For soccer fans like myself, the World Cup games are manna from heaven. The outstanding talent of the players, glorious goals, spectacular comebacks, and games won and lost affirm the power of teamwork. But not just any kind of teamwork. Exquisite teamwork.

There is an amazing opportunity for leaders and teams in all businesses and organizations to learn from the cohesion and collaboration that the World Cup teams demonstrate, irrespective of whether they win or lose. Sure, all the players are professional athletes, but beyond their individual acumen of soccer, each team’s collective action presents an opportunity to learn and be inspired by exquisite teamwork.

The World Cup teams are, in my mind, “exquisite” in their teamwork because of their:

(1) clarity and commitment to an immediate and shared short-term goal.

(2) acute understanding of how each of their roles and strengths is intertwined.

(3) ability to streamline their collective tactics in the moment and not abandon the strategy.

Sure, there are other aspects of teamwork and performance that are at play (no pun intended), but these three areas are ones that many teams fall short of, despite the best of intentions. If business teams are to rise to the level of teamwork that professional athletic teams demonstrate, they will need to adopt and integrate practices that support this level of excellence. If you are interested in enhancing your team’s capabilities towards exquisite teamwork, read on. I promise you’ll walk away with at least one nugget of value or more.

Clarity and Commitment to a Defined Short-Term Goal.

The World Cup is a series of elimination matches until the final game. This begins even before the actual World Cup starts with the qualifying matches. For each game, except the final match, the focus of the entire team is not on winning the World Cup (long-range goal), but on winning the match. Just the match.

What each team has in each game is Thrust Clarity – a clear, shared focus towards an immediate goal – and Thrust Commitment –  complete commitment to attain the goal. Thrust Clarity and Thrust Commitment produce the hyper-focused attention, urgency, and shared commitment needed to collectively attain an important goal. The key is to create a goal that is immediate and within reach.

By creating a series of short-term goals (as part of their effort to achieve a long-range goal) and ensuring (not assuming) that each team member is completely committed to achieving it, teams can create the necessary shared focus and commitment.

Teams that don’t set immediate short-term goals often find their team members working at cross-purposes, not supporting one another strategically, and losing focus. We’ve all been on and at times lead such teams. Results are hard won and often, rework is needed along the way.

The Fix – Boost Your Team’s Thrust Clarity and Commitment:

• Review your team’s goals, both overarching goals, and ones for specific projects.
• Develop immediate/short-term goals focusing on a specific achievement that needs to be attained every two to three weeks. This will help your team move forward more purposefully with less rework and be able to measure their progress more accurately.
• Check that all team members are committed to achieving the goal – a simple yes, no, maybe – would work. If any responses are “maybe or no,” explore what’s in the way of their complete commitment (e.g., the goal still isn’t clear, there are competing priorities, or they just don’t care). Resolve to allow wholehearted commitment.

 

Harness the Interdependence of Roles and Strengths

What struck me in watching the World Cup matches is how each team member within any team intertwined their efforts towards a cohesive interdependence. In a soccer match, there are 11 players on the field and like all team sports, each player is responsible for specific action on a specific area of the field. Despite these boundaries, they did not operate in silos. If you’re rolling your eyes, with an “of course” running through your head, ask yourself, “How well does my team practice interdependence, or are we working as a collective of silos?”

Teams often forget to structure how their skills and talents work together, at any given stage of an effort. Professional soccer players know not only the strengths of each player on their team but also exactly what each of their team members can be counted on to do, in any given moment. This enables them to work together more cohesively while keeping focused on the goal of their efforts. This isn’t magic; it’s about creating a shared understanding.

Your team can also achieve greater interdependence between roles when team members understand each other’s strengths (think in terms of creating, influencing, relationship building, strategy, and execution) and how their roles are intertwined – upstream, downstream, and laterally within their work. Lacking this understanding relegates team members to their collective silos.

