Cohesive team building is not an easy feat. It takes time, energy, and commitment of the team members to truly achieve the desired results. It also takes awareness to realize you need to put the teams at your organization through a cohesive team building program.
If you find yourself agreeing with any of the statements below, it’s time for you to look into cohesive team building training that uses Wiley’s The 5 Behaviors of a Cohesive TeamTM:
- “We call ourselves a team, but we don’t act like it.”
- “I’m afraid to actually speak my mind on projects.”
- “Meetings are boring. No one participates.”
- “I’m really sick of ____ putting his/her individual goals ahead of what’s best for the group.”
These types of issues are surprisingly common among teams. These issues also occur at every level of an organization, but are most detrimental to success when they exist on executive or senior leadership teams.
But have no fear. Building a cohesive team can be accomplished by the team adopting five simple behaviors: Trust, Conflict, Commitment, Accountability, and Results. Without these five behaviors, your team will not be able to tap into its highest potential for success and efficiency.
Teams can begin their journey to becoming more cohesive by taking individual assessments and using the five behaviors as a tool for not only understanding team dynamics, but also what is needed to improve them.
Here’s what you need to know about the five team-building behaviors:
- Trust: Trust is the foundation for building a cohesive team. This means that the team won’t make it very far on their path to success without trust. Trust happens when team members are willing to be completely vulnerable with one another.
- Conflict: Healthy conflict is what keeps all organizations moving forward and innovating. Building a team that champions healthy conflict is extremely important to the growth of the individuals and the organization. It won’t be easy, but it will be worth it.
- Commitment: Commitment can mean different things to different people. But to a cohesive team, commitment means clarity.
- Accountability: Adopting a strong sense of accountability is often hard for teams to do. It’s uncomfortable to call out a peer on their lack of performance, but it is necessary for the success of a team.
- Results: Speaking of success, too often teams do not measure results. They don’t talk about what did or did not work well after a project is over and those are the types of metrics that could help the team make decisions down the line.