In order to have a great organization that achieves anything of consequence, you must have great teams. As we partner with teams to help them become more effective, our focus is on three things: alignment, trust, and collaboration. Alignment ensures everyone is working together and not fighting over priorities, trust provides the social lubricant for interpersonal interactions and collaboration enables the team to work well together, accept and integrate each other’s suggestions, and synergize the efforts of multiple individuals.
If your organization is larger than one person, unless it’s comprised of robots (which could be the future), getting things done will also invariably require people to work together. Consequently, in order to have a great organization, you must have great teams. It is very difficult to achieve anything of consequence today without good teamwork. Teamwork is comprised of a lot of factors and numerous books have been written on this topic. To make the subject manageable, we have distilled this down into three primary components of a great team which create the acronym ACT: Alignment, Collaboration and Trust.
First is Alignment. In order for a team to function effectively, its members must be on the same page and working toward a common goal and vision. It is surprisingly easy for misalignments to arise within a team so it is useful to look at alignment as a process as well as an outcome. To achieve alignment, go out of your way to surface different views from people on the team. You’ll want to include people with different experiences and backgrounds and keep the conversations respectful when there are disagreements so each perspective is heard. This kind of healthy conflict is necessary to achieve an outcome of true alignment, which Patrick Lencioni invites leaders to consider as binary: you’re either aligned or you’re not.
The second component of the team level of our model is Collaboration. The ability to work well together, accept and integrate each other’s suggestions, and synergize the efforts of multiple individuals is the visible hallmark of a great team. The presence of collaboration is what enables a team to be greater than the sum of its parts. Collaboration requires skills, and too often in organizations these skills are overlooked. Leaders come to believe that collaboration is just something that you do, rather than seeing it as a combination of specific behaviors including being open about your intentions, accountable for your contributions to the situation, and willing to support others with what they want to accomplish.
The final component is Trust. Trust within a team is like oxygen in a room. When it’s not present, it’s the only thing people can focus on. Trust acts like a lubricant for interpersonal interactions, making it easier and faster to communicate and support one another, even on difficult topics. Trust is multi-faceted, and as Covey highlights in his book, The Speed of Trust, we can break trust down into trust in competence (believing that somebody can accomplish results) and trust in character (believing that somebody is truthful in their intentions). In both cases, the presence of trust reduces fear between people on a team, which enables them to perform at higher levels. While fear is a motivator for humans, it will never yield better outcomes than when people are able to put their full energy and attention toward problem-solving, without getting bogged down in the fear of judgment from others or the fear of being let down by others.
If you’d like to know more about how you can build alignment, collaboration and trust in your teams, start from the Inside Out. We invite you to join our Insider Edge community and check out the “Team” content. There, we provide videos and exercises that will build your team’s internal foundations and leadership skills, empowering you and your colleagues to work together more effectively.
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