The Fix – Boost Your Team’s Role and Strength Interdependence

• Define the roles and strengths you need to achieve each short-term and long-range goal. Do you have your bases covered, or are their key roles and strengths missing? (If the latter, who can you have joined your effort or how can existing team members expand their roles and strengths?)
• If you aren’t clear about your team members’ strengths, invest in some preference indicator work to help them garner greater understanding about what each person brings to the team’s table.
• Create a matrix of the team’s strengths and share with the entire team. Discuss where there are depth and scarcity of strengths across the team. Knowing where you might stumble as a team, will enable your team to anticipate better and create contingencies for more purposeful execution.
• At each stage of work, ask, “What strengths and roles do we most need to use to successfully move forward?” and “Who on our team has those strengths and can take the lead?”
• During your goal progress meetings, assess how well the team is operating interdependently. Questions to guide your discussion include “When was it easy to work together?” “What was present that supported that ease?” “When was it hard to work together?” “What was missing from the way we collaborated?” “What would help us achieve greater interdependent effort here?” If you don’t ask, you’ll never know.

 

Streamline tactics to address the unexpected, but don’t ditch the strategy.

Things don’t always go as planned, in World Cup games or in the business world. Navigating the unexpected well rests on the agility of a team to collectively switch tactics as needed to execute to a goal and not completely abandon a planned strategy.

As I’ve watched the World Cup games, I’ve been impressed with the agility of the teams to change their tactics over and over again. The fluidity of their change readiness and execution has been breathtaking and made me wonder how that kind of agility could be replicated in business teams. Certainly, some business teams already have such agility, but many do not.

Consider your teams and the times when planned approaches needed to be abandoned or modified to address unanticipated problems. Were your teams able to do this swiftly, cohesively, and accurately? Or were there delays, resistance, and clumsiness in their collective switching of gears? Likely, sometimes it was smooth and other times full of friction. What’s clear about the World Cup teams and other teams that navigate the unexpected well (surgical teams come to mind), is their ability to spot problems early, remain process-driven even when hell is breaking loose, and staying more problem-solving than blame-focused.

The Fix – Boost Your Team’s Agility to Deal with Change

• Deconstruct and evaluate your workflows with the entire team so each team member truly understands how your team gets stuff done. Assuming everyone knows and understands all the steps and sequence is a recipe for delays in action and a breakdown in cohesion when changes are needed. I can only change what I know.
• Identify the critical steps in your processes that would be lethal to successful execution, as well as those steps that if skipped or modified, would not derail attainment of your goals. (e.g., Soccer players routinely play the ball back away from the goal in order to keep it in their possession and move it forward later.
• Make your process measures open and visible, so the entire team can keep their eye on how well they are executing to goal. The entire team shares the responsibility for alerting one another when approaches need to be changed or go awry.
• Structure team dialogues to focus on problem-solving and not blaming (even when someone has screwed up). There will be future mess ups; your team can either craft potential solutions in anticipation of these, or they can reduce the necessary risk-taking that occurs when one has to make changes quickly because team members fear alienation and ostracization.
• Do some roadblock scenario planning to envision all that could go wrong with a given strategy or process. Play out all the scenarios to understand what might occur. Then design-in early warning elements, check and balances, and agree on contingent approaches that the team will utilize when they need to switch gears and tactics fast.

 

Your team has the capacity to grow its teamwork to new heights of excellence by strengthening its collective focus, the interdependence of strengths, and agility with its processes and tactics. With collective determination, practice, and collegiality, your team can also achieve exquisite teamwork. Imagine the joy that will be to behold.

 

P.S. – Enjoy the last three 2018 World Cup matches. Croatia vs. England on 7/11 at 11 a.m. PST; Third Place Playoff on 7/14 at 7 a.m. PST; and the Final Game on 7/15 at 8 a.m. PST

 

 

Your insights and feedback are welcomed and appreciated. If you enjoyed this article, please share it with your colleagues and friends.

Sharon Weinberg is a Leadership and Business Strategy Coach based in Oakland, CA. She helps leaders and their teams transform how they create, collaborate, and achieve together to have greater impact and ease. She’s worked with more than 150 teams and supported the development of more than 1000 leaders. When not working during the past World Cup month, Sharon has watched 42 of the World Cup games. Sharon can be reached at sharon@sharonweinberg.com

If you are interested in learning how your team can become exquisite in their teamwork, please check out my Team Uplevel Coaching which helps teams transform their collective vision, engagement, and the way they harness their strengths for greater interdependence, execution, and fulfillment. https://sharonweinberg.com/team-uplevel 

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” – Aristotle

 

As a leader, your habits either support or diminish your leadership.

