Unlock Your Dream Team

We all know meetings are overabundant; by one estimate, up to $283 billion is lost annually from unproductive meetings. The shift we need to move to is that collaboration starts asynchronously. The primary data we have collected is a powerful awakening for leaders and teams as it reveals that asynchronous collaboration can reduce meetings by up to 30% and increase bolder decisions with broader input.

Only 41% of team members believe caring, trusting and supportive relationships exist with other team members. Building relationships in the team on a foundation of commitment and empathy is critical to providing an environment for forgiveness and caring enough to challenge each other. We call this “trust,” but trust breaks down into professional performance and personal relationships. Both need repair.

Only 49% of teams respect and value what other team members contribute. And we have even further to go with proactively building and strengthening solid and committed relationships, particularly in an increasingly hybrid work environment. Without underlying trust and commitment among the team, there is no wonder we see significant gaps in almost every team in high integrity professional behaviors like candor above. The High Return Practices to engineer relationships, empathy and commitment within the team include Long Slow Dinners (the actual detailed practice of shared storytelling), Personal Professional, and Sweet and Sour Check-Ins.

Seventy-one percent of team members do not believe that they and their peers collaboratively engage in the most critical business problems. Awakening to redefining collaboration to be much more inclusive. Most believe that the more inclusive you are in your collaboration, the slower and more watered down the outcomes are. Our data shows very little proactive recognition that we now work in networks and that we should systematically work with external stakeholders who are critical to our success. The opposite is true. Taking broader inputs into decision-making can create bolder and faster decision-making. We call this “Teaming Out,” and never before has it been so approachable than in an increasingly hybrid and remote world of work. The High Return Practice will be a systematic process of hybrid and remote Collaborative Problem Solving and the new research around “The Collaborative Stack.” We will also reveal the practice of “the power of three” associated with small group collaboration.

Fewer than 30% feel they have a collective responsibility to lift each other’s energy and mental well-being. Awakening to mental health and resilience is more than an HR department’s offering of nice-to-have well-being programs and a safety net in times of personal crisis and shifting it to a team’s commitment to collective resilience and each other’s well-being and emotional growth. During the pandemic, we buckled down and wrestled through the crisis as so many teams have done in grave times of the past, but over two years, that brought us to the breaking point; it was not sustainable. Our research during this period has shown that how we perform the work and how difficult it is to get things done in old ways of working contributes more to a team’s resilience than the external stressors. A Co-elevating team feels responsible for tuning each other’s energy like a corporate athlete. The practices start with bringing it out of the shadows and agreeing that this is a team obligation. In addition, we add regular shared energy check-ins, peer-to-peer celebration practices, and working new work routines and personal well-being into each team member’s formal schedules to be described in the piece.