5 Key Factors of a Successful Team

For the last few weeks, we’ve been talking about what a fully functional team looks like and the components that are crucial to building one.

Let’s do a quick review:

Trust – the foundation of everything. If you don’t have trust in your team, you’ll have a very difficult time reaching your goals and objectives. Members of great teams trust one another on a fundamental, emotional level. That means that team members are comfortable being vulnerable with one another about their weaknesses, mistakes, fears, and behaviors – and share without filters.

Mastering Conflict – When teams have this type of trust, they can engage in passionate dialogue around issues and decisions that are key to the organization’s success.

And that’s where conflict can enter the picture. There is a commonly held belief that conflict is a bad thing. It’s not. Conflict – done in a respectful way – is essential for teams to be effective, productive and successful. Conflict needs to become an expectation rather than the exception.

Achieving Commitment – We need to take our teams through conflict and get to commitment. Our teams must commit to decisions without reservation. Two key factors of commitment are buy-in and clarity.

Embracing Accountability – When everyone is committed to the same clear actions and goals, the team understands what everyone is doing and what is expected of each team member. This clarity makes it easier to hold one another accountable. Team members must be willing to call one another on behavior or performance that isn’t up to the standards they agreed on or that hurts the team.

Focusing on Results – The ultimate goal of building greater trust, healthy conflict, commitment, and accountability is the achievement of results. For a team to excel, all the members must be willing to put the team’s goals ahead of any individual goals.

These five key factors create a healthy, functioning and effective team.

So, how do you get there?

You have to dive deep, get curious and be willing to do the work it requires to create such a team.

Begin by reviewing and discussing the team’s strengths and challenges. Be honest about both, because it doesn’t do any good to dance around what’s not working. You’ve got to call it all out. List everything that comes up. You can pare down the list later.

Next, you need to craft a plan of action to address those challenges. The entire team then determines which items to put on its action plan. Remaining items are recorded for future reference. Facilitate a discussion in which each of the three actions is reviewed and the necessary steps, people responsible, and due date are determined. You’ll need to remind the team to regularly review and update the plan as goals are achieved and/or circumstances change.

AND – remember to focus on the collective strengths of your team. We tend to put a lot of our energy into noticing what’s not working and we forget that there’s a lot of good stuff already. Choose your top 3 strengths and celebrate them.

Now, there’s a lot more to this than I can capture in this short video, but I wanted to give you an idea of the process. And, I wanted to give you hope that it’s possible to make positive changes within your team.

In my team coaching programs, I guide teams to identify what their team strengths and challenges are; what behaviors and beliefs are present and help them craft their Action Plan.

Do you see the value in bringing this to your team? Schedule a call with me today so we can discuss exactly what’s going on.

Isn’t it time to figure out why your team isn’t reaching their goals and how to correct that? You can reduce your stress levels and navigate change inside your team. You just need the right tools and the right coach.

Schedule a call with me today and learn how team coaching could be the solution you’ve been looking for.

I look forward to talking with you soon!