Given the reflexive nature of habits, we often aren’t aware of some of the behaviors or practices we are doing or not doing. Moreover, we often don’t consider the impact of our habits on our direct reports, problem solving capability, and the success of our teams until problems arise, opportunities are missed, and targets aren’t achieved.

Being more deliberate in your leadership habits can strengthen the beneficial practices you are already doing.

As a leadership coach and organizational performance consultant, I’ve seen many leaders inadvertently sabotage their success and that of their teams by not consistently putting into practice some good habits. The operative word here is consistently. The good news is that you can easily move from auto-pilot to a place of more consciously shaping your impact, supporting your teams, and modelling practices that foster high engagement, effective collaboration, and follow-through with a few simple practices that you commit to using.

To make thinking about and adopting habits a bit easier, I like to divide them into four categories: relational, influencing, problem solving, and executing. Within each category, I’ve identified five to six specific actions that if done consistently will result in tangible benefits for your leadership and the performance of your teams. There are, of course, other actions one could add to each of the categories and I encourage you to do so as you see fit.

Good Habits to Strengthen Your Leadership
Relational	Influencing	Problem-Solving	Executing
– Listen to each person from a place of learning and respect. – Build trust by only committing to what you will follow through on. – Encourage and safeguard candor. – Regularly explain vision, goals, plans, issues, and progress to support connection and alignment. (Weekly or at least once a month.) – Regularly acknowledge individual and team contributions and successes privately and publicly. – Resolve conflicts as they come up even if doing so is uncomfortable for you.	– Offer your perspective, feelings, and suggestions last. – Explore others’ opinions, needs, and feelings first. – Acknowledge people’s ideas and contributions (even the naysayers) to make them feel valued. – Identify and vocalize the common ground often. – Present your ideas in a logical, open-to-discussion way to garner support. (No “my way or the highway.”) – Create hybrid solutions to support greater inclusion and engagement.	– Do some simple root cause analysis to ensure that you are not just addressing symptoms. – Frame problems accurately and objectively before beginning dialogue and solution development. – Surface and assess the validity of assumptions. – Balance advocacy and inquiry in dialogues. – Decide how decisions will be made and what criteria will be used before you make the decisions. – Use critical thinking methods to uncover biases and barriers, analyze data, and create options.	– Create a tactical roadmap (what, how, who, by when) to promote clarity and shared understanding about how execution will take place. – Communicate with all those involved what their specific role and actions will be. (Avoid the “No one told me, I didn’t know.”) – Conduct weekly or bi-weekly team check-ins to smooth the path forward. – Take the warning signals that successful execution is in jeopardy seriously. Intervene to help course correct. – Acknowledge progress not just completion.

 

How You Can Strengthen Your Good Habits 

Step 1: Review the actions listed in each category and put a check next to the ones you do consistently 75% of the time or more.

Step 2:  For the actions that you checked, ask yourself, “What makes it easy for me to do these actions so consistently?” and “What are the benefits my team and I realize because of doing these actions?” The intent here is for you to recognize what you are doing well and its beneficial impact on your leadership and your team’s successes. Your raised awareness will be supportive in helping you add new habits to your practice. We do more of what benefits us.

Step 3: Circle one or two new actions in any category or within a given category that you would like to put into practice consistently over the next three months. I suggest three months because there will be times when you forget to do the new practices, or not have enough opportunities to build the new habit during a shorter timeframe.

Step 4:  Write your two new actions in a few places where you will be regularly reminded to do them. Set them as daily/weekly reminders in your calendar. Review what’s on your plate for the week and integrate the new actions proactively into your weekly work. Add them as actions into the agendas for your meetings and problem solving sessions. The intent here is that if you don’t see it, you won’t remember to do it.

Step 5:  Set a date with yourself in your calendar three months from when you begin. This will be time for you to assess your progress and the changes you’ve experienced in your leadership because of putting in place the new habits.

Step 6: Keep a simple log to help you track your progress. A post-it with the starting date of the week and a check mark each time you do the new habit can be sufficient acknowledgement of your progress, or a truth-telling indicator when you’ve slipped up. Celebrate your success. If you got off track, don’t beat yourself up. Simply renew your commitment.

Step 7:  Your three-month check in date has arrived. Honestly assess your progress with implementing the new habits. In what way was it easy or hard to adopt the new habits?

What shifts did you see in your leadership because of your new habits? Your work relationships? The performance of your teams?  Your work culture?

