Leadership Team Development: Five Behaviors That Build a Successful Team in Naperville, IL

Strengthen Your Executive Team Training and Cross-Functional Team Training with a Team Assessment Program in the Naperville area

Behind every successful company lies a cohesive, streamlined executive team and equally cohesive work teams. When team members at every level work competently with one another, they drive overall growth and create a great working culture where employees can thrive. One of the most effective ways to cultivate success is to invest in a custom team-training program for your managers or cross-functional teams. A tailor-made training program builds on each participant’s strengths, helping your working teams collaborate comfortably and complete projects efficiently.

Five Behaviors that Make Teams Great, and How Companies Can Encourage Them

Even if you hire the cream of the crop, if your team doesn't work together in a cohesive manner, you might not see results. In a manufacturing environment, we know that production is only as fast as the slowest machine — this concept is true in any situation where people must work together to accomplish goals. If one person isn't working in the same direction as everyone else, the entire team suffers. If technical skills are robust but communication falters, the team is likely to face obstacles. By understanding and encouraging five behaviors for team cohesion, companies can develop teams that bring coveted hard and soft skills to the table and work together to achieve and exceed expectations.

At Turnkey Coaching & Development Solutions, we provide customized team development programs that teach these five behaviors and provide work groups with the resources they need to continue building on skills learned. During personalized training, your team of 6 to 40 individuals will learn about:

• The importance of trust among coworkers. It's not enough for a few personally close members of the team to trust each other; all members — at all levels — must believe everyone else is capable of handling their position, willing to ask for help when needed and honest in working toward shared goals.
• The role conflict plays in any team. Even teams that share consistent trust are made up of individuals, and people don't always agree. Teams that want to move forward can't always avoid conflict, so it's important for groups to learn constructive communication skills and how to disagree without unbalancing progress.
• Why commitment to each other and excellence is paramount. Every person on the team must buy in to the end goal and be willing to do their part in working toward it.
• How accountability falls on every member of the team. Passing the buck isn't an option in a team environment: everyone rises and falls together, so team members can't fall into blame games or avoid accountability for duties that are theirs.
• How to work toward results together. Meeting goals as a team involves flexibility as individuals and as a unit, and this isn't something everyone is naturally equipped to handle. Team development programs help groups — from executive leadership to production staff — learn how to see the big picture and how each person fits into it. That knowledge, along with all the other skills learned during team training, helps everyone contribute positively to results.

"Assembling a team is not rocket science. Once the desired skill sets are defined, it is simply a matter of choosing the best players, or in the case of business, the most highly qualified candidates. But ensuring all the members of the team can function and play well together requires teamwork training." — Cindy Phillips, Teamwork Training Ideas, The San Francisco Chronicle.

Even if you have the right people in the right seats, their talent is wasted if they're working on islands and not connected to one another. Just as you train team members on their individual roles, it's equally important to coach them on how to work as a team, and how to ensure their talents complement one another. An effective team-development program identifies your team's pain points — the specific areas holding your team back from reaching its potential — and, through the use of progressive exercises and facilitated dialog, turns them into constructive and meaningful data-points, now useful for transformation.

Team Development Results You Can See

Organizations that invest in teams see both tangible and intangible results. Communication that inspires and motivates helps create morale among the entire team — something that would be worth its weight in gold if you could measure it. Other results that come from strong leadership team and work team development include higher employee retention rates (and substantial HR cost savings), increased production and efficiency and better problem solving.

In addition to teaching teams to employ the five behaviors that make them cohesive and productive, we provide you with tools for monitoring results. Turnkey Coaching & Development Solutions’ team development program includes a progress report framework . You'll receive survey results, points of discussion, a customized plan of action, guidance on setting priorities and a DiSC® team map — all designed to help your team navigate ongoing team building as you go forth to conquer business goals together.

The Five Behaviors of Effective Teams

The need for psychological safety plays itself out as you work through team development, making itself evident in every stage of the process. These five behaviors join to create the environment in which a successful team can flourish.

1. Trust.
   Building the kind of trust that allows true vulnerability is vital for a team to thrive. Even a simple statement like, "Your solution to the problem is better than mine" can open doors that allow trust, empathy and insight to flourish.
   If an individual is worried that another member of the team is likely to use their weakness against them, take credit for their idea or make commitments they fail to keep, for example, the work team will fracture in an environment filled with a lack of trust. When team members can be honest about their misgivings and weaknesses, they're not afraid to admit if they make a mistake. That opens the door to being able to ask for help, making it possible for team members to join together to meet deadlines and achieve common goals.
   
   
2. Conflict
   Conflict is inevitable among any group of people. When you combine people with different gifts and personalities on a workplace team, however, conflict can cause progress to slam to a stop.
   Once trust is established, healthy conflict is achievable. When team members engage in healthy conflict, they're able to debate ideas on their merits rather than vying for political advantage. An environment that welcomes all ideas equally helps a team focus on finding solutions.
   
   
3. Commitment
   Your entire team doesn't have to agree on details to commit to decisions made. However, when individual team members feel they've been heard, it becomes easier to set aside personal agendas or desires to work together to achieve the goals of your organization. When it's clear that a decision has been made in the best interests of your organization, even team members who retain some modicum of disagreement can buy in to the actions to be taken.
   
   
4. Accountability
   In a truly cohesive team, the team leader doesn't have to become “the heavy” in demanding accountability. An effective team consists of members who hold each other accountable to meeting deadlines, taking appropriate action and adhering to the standards the group must meet. When a team member expects and receives consistent respect and trust from other members of the team, a call to accountability isn't taken as an insult but rather as a statement of shared responsibility.
   
   
5. Results
   With a team development program focusing on the Five Behaviors, you don't end up with a group of individuals who place their own agendas, egos or aspirations ahead of the team's goals. Instead, you see a true team with members who can set aside individual needs to achieve results.

The Importance of Customized Team Development Solutions

Moving through these stages and creating an environment of psychological safety isn't something that happens at a day-long event with people from other companies undergoing training as well. At Turnkey Coaching & Development Solutions, we design each program to meet the needs of each client, looking at specific goals, managerial levels and existing programs. We customize each team development program to be specific for your unique intact teams, operational teams, decision-making teams and work-groups to reach true effectiveness.

Turnkey Coaching & Development Solutions offers programs throughout cities all over the United States. Starting with well-respected resources and building custom solutions for each organization ensures participating organizations get maximum ROI from each training. We don’t provide cookie-cutter training seminars or weekend programs you send a single employee to; instead, we work with you to develop customized team development solutions that hit hard out of the gate for your organization.

The constituent parts of anything — a vehicle, recipe or composition — determine its efficiency and success. Some components have major operational roles while others perform smaller essential tasks, but every element counts, and all of them require regular maintenance. The same rules apply within businesses. When you provide your work teams and cross-functional teams with well-planned team development courses, you nurture individual professional growth and increase company prosperity in general.