From Losing Out to Standing Out: What We Know About Extraordinary Teams

Sarah Cirone:

Hi everyone and welcome to today’s webinar, From Losing Out to Standing Out: What We Know About Extraordinary Teams, hosted by HRDQ-U and presented by Kevin Coray, Sally Stamp and Brad Britton. My name is Sarah and I will moderate today’s webinar. The webinar will last around one hour.

If you have any questions, just type them into the question area on your GoTo webinar control panel and we’ll answer them as we can or after the session by email.

Today’s session is based on the workshop and team assessment, extraordinary teams available @hrdqstore.com The complete set, it gives you everything you need to deliver an engaging and meaningful team training workshop. If you’re interested in more help, our team of skilled practitioners, some you’ll hear from today are available to certify you as a trainer or deliver this workshop at your location for your organization. Reach out to HRDQ for more information on how you can bring teams from ordinary to extraordinary.

We’re excited to have three members of the extraordinary teams partnership as our presenters today. As an industrial and organizational psychologist and master somatic coach, Kevin Coray is a consultant to leaders, teams and organizations. He is also co-author of the Extraordinary Teams Inventory and the Embodied Leadership Assessment. Kevin brings over 35 years of experience consulting to coaching executives, teams and improving organizational performance as leader of an award winning national consulting firm, he ran for 27 years, CG Strategy.

Sally Starbucks Stamp is a certified coach and consultant who works with individuals, teams and organizations primarily in the areas of leadership development, communication effectiveness, culture transformation and work life balance. Her experience includes work for a variety of healthcare and technology organizations as both an internal change agent and an external coach and advisor.

Brad Britton is an expert in organizational development, leadership development and executive coaching. He works with individuals, teams, and organizations to offer transformative strategies that achieve real world results and competitive advantage.

Brad has over 30 years of experience with fortune 500 companies in high technology, banking, healthcare and engineering as well as significant projects in both governmental and nonprofit sectors. It’s an honor to have you all speaking with us today.

Sally Stamp:

Well thank you so much Sarah, and it’s certainly an honor and a pleasure to be here. So you heard a little bit about us and we understand that we have a wide range of professionals in the audience today and so we’re hoping that everyone will enjoy hearing more about the work that we’re doing and the practices that we have. So what will we talk about today? This is a brief list beginning with how being extraordinary can benefit you, your team and your organization. And you’ll hear more about how we came to use this term extraordinary, and what’s behind that. We’re going to talk about what’s required for your team to move to extraordinary. So some actual how tos for you to take away.

We’ll talk about how to know if basic psychological needs have been met in a teaming experience. And we’ve all been exposed at some point in our lives and careers to needs models and we’re really going to dive into that since there is validity in exploring needs and not just once. We’ll also look at what’s meant by personal transformation from a team experience, and that’s something that the authors of the book, that’s the foundation for this webinar have explored.

And finally we’re going to do something that we all felt strongly about and that’s how do you go deeper with this material? We wanted you to be able to leave the session today and have some actual next steps to take. So I wanted to add one more thing. We’re all coaches and we’re going to be talking about team coaching. So we really want to be coach-like in this webinar, which means we’re curious. We want to know what you’re thinking, what you’re experiencing. So we’re going to be inviting you to share with us on several occasions and as Sarah said, you’ll do that by going into the questions area of the GoTo webinar. So, ready to get started?

It’s really all about human needs. We think this quote from the book, Extraordinary Groups: How Ordinary Teams Achieve Amazing Results, really captures the essence of what we’re going to be talking about. People need groups and extraordinary groups meet their needs. I’m guessing most people would agree the groups or teams are really a part of life for all of us, not just the workplace, but family, friendships, our leisure endeavors. It’s really difficult, if not impossible to think of activities now that don’t include at least some degree of doing and being with others.

And there’s lots of research that’s confirmed we really need groups to achieve tangible and intangible outcomes, even if we’re working in somewhat solo or siloed endeavors. And what we’ve learned in our work with the extraordinary teams partnership is that people who have experienced extraordinary teams have really had their needs met and their needs for basics like safety and security and belonging, and a sense of really wanting to be a part of the endeavor.

And what we’ve also learned is it’s possible to create and sustain extraordinary teams that are collaborative, productive, and fun, the ones that you’re going to remember long after or an outstanding experience. So before we dive into some of the details of why this is important, why we think it’s important for you, your organizations, and how you go about doing it, Kevin’s going to share some of the background on the research since this is all evidence-based and this will help better understand what led to our work in helping teams move from ordinary to extraordinary. So Kevin.

Kevin Coray:

Yeah, thanks Sally. Because you can see on this slide we started the work thinking about extraordinary teams many years ago. And in 2009, Jeff Bellman and Kathy Ryan published their book about Extraordinary Groups having done field research on 60 teams that identified themselves as having had a truly amazing team experience and at the same time had remarkable results. But that time I reviewed their book and I was excited about their findings and I thought, well, jeez, this would be really great to extend this from just teams that identify as extraordinary to all teams and to see whether or not the characteristics or indicators that Bellman and Ryan identified in their book held true for all teams, in that in essence we could take teams no matter where they were and put them on a continuum from losing out to being really extraordinary, or from sucky teams to great teams.

And so Kathy, Ryan and I started to work on building that research. And in 2014, HRDQ published the Extraordinary Teams Inventory, which was the result of the research we did on hundreds of teams. And we’re at a place now where more than 2000 people have been involved and there are over 230 groups and teams that we continue to do research on. And since that time, we’ve been building the extraordinary teams partnership so that we can continue our consultation, coaching, training and research with these kinds of teams.

Brad, can you say some more about how human needs plays such a big role in teams being extraordinary? One of the things that’s important to note is that besides these characteristics in the Extraordinary Groups book, Bellman and Ryan identified the fact that was it expressed by the quote, the teams meet individuals needs, and individuals need teams. And Brad will go deeper into this.

Brad Britton:

Great. Thanks Kevin. Yeah. One of the things that we want to do to maybe take a step back before we dive in on the extraordinary teams model itself is this concept of what we call the task relationship bubble. You see that on your slide there and it’s a simple diagram. And for individuals and teams, we see that task and relationship are in a marriage. Task of course is about doing and getting things done where relationship is about how we are connected to others and ourselves and each is essential. It is truly a marriage.

And when we finally balance the attention on both, generally we see positive outcomes for both tasks and relationship. And I’m sure you’ve been in situations where you’ve over-focused on one and then you’ll see that the other suffers. Our experience is that many teams are much more comfortable in focusing on task and doing this over a long period of time, the relationships really start to suffer.

So for our extraordinary teams, what we find is that they put a lot of focus on the relationship side of the circle and they bring things back into balance. And with this focus on relationship, there’s a real commitment to understanding the needs of the team members. Not only understanding them, