A guide to build a successful and cohesive team

Principles and guidelines from “The Advantage”

tl;dr

A summary of the principles and guidelines from the book “The Advantage”, by Patrick Lencioni, that may be used to guide every team to greater cohesion and success.

Context

This summer, the CEO of our company told us about the book “The Advantage”, and how we should use its principles to transform our leadership team (i.e. the C-level team) into a successful and cohesive team. After following his instructions from his own understanding of the book, I recently decided to read it myself to get a deeper understanding (as well as out of curiosity).

Not only for the leadership team

Currently scaling JobTeaser’s development team (again, we’re hiring ;)), we’re rapidly evolving our organisation (e.g. redefining roles and responsibilities, redefining goals...). When reading this book, I felt it was making perfect sense to apply its guiding principles to our current organisation challenges. Even though Patrick Lencioni addresses it to the leadership team, I’m pretty sure we can reuse most of it in every other team too!

I hope the following summary will help teams find interest in reading this book and maybe in achieving success and greater cohesion!

The summary

Team requirements

• Small: the team must be between 3 and 10 persons.
• Collective responsibility: members of the team must be ready to share resources, tangible (like organisation’s resources) and intangible (time, work and effort).
• Common goal: the team must clearly share a common goal, and a part of the team’s compensation should be based on it to ensure everybody steers in the same direction.

The 5 principles for a cohesive team

1. Trust: openly share vulnerabilities and mistakes, ask for help.
2. Conflict: do not avoid conflict, this enables better solutions to emerge.
3. Commitment: clarify, document and communicate the decisions taken by the team.
4. Accountability: be accountable for these decisions.
5. Results: measure results and remain aligned to your common goal.

The 6 questions to build cohesion

NB: I think it’s particularly important to keep in mind that these questions must be answered for the team by keeping in mind the company’s own answers, which align all the teams in the company. But this does not reduce the need for answers at the team level.

1. Why do we exist?
   Define the core purpose of the team. This helps identify who it works for and what is its purpose.
2. How do we behave?
   Clarify the value of the team. This helps its members to know how to behave without needed micromanagement.
3. What do we do?
   Clarify what value the team brings to its surrounding organisation.
4. How will we succeed?
   Determine what strategy will be used to achieve success: which goals, steps, objectives…
5. What is most important right now?
   Set the current #1 priority. This gives alignment and focus.
6. Who must do what?
   Divide the labour for this priority to cover all critical areas.

Over-communicate!

The answers to these questions must be constantly reminded to the team. Clarity is as important as the team’s cohesiveness.

Organisations: simple and consistent

The human systems inside the team must be simple and consistent with the answers to the 6 questions, in each phase of the life cycle of a team member:

• Hiring: must fit the team’s behavioural values.
• Orientation: keep the new hire in the right path.
• Performance management: give clear direction, proper coaching and regular feedback.
• Compensation and reward: incentives and recognition to remind what’s best for the team and its surrounding organisation.
• Dismissal: give another chance if the team member fits the values but is not performing well, otherwise let him/her go, this will reinforce the values throughout the team.

Meetings: a powerful tool if used properly

A meeting must not try to address all kinds of issues, like strategy, operations, urgent issues, etc. Instead, several types of meetings should be used:

• Daily check-ins: 10 minutes to solve problems by exchanging information fast instead of individually chasing stakeholders.
• Weekly tactical staff meetings: particularly important to build a cohesive team.
  No need for an agenda, everyone reports his/her top-priority activities and issues, and organisation-level priorities determine the topics to be discussed further.
• Critical and long-term issue meetings: add-hoc meetings to dig in issues involving significant amount of work or with long-term impact.
• Quarterly off-site review: review strategic goals, assess performance of the team, discuss environmental changes.

Conclusion

I am convinced that these principles and guidelines may greatly help a team reaching success. While I hope this article offers a good starting point (and an efficient introduction or reminder for you and your team), I strongly advise you to read the book as it will give you a deeper understanding of these principles and their motivation (as it did for me!).

Like always, feel free to share comments and questions! Thanks for reading :)

PS: Instead of reading the book, I listened to the Audible audiobook. Lacking the written version, I used the Blinkist summary to write this article. So I kinda summarised the summary! I hope I did not “copy” it too much, I did my best to interpret and extract the essence. I want to add that I am not affiliated to Audible neither Blinkist, but I love both services to learn things by reading!