Team Development Workshops
Trust and respect between team members, and between the team leader and team members, is critical. Relationships and trust between team members far outweighs immediate results. After all, if the trust is gone, future collaboration and working partnerships will simply not happen.
Great leaders excel at creating and maintaining high-performing, cohesive teams, which are characterized by:
- Utilization of the diverse skills, knowledge and experience of all team members.
- Alignment around mutually agreed upon common objectives and goals.
- Robust conversations and debates on critical issues that lead to high-quality decisions.
- Individual and group accountability.
- Learning from mistakes.
- Fixing problems by looking for solutions, not blame.
Three areas that cause team chemistry, and therefore team results, to go astray are:
- Drama caused by interpersonal relationships
- Negative conflict caused by behaviors between team members
- Poor workplace cultures that allow conflict and drama to flourish
- Poor team leadership, usually from leaders untrained in people leadership
- Employee disengagement from demotivating work and environment
- Team dysfunctions that are not nipped in the bud early
Drama and conflict are unfortunately part of the working environment. To minimize the impact of negative conflict, check out our highly popular and effective program Turning Workplace Conflict Into Collaboration.
Interpersonal Relationships and Employee Disengagement Impact Team Results
Employee engagement should be a critical concern of all leaders today, but apparently it is not. I say this because Gallup has been monitoring employee engagement around the world for years, and the needle hardly ever moves. Either few leaders are taking employee disengagement seriously, or their actions are ineffective.
In the latest Gallup State of the Global Workforce study (2013), the prevalence of disengagement in the workforce is astonishing. The data shows that 87% of employees worldwide are not engaged at work. Additionally, actively disengaged employees outnumber engaged employees by nearly 2 to 1.
The data for the U.S. is very similar to the worldwide figures, with results from the 2014 Gallop Survey in the U.S. showing 68.5% of employees are not engaged and only 31.5% being engaged.
One key factor for low employee engagement and morale is workplace conflict. A workplace climate that is contentious results in employees who are unproductive, unpleasant, and disengaged.
The cost of employee disengagement are phenomenal. According to Gallup, companies with highly engaged workforces outperform their peers by 147% in earnings per share. These companies also realize on average:
- 41% fewer quality defects.
- 48% fewer safety incidents.
- 28% less shrinkage (employee theft or wastage).
- 65% less turnover (in low turnover organizations).
- 25% less turnover (in high turnover organizations).
- 37% less absenteeism.
Dysfunctional Teams
Leading teams is fraught with peril and numerous opportunities for mistakes, especially by new or inexperienced leaders. This is mostly due to the dynamic nature of teams, including how individuals on a team interact with one another.
Cohesive teams break down for many reasons. Almost all of these causes are covered and explained in Patrick Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team:
Dysfunction #1: Absence of Trust
Dysfunction #2: Fear of Conflict
Dysfunction #3: Lack of Commitment
Dysfunction #4: Avoidance of Accountability
Dysfunction #5: Inattention to Results
Preventing these five team dysfunctions is a primary concern of a great leader. This often requires an unbiased assessment of individual actions and motives, as well as keen eyes and ears for the various early warning signals.
Team Development Workshops
Not all groups of individuals comprise a true team. Even when managers talk about “my team” often this is really only a group of individuals performing similar, but not necessarily inter-related work who all happen to report to the same individual.
As leadership author Steven Howard often points out, “A team is not a group of people who work together. A team is a group of people working together towards a shared outcome who trust and respect each other.”
Contact us today to discuss our core and bespoke Team Development and Team Leadership programs.