What Makes a Great Team Player?
No one really tells you how to be a good teammate
Built upon the success of the Five Behaviors TEAM Assessment, the new Five Behaviors Personal Development assessment is a simple but powerful model for individuals who desire to develop their skills as a team player. Personalized results provide actionable strategies that will help you understand what you bring to your teams, and where you can keep growing.
Based on Patrick Lencioni’s best-selling book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, you’ll learn about the model and how the five interconnected behaviors come together to create a framework to become a better teammate and start building stronger teams.
Building Trust
The first and foundational behavior of a cohesive team is trust. Although many people think of trust as the ability to predict a person’s behavior based on past experience, that’s not what we’re talking about here. Rather, in the context of a cohesive team, trust means: a willingness to be completely vulnerable with one another—to let down our guard, admit our flaws, and ask for help.
Mastering Conflict
By building trust, a team transforms conflict into something powerful and constructive. Team members feel safe engaging in passionate and sometimes emotional debate, knowing that they will not be punished or resented for saying something that might otherwise be interpreted as destructive or critical.
Conflict is often considered taboo, especially at work, and people may spend inordinate amounts of time and energy trying to avoid the kind of passionate debates that are essential to any great team.
Teams that are willing to engage in productive conflict resolve issues and create the best possible solutions in the shortest period of time. By productive conflict we mean: debate that is focused on concepts and ideas and avoids mean-spirited, personal attacks.
Achieving Commitment
By engaging in productive conflict and tapping into team members’ perspectives and opinions, a team can confidently commit and buy in to a decision, knowing that they have benefited from everyone’s ideas.
If team members don’t commit, they’re just half-heartedly going along with decisions, which means they’re unlikely to have the kind of alignment necessary to reach their goals. In the context of a cohesive team, commitment is: clarity around decisions and moving forward with complete buy-in from every member of the team, even those who initially disagreed with the decision.
Embracing Accountability
In order for teammates to call each other on their behaviors and actions, they must have a clear sense of what is expected. Even the most ardent believers in accountability usually balk at having to hold someone accountable for something they never agreed or committed to in the first place.
Accountability has become a buzzword—so overused and with so many different interpretations that it has lost much of its meaning. In the context of teamwork, however, accountability is: the willingness of team members to call their peers on performance or behaviors that might hurt the team.
Focusing on Results
If teammates are not being held accountable for their contributions, they will be more likely to turn their attention to their own needs and to the advancement of themselves or their departments. An absence of accountability is an invitation to team members to shift their attention to areas other than collective results.
The ultimate goal of encouraging trust, conflict, commitment, and accountability is to achieve results. And yet, as it turns out, one of the greatest challenges to team success is inattention to results. In the context of a cohesive team, results refer to: the collective goals of the team; they are not limited to financial measures but are more broadly related to expectations and outcome-based performance.
View the Sample Five Behaviors Personal Development Assessment
Try Out the Five Behaviors Personal Development Assessment
Enter the code: FIVEPD and receive a $25 credit and a complementary debrief with a member of our Accredited Five Behaviors Facilitation Team
Purchase the Five Behaviors Personal Development Assessment at our Partner Site: https://www.profileassessments.com/five-behaviors-personal-development/
Contact us to learn more about the Five Behaviors Model and the positive impact it has for teams
To Learn More about Corporate Teams Profile Assessment offerings, visit our partner site: www.ProfileAssessments.com.
