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Few teams reach level five of team development, but those that do certainly reap the rewards. If you’ve had issues getting team members to think beyond their function or to come together around a common purpose and goal, you’ll be envious of the characteristics of a level five team.
Too often teams are just a group of individuals who happen to share the same meeting room. They remain steadfastly ‘in it for themselves’ and actively compete with colleagues that they should be collaborating with. These characteristics are synonymous with failing teams. The potential for a ‘greater than the sum of the parts’ experience is dramatically limited. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
This is the fourth in a series of articles that explores the nine stages of team development. The path to high team performance requires expert guidance through these nine levels of development.
In this article, we consider level five of team development – interdependent achievers.
Best in class teams
Teams at level five start to see themselves as business leaders and not functional leaders and the team’s shared purpose binds them. It’s an energising team to lead.
Team members seek out each other’s views, spontaneously, because they value each other’s opinions. There’s a drive to create more interdependency as they realise that this drives better results.
The defensiveness and divisiveness of level three has gone completely. People are encouraged to voice disagreements and ask genuine open-ended questions, rather than questions just to make themselves look good.
The team is much faster at processing tensions and aligning outputs, identifying common ground rather than pushing a single point of view. This is about intimate and effective collaboration.
If you’re leading a level five team, you’re not having to give the answers, you’re just facilitating clarity. You don’t have to spend time managing tensions as they don’t exist. Disagreement is seen positively, as a way to improve team dynamics.
Another step in the journey
The benefits of level five team development are clear. It’s a joy for a leader to have a team like this. But, while they function well, they have yet to master true interdependence. This is just level five of nine potential levels of team development … there is more to come.
Let’s talk about where your team is at and how you can take your team to the next level – get in touch.
