Rob Whitfield: Small shifts, exponential results

The complexity of the world is well documented. What isn’t well documented is how teams need to work differently to manage through the levels of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. Our research, spanning back more than twenty years, tells us that only 20% of leaders believe their teams fulfill their potential. So, is it any wonder it feels harder and harder to be successful at even standing still let alone in delivering true value in people, people, and technology transformation efforts?

Whatever the challenges your team is facing, there’s a lot of untapped potential present in your organization. It’s sitting there, waiting to be tapped, but we as leaders aren’t embracing it and maximizing the value of that potential.

What I’m talking about are the teaming competencies that are critical for all teams to build together. Not technical or leadership capabilities which are critical for individuals, of course, but rather the teaming competencies that unlock this latent value and make it easier to get exponential outcomes, more easily, and dare I say it more joyfully.

How individuals operate within teams is often left to chance. Assumptions people bring from other organizations, ways of working they inherited from their current or past manager, what people bring from watching YouTube (seriously) all form the basis of teams and how they operate. And for the most part, it is shaped by happenstance rather than intentionality.

By extension, how people work in teams is a big determinant of the culture of an organization. That means we’re often leaving culture to chance, too. Not a good idea – especially when organizations spend over $87 billion each year on curating corporate cultures (Forbes, 2018).

Moreover, during times of the great resignation (or as we like to call it, the great exploration) where people may be leaving, not taking action in teaming competencies is likely costing you great people.

So, it is always worth considering these teaming competencies and how you can improve your team’s performance. Desired business outcomes – and often the audacious ones we can only dream of – can be achieved more quickly when a team enacts Co-Elevation®; mindsets and high-return practices with a commitment to a specific mission or north star that includes a commitment to each member of the team. The eight dimensions of high-impact team performance are: Candor, Collaboration, Accountability, Development, Relationships, Energy, Teaming Out, and Outcomes.

Through the past 20 years, the Ferrazzi Greenlight Research Institute has cracked the code of team performance, working with teams to bring a commitment to never let each other fail and instead a promise to go higher together.

With this, teams learn how to be Radically Adaptability™, with agile execution and flexibility in a climate of changing markets, teams, and organizations. It shifts the company culture into one that capitalizes on unexpected opportunities for transformative growth in addition to proactive risk management to tackle unexpected adversities by helping your team see around corners. Indeed, companies we partnered with at the outset of the pandemic were able to pivot proactively and weathered the ensuing storm more easily, too.

Shifting from a traditional hub and spoke model from leader to team requires a shift on the part of the leader and the team members. We kick start this with what we call a re-contracting conversation that gives permission for candor, shifts from a fractured team to one where everyone references the team as “us”, and promises to make co-creation and collaborative dialogue a foundation of how the team works. This short approach unlocks time-saving after time-saving and frees up team members for more important work activities.

The wisdom is already in the room – engage and involve your team members in new ways. We coach this through our high-return practices and enable teams to free up leader time, make faster progress, uncover insights that have always been there but have never been surfaced, and much more.

And as leaders navigate remote, in-person, and hybrid work, we introduce best practices in each setting along with the opportunity to reduce meeting time by 30% using asynchronous collaboration. This unlocks the power of your team members wherever they are in the world, whatever their preferences for working, and is underpinned by that commitment for candor that means your tough realities are dealt with proactively – without adding a new meeting!

With psychological safety, peer-to-peer accountability, and an unwavering commitment to win together, you can unleash value from the team’s interdependencies through these critical teaming competencies.

Instead of pushing your team to work harder and to be present for more hours, ask yourself whether you – and they – have actually made use of intentional teaming competencies, and if not, then make a start now. This will drive much more powerful outcomes – and drive greater goodwill – than an extra meeting, an extra hour in the office, or an extra remote session. Why? Simply because it will supercharge the efforts of every team member in how they work together and what they do every single day. Now, that is how you shape a company culture while delivering transformation at every level.