Team Building – Part 1
The Pinnacle Team recently did a self-assessment to find out the strengths and weaknesses of our team dynamic. The exercise was inspired by Patrick Lencioni’s book – The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.
In his book, the author describes the five attributes that characterize a highly functioning team. He also provides an assessment tool for determining the functionality of your team and prescriptions for improvement and leadership in each of the five areas. We decided it would be informative to try the assessment in our office.
Lencioni proposes that high functioning teams have the following attributes:
- Trust –members of the team are not afraid to be vulnerable in front of each other.
- Conflict – functional teams engage in unfiltered conflict around ideas.
- Commitment –team members commit to decisions and plans of action. They do this by seeking “clarity instead of certainty” and “buy in instead of consensus”.
- Accountability – the members hold each other accountable for delivering on decisions and plans of action
- Attention to Results – members focus on achieving collective results ahead of their own personal ego or goals.
Using the Team Assessment provided by Lencioni, we polled all of our team members and discovered that on a scale of 1 to 10, we self-assessed as follows:
Trust 8.3
Conflict 7.8
Commitment 8.9
Accountability 5.5
Attention to Results 6.8
Clearly, we need to work on our Accountability and Attention to Results. Luckily, Lencioni prescribes what to do. I’ll tell you what we did in a future blog.
If you want to try this assessment with your team, contact our office. We can lend you the book or help you do the assessment. Better yet, support the author by purchasing a copy of the book here:
He’s written a number of inspirational books on business leadership. Each one is presented as a story with characters we can all relate to.