Group success happens when people come together with a purpose.
How do you influence a shift in direction, having your team be less fragmented and more aligned? Starting with “Why” will bring awareness to your team’s purpose and help living it from insight out – rather than being driven from outside in. It will raise the perceived team-efficacy by a multiple – for your team and its ecosystem.
Alignment is about “bringing parts into proper relative position; to adjust, to bring into proper relationship or orientation”. Alignment is about being in absolute agreement or permanent harmony. Alignment is about being able to say, “Let’s agree to differ.”, and still move into the same direction wholeheartedly, knowing that the direction is serving a common goal.
Conscious alignment becomes the bridge team members can utilize to create from one another for the sake of their common goal.
The team can be in alignment about bringing a project to success together, while single team members dislike some of the procedures that were agreed to get the job done. Or team members might dislike a lot about each other and still appreciate the qualities offered on a professional level relevant to their work.
Fine-tuning your team alignment to generate greater competitive and creative advantage.
Seeking higher ground
Find the team agenda with the big A, the one that is greater than the apparent distortion. For example, team members may not agree on what action to take or how to get there, but all may deeply desire the good of the outcome.
Making the invisible visible will be highly transformative.
Dealing with what interrupts and distorts
Uncover the weaknesses your team needs to deal with. What are the limiting beliefs? Where are critical relationships out of sync? Encourage your team to have a closer look. Dare to catalyze unlocking conversations.
The way your team is constellated will influence its culture, its natural way of being in relation with each other. This team culture might be hard to get changed. And it might be difficult to be shifted. However, it’s always possible to expand, to gain the flexibility to broaden your team’s perspective, embracing diversity and inclusion, finding acceptance of something larger to care about.
Amplifying your team allies
Reveal the hidden patterns of crucial relationships. In relation to the team’s goal(s), what are roles and responsibilities of other functions, departments, and business units?
Play the team’s strength zones. How can your team expand its potency? What are the critical levers – inside the team and within the team’s ecosystem? Be of service when it comes to developing strategies for releasing the potential that lies in the space between them.
Support your team to live from the inside out; to think, act, and communicate from its unique wow message.
Turn insight into action…
The first step toward integrating the efforts of a group or team is for a leader to establish a common purpose and assure that each person knows how they fit into the total effort.
Help your team get aligned on purpose, vision and how they want to and will walk their talk. Try answering the following questions – first individually, then collectively to come up with an aligned answer the team as a whole feel deeply connected to:
WHY. Why are we here? (think "Why do we care?")
HOW. How do we bridge our vision to reality? (think "methods and disciplines; standards, guidelines, procedures")
WHAT. What is the desired outcome? (think "service, product, result")
As a next step, get very specific about how each team member fits into the total effort. A perfect starting point could be the Team Alignment Map, offered by Stefano. Its focus is to give orientation and get alignment around what gets shared:
Joint objectives: What do we want to achieve together?
Joint commitments: Who does what with whom?
Joint resources (people or physical resources): What resources do we need?
Joint risk: What can prevent us from succeeding?
The Team Alignment Map is best revisited throughout your team journey until you get to the desired outcomes. Find it on Strategyzer, Psychological Safety: A Prerequisite For High Performing Teams, by Stefano Mastrogiacomo on October 30, 2019.
Deepen your insight…
Start with Why (5 min. video on YouTube), is an extract of Simon Sinek’s key message you also find in his book “How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action”, published 2009.
Simon says: ”People don’t buy what you do but why you do it.”
Share your team story from inside out (rather than being driven and pushed from outside in).
Know your teams' purpose, cause, and belief. What pulls your team out of bed and to work every morning like a magnet? What exactly is it that gets your team excited about what they do?
Why does your team's ecosystem care?
You want to know how to support your team in attaining a shared vision? Send me an email or call me.