Smarter Together/ Connecting The Dots
2007 Jack Ricchiuto
There is a fascinating body of research and practice emerging in the study of team performance in organizations. We're looking at the question of why some teams do better than others. It turns out to be a question that is most interesting in large organizations with hundreds of teams all doing the same things in the same environments.
What's interesting is that we've now discovered the essential difference between teams that perform at A, B, and C levels in the same organizational environments. The difference is the quality of relationships between and among people on these teams. In a team of 4 people, the "5th person" is the quality of the relationships on the team. It's the 5th person that determines how consistently the team is smarter and faster together. Any team of 4 with a missing or weak 5th person will struggle to perform, adapt to change, learn from experience, innovate, communicate, and act in self-organizing ways.
This is good news for organizations who believe that relationships can be intentionally built. As it turns out, we now know how to build relationships in organizations.
Relationships grow when people take a positive approach to how they communicate, organize, collaborate, make decisions together, and learn together.
A positive approach is a focus on possibilities, strengths, assets, successes, and promises. A negative approach is a focus on problems, weaknesses, obstacles, failures, and excuses. When people take positive approaches, they feel and act connected, engaged, and creative. When they take negative approaches, they feel and act at odds, unengaged, and frustrated.
Many organizations still suffer from outdated models of relationships. According to these models, building relationships means spending time identifying and eliminating people's weaknesses. We do everything we can to design and deploy deficiency-based and individualistically focused systems of performance reviews, coaching, and training.
This approach has never worked, but without a viable alternative model, organizations have no choice but to keep doing more of the same, hoping for something different to occur. The fundamental flaw is that the model sees people as problems to be fixed, not gifts to be engaged in the development of the team's "5th person."
The good news is that viable alternative models of relationship building now exist. Thanks to the new sciences of strengths-based organizations and social networks, we now understand that relationships can be built without needing to make weaknesses the focus.
A strength is a capability for effective action. A weakness is a capability for ineffective action. Like strengths, once we have a weakness, we will always have it. But, when we invent better ways to engage our strengths, our weaknesses become irrelevant.
We build relationships when we engage our strengths in ways that make our weaknesses irrelevant. Building relationships becomes a matter of aligning around compelling possibilities, engaging and combining strengths and assets, learning from and transferring successes, combining assets in new collaborations, and making and keeping promises that build the core of relationships: trust.
A positive approach builds trust and trust accelerates our collective capacity for performance. We become smarter and faster together.
To learn more about the possibilities of your team becoming smarter and faster together, contact Jack at 216.373.7475 or by email: jack at designinglife dot com. For links to some of the research on strengths-based organizations, teams, and leaders, visit AppreciativeLeadership.org.
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