin where all teams wishing to become highly effective must begin, by building trust.

Building Trust
Without establishing vulnerability-based trust, teams will struggle to engage in conflict, achieve collective commitments, hold each other accountable and produce desired results. Trust is everything. To be clear, trust is not just about having confidence in a team member to follow through on a set of agreed-upon action steps. It's the ability of team members to speak openly, honestly and with vulnerability about mistakes, failures, and weaknesses. This level of trust is uncommon, especially among relationally disconnected teams. PLCs void of trust often operate at a very surface level. They focus meetings around procedural discussions related to a common calendar (upcoming units, assignments, projects, field trips, or standardized assessments). They are not engaged in action research around their collective capacity to cause learning (the goal of TDAP) because to articulate what they're doing well and not so well necessitates a willingness to be vulnerable. Collaborative teams that don't have trust "do" PLC work, as opposed to identifying the collaborative process as synonymous with who they are as teachers.

Graham and Ferriter (2009) suggest teams use and discuss the results of this survey to determine the extent to which they trust one another enough to engage in the kind of conflict that produces authentic commitment. To then begin building trust, Lencioni suggests teams share "Personal Histories." Members simply share meaningful things about their lives; they take time to discuss where they were born or grew up, how many siblings they have and where they fall in the order among them, and what the most interesting or difficult challenge was for them as a child (Lencioni, 2012, P. 28). To lead this type of discussion, consider using this 4-corners exercise. It's been my experience that when teams begin to share personal histories, they find connections they did not know previously existed (I found out a team member dated the girl I took to  my senior prom). The other added benefit is that each member takes a "journey within," whenever asked to recall previous lived experiences. When led skillfully, these "personal journeys within" can be tied to who each person is as a cultural  being, a necessary realization for becoming culturally proficient.

In addition to intentionally building relational awareness and capacity through the sharing of personal histories, Lencioni suggests teams engage in this "Team Effectiveness Exercise." In completing the exercise, whereby each person articulates one thing the other members do that helps the team and hurts the team, groups discover how giving and receiving direct and actionable feedback improves team performance.

Building Trust Means Being Aware of Fundamental Attribution Error
A key piece of learning for teams that don't have trust is the notion of fundamental attribution error. Lencioni describes fundamental attribution error as "the tendency of human beings to attribute the negative or frustrating behaviors of their colleagues to their personalities, while attributing their own negative or frustrating behaviors to environmental factors (Lencioni, 2012, P. 32)."  To be mindful of fundamental attribution error is to become aware of how our perceptions and misconceptions color our collaborative reality.

For more on trust and the "power of vulnerability" visit my blog entry from November 2014.