Review the matrix again. Add at least one new habit every three months and repeat steps 4 through 7.

One year from when you started, you will have four to eight new habits integrated into the way you lead, influence outcomes, collaboratively problem solve, and achieve results. You will have also modelled good habits for your team members and colleagues to emulate.

Simple but deliberate changes can have big impacts on the excellence of your leadership, the performance of your teams, and the positivity and productivity of your work culture. All it takes is awareness, real intention, and consistent commitment to do things a bit differently. Practice makes permanent one new habit at a time.

If you found this article helpful, please share with your colleagues and friends.

 

  How many discussions did you have this week that you felt were a poor use of your time? 2? 4? 6? 10? Ouch! Many discussions don’t leverage the minds in the room well because of the way statements and questions are framed. Rather than enhancing the discussion, what occurs is disengagement, or worse, a battle of words. There are two simple ways to increase the engagement and critical thinking of your discussions: set the context and expectation in the beginning and balance the amount of advocacy and inquiry throughout the discussion. As simple as these approaches are, they often are not done.     Set the context and expectation from the beginning.  Start any discussion with something along the lines of “Here’s the problem or issue we need to discuss and address, and I need your help to achieve X. I’d like all of us to make an effort to take on a mindset of curiosity, learning, and consideration as we explore and create together.”  Consider this opening sentence as your “Hello” to the discussion and a way to bring participants’ attention together. I know it seems ridiculously simple or hokey, but I (and likely you) have been part of too many discussions where this very small and important “stage setting” does not take place. Balance advocacy and inquiry.  One of the greatest shortcomings I’ve seen and experienced is an imbalance between advocacy and inquiry. Advocacy is making the case for your own or another’s perspective; inquiry is about uncovering and learning about another’s perspective or suggestion. It is in the framing of the statements and questions that either heightens the discussion and problem solving or shuts it down. Additionally, too much advocacy feels like a sales pitch and power play, diminishing listening, learning, and co-creation. The right balance is 25% advocacy and 75% inquiry – not the other way around. The Fifth Discipline Field Book offers sage guidance about how to advocate better and be a better inquirer. By framing your advocating and inquiring differently, you invite others to consider, reflect, contribute, and build more effectively. Below are some suggestions for improving advocacy and inquiry in your discussions. See what resonates with you. Advocacy – Make your thinking process visible. 

• Share your assumptions and describe the data that lead to them. “Here’s what I think and here’s how I got there.” 
• Explain your assumptions. “I assumed that…”
• Make your reasoning explicit. “I drew this conclusion because…”
• Give examples of what you propose, even if hypothetical or metaphorical. “Here’s an example. Imagine that you are a member who will be affected…”
• Reveal where you are least clear in your thinking. “Here’s one aspect which you might help me think through.”
• Listen, stay open, explore, and encourage others to provide different views (even when advocating). “Do you see it differently and if so, in what way?”

Inquiry – Asking others to make their thinking process visible. 

• Gently find out the data from which they are operating.“What (data/info) leads you to that conclusion?” “What causes you to say that?” 
• Ask in ways that don’t promote defensiveness.“Can you help me understand your thinking here?” instead of “What do you mean?” 
• Draw out their reasoning. “What’s the impact of the solutions for you? How does this relate to your concerns?” “Where does your reasoning go next?”
• Explain your reasons for inquiring and how your inquiry relates to your own concerns, hopes, and needs. “I’m asking about your assumptions because…”
• Assess what they say by asking for broader contexts or examples.“How would your proposal affect…?” “Is this similar to…?” Can you describe an example…?”
• Check your understanding of what has been said. “Am I correct that you’re saying…?”

Reality Check:  How many of these ways for advocating and inquiring productively do you practice regularly? How often do you see your teams, colleagues, superiors collaborate in this way? If the answer is not often, then it’s time to change the way you participate in and lead your discussions.

Be the model for all those you work with to follow.

Your Next Step: Choose one technique from the advocacy list and two techniques from the inquiry list to use in your next discussions. Use them over and over until they come more naturally for you. Then select a few more of the techniques. Practice makes permanent. I encourage you to share the guidance with your participants, so you’ll collectively nurture and own the quality of your discussions. Best wishes for engaging and productive discussions. If you found this article helpful, please share it with your colleagues and network. Thanks.