Leadership Team Development: Five Behaviors That Build a Successful Team in Pittsburgh, PA

Improve Your Team Training Strategy With a Custom Team Building & Team Assessement Retreat in the Pittsburgh 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.

What Does an Effective Team Look Like?

An effective team is a collaborative unit that's able to work toward a common goal successfully. If your team is dysfunctional in any way, you'll see a failure to meet your goals or a delay in meeting them, as well as fractured relationships and non-productive interaction between team members.

Turnkey Coaching and Development Solution's team development program focusing on the Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team provides a highly useful metric by which to evaluate your own work team or leadership team.

• Do the members of your team trust one another? Do they communicate with transparency and honesty, or do individuals try to protect themselves, often at the expense of others on the team? Once your team members are able to be vulnerable with each other, they can provide the support needed to reach common goals.
• Do the members of your team thrive in an atmosphere of healthy and supportive conflict? Are they able to address ideas constructively and honestly? Teams that are afraid of conflict often hinder their ability to create something exciting and to solve intractable problems, whereas teams that have learned to listen to the alternative points of view that arise during healthy conflict can move on to constructive solutions.
• Are the members of your team afraid to commit to decisions? Do they hesitate to come to a conclusion or even to state a clear opinion, perhaps out of fear that they'll be censured or mocked? If your leadership team has all the data and experience it needs, but they can't reach a decision, no plan of action can be executed.
• Does your team hold one another accountable for measurable results? Do they meet deadlines effectively, or do you hear countless excuses as to why an action item couldn't be accomplished? Team members that trust each other, that have explored all the options together, and that have committed to a clear and actionable plan are able to encourage each other toward completion because they share a desire for mutual success.
• Does your team have its eyes on the final goal? Do the members of your leadership team (or cross-functional team) know what they want to accomplish individually and collectively? Once you have the fundamental team development building blocks in place, your team can achieve the results they once only dreamed of.

Nurturing Employee Success

According to a recent study by the American Psychological Association, 93 percent of all employees were more likely to do their best at work when they felt valued by their employers or valued at work. In contrast, only 33 percent of people who didn't feel like a valued part of the team said they felt motivated to make an effort in the workplace. Among those who felt valued, only one in five said they'd consider looking for a new job in the next year. On the other hand, 50 percent of the people who didn't feel valued expressed an interest in seeking alternative employment within 12 months.

Finding the right employees, preparing them for work and making them part of a truly cohesive team is expensive and time-consuming, so investing in existing staff and working to boost morale and encourage productivity and teamwork is important. Well-designed training courses nurture participants and encourage them to excel, to push the limits of their abilities and to work constructively and productively in teams.

How Can You Evaluate Your Team?

Your team development program must include a way to assess whether your development efforts are working. The Harvard Business Review recommends paying attention to the team's output and the ability of the team to collaborate, as well as individual assessments of each of the team members.

The Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team Progress Report provides a template for just such an assessment, allowing you to pinpoint areas of improvement to celebrate and build on as well as those ways in which your team still needs to improve.

If a team is truly working together in a relationship of mutual accountability, the Progress Report makes that clear. It also shows obstacles to development and paves the way for team members to assess their own collaboration.

How to Improve Your Team-Training Program

Here are a few of the things we emphasize as we custom-design a team-training and development program for your organization.

• Trust
  Remember the ropes courses you did in summer camp? Typically, they required a team to work together to solve a series of physical challenges. For example, the team had to find a way to get every member over a 10-foot wall without the use of ladders, ropes or outside help. And then there were the dreaded "trust falls," where each team member took a turn falling backward from an elevated platform, trusting their teammates below to catch them.
  
  For most people, such activities can be frustrating — terrifying, even, for newly formed teams not yet comfortable with each other — but they are undeniably effective at building trust quickly. While our training programs might not have your team scaling walls or catching each other in midair, we design similarly powerful exercises (often focused upon real business challenges) to establish strong, enduring bonds of trust.
• Conflict Resolution
  Fear of conflict can plague a team and hold it back from its potential. What often happens is that one or two alphas emerge and dominate team discussions, and the others are afraid to challenge them or offer alternative viewpoints. As a result, potentially great ideas get left off the table for fear of rocking the boat. Our training programs teach teams to rechannel their fear of conflict into respectful, constructive discussions where every member feels their ideas are valued. This allows a robust marketplace of ideas to flourish within your team.

How Turnkey Coaching & Development Solutions Can Help

Our master trainers can design a team-building program to fit your company's specific needs. We do not have events or local classrooms where managers can attend a day or a week of training with other managers. Instead, we consult with you and learn what your goals are. Then, we create a training program from scratch. We help you cultivate effective teams no matter what the size or department - from leadership and decision-making teams, to operational work groups, to special project teams, the model is a powerful tool for transforming the culture and improving the team's results.

The Team Development Program That Moves Your Team Forward

The Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team leadership team training and development program is tailored to meet your organization's very specific and unique needs and culture. Through training, coaching and team development, you can facilitate trust, strengthen your team members’ ability to deal with conflicts, and their collaborative skills, all of which come together to produce the results you want your executive and work teams to achieve.

When you're able to harness the talents and personalities of your team members to work together cohesively toward a common goal, everyone benefits. Imagine your team making smart decisions together, tapping into each person's special abilities, and staying focused cooperatively to get results. That's the kind of teamwork that provides your organization with the ability to compete at its best.

The very best team-training and team-development programs are designed with your company in mind. Attendees emerge with a new sense of well-being and feel smarter, stronger and more ready to tackle challenges than they did when they arrived. In turn, they inspire their peers and subordinates, causing an uptick in morale and an increase in productivity. In the end, an investment in your most important, but often most neglected assets — your leadership teams and work teams -— produces widespread results that positively affect your business.