The Importance of Leadership Team Development Training in Roseville, CA

Team Training - The Benefits of Deploying a Team Assessment and Team-Building Program to Develop Trust, Cohesion and High Performing Teams in the Roseville area

A successful professional team is a group of people who work well together, trust each other and are collectively responsible for achieving desired results or working toward a business-specific goal. Developing a cohesive team takes time, energy and effort, but when you participate in our team development and training program for working professionals, your team can create and sustain the results you need.

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.

In 2012, Google began a new research project in team development, which it dubbed Project Aristotle. The Googlers studied 180 productive, effective teams but couldn't figure out what they had in common. Was it hierarchical structure? No. Did the team members have compatible backgrounds or personality types? Sometimes, but not always. Were all the team members friends who hung out together after work? Again, sometimes.

The Google researchers drilled deeper and deeper, finally discovering the one element that all great teams share: psychological safety.

According to Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, psychological safety is the "shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking." To reach a point of psychological safety, trust is vital, as is the ability to disagree in a healthy manner.
The Project Aristotle researchers then looked at how psychological safety manifests itself in healthy teams, highlighting two defining factors that show up in the give-and-take of the top productive teams.

• Social Sensitivity. In top teams, all the members are honest about their emotional states and moods, and they're considerate of each other in this regard.
• Turn-taking. All members of an effective team end up participating to the same extent. This is especially crucial when a team is dealing with conflicts.
  When psychological safety exists, individual team members are free to bring their very best contributions to the table. The team then becomes greater than the sum of its individual parts, and it is able to deal with conflict in a healthy manner and stay focused on its task.
  

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.

Great team-training courses help participants feel accomplished, energetic and ready to achieve challenging objectives. Well-nurtured employees at all levels interact with their colleagues and peers in healthier ways, helping to create a positive atmosphere in the workplace. To achieve real success, businesses choose tailor-made team-building programs, which empower their participants and ultimately drive company growth.