Unlock Your Team’s Potential

Seventy-four percent of team members do not think their team is accountable for shared goals and responsible for each other’s success. Most teams are individuals accountable to their siloed numbers and accountable to their leaders, but we need to awaken to the untapped power of peer-to-peer accountability. Seventy-one percent of team members do not believe they and their peers collaboratively engage in the most critical business problems. We needed to create a word for it – Co-elevating teams. Here you find an equal commitment to achieving the requirements of their responsible silos and recognizing their responsibility for holding each other accountable. They collectively do what is needed to achieve enterprise value creation and transformation. This new social contract includes an increased commitment to bringing problems to the team and asking for input on our work versus the traditional defensiveness of holding our cards close to our chest. Opening up time in your team for more collaborative problem solving, your organization can bust silos and shift from hub-and-spoke to Peer-to-peer, where teammates can cross the finish line together.

Seventy-two percent of team members avoid conflict. We need to awaken to candor and realize how erosive conflict avoidance is to a team: it leads to our missing bold innovations and exposes the team to unnecessary risks quietly recognized by others but not articulated. Unfortunately, too many teams still operate under conflict avoidance and believe that feedback only comes from our superiors. This state is a striking contrast to that Co-elevating agreement, a commitment to going higher together, which builds a team culture where we care enough about each other’s success not to let each other fail.

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.