WORKSHOPS >> team collaboration

It used to be that teams were built from scratch, and then team collaboration and chemistry were honed over years of working together.

Not any longer. There's not time.

Today, many people work on a project for only a few months and then move to the next team. Some are never assigned to a permanent team, but jump from team to team as needed. The average employee tenure is now only 3.6 years. So in a world where people join a team-get in, get it done, get out and move on-how do you build a collaborative team... fast?

Team dynamics have to be built strong and world-class from the outset or team performance will suffer. In any organization, there are 5 Levels of team collaboration that drive performance:

Level 1 collaboration is isolated; people are stuck in first gear because they stay isolated in their work, while team performance slowly declines until the team breaks up.

Level 2 is characterized by indifference - when things go poorly, or occasionally well if all the stars align, people don't care. People may collaborate with one or two people in their group, but that's where it stops. About 1 in 4 teams work at Level 2.

Team collaboration at Level 3 is independent-that is, people work on a team, but not very effectively as a team. People at Level 3 recognize the need for collaboration, but it's often clumsy and difficult to sustain because competing agendas and personal territories interfere. Most teams, and even entire organizational cultures, operate at Level 3.

At Level 3, average performance is the norm, primarily because certain behaviors drive us away from great team dynamics, and the ripple effect impacts everything else the team tries to do. Here are only a few of those behaviors... maybe you can relate:

• Colleagues get defensive in debates, which leads to fixed positions and unproductive arguments that waste time and delay decisions
• People ignore the truth when it's hard to hear, or acknowledge it but don't change
• Team members don't speak up enough (and so bad policies and projects waste money)
• People fear getting labeled if they try something new and make a mistake (and so nothing new gets tried)
• Some people aren't engaged like they could be (or want to be), and think only within the confines of their own jobs, seeing problems as "other people's" problems.

If there was a label for Level 4 team collaboration, it might be "doesn't play well with other teams." Level 4 Teams are "intra-dependent," which means they work well within their own team, but that's where it stops. For example, maybe marketing doesn't trust sales, and that distrust creates work silos and territories. About one quarter of teams operate at Level 4.

And finally there is collaboration at Level 5 - teams that are interdependent, and according to research by Logan, King and Fischer-Wright of USC, represent 2% of teams in corporate America. A collaborative team at Level 5 team is defined by three, unique characteristics.

The first trait is humility... what we call healthy egonomics. Humility may come as a surprise when talking about business performance. Our latest book, egonomics from Simon & Schuster, is our direct aim at revealing the truth about the competitive advantage of humility in business and why it matters, maybe more than anything else that teams and leaders work on.

As part of our research for egonomics, we explored how top team players and leaders work differently, or what we call "Team Dynamics." Teams with "Level 5" humility get great results precisely because they:

• Listen with open-minds and open the minds of others to different ideas
• Relentlessly look for ways to make things better
• Confidently and constructively speak their mind
• Passionately debate ideas without getting defensive
• Don't hoard knowledge and business expertise.

While humility is the most crucial difference in team dynamics between the 2% and everyone else, it doesn't explain everything. Our investigation uncovered two other critical components of 2% teams.

The second trait is intense curiosity. 2% teams:

• debate with a higher level of intensity and diversity of thought
• structure discussions that lead to action, not endless meetings and conversation
• adapt effectively and creatively to corporate and economic change
• balance free-thinking and creativity with business discipline.

The third unique trait of top business teamwork is "water-cooler honesty." There is a difference in the ability of 2% teams to:

• say what's really on their mind at crucial points during important meetings, rather than later at the water cooler
• freely speak their mind without fear listen to feedback without hesitation
• remove politics from conversations

Based on the original, eye-opening work of David Marcum and Steven Smith, our Team Dynamics workshop teaches how to build effective team collaboration that leads to Level 5 results:

• people are engaged; a 48.9% improvement in team effectiveness
• retain top talent and lower turnover by up to 63%
• productivity-per-employee picks up
• increased customer loyalty and client trust
• less status-quo, more innovation

You can register for one of our LiveWeb workshops, or call us at 801.492.9009 to schedule an onsite workshop or keynote. You can also download one of our latest whitepapers, or take our Team Dynamics survey to find out how close your team is to Level 5 performance.

If you would like to watch archived webcasts and webinars, download our latest whitepapers and articles, or get free tools for your team, visit our All Access page. You can watch a short Flash presentation of our Team Dynamics work and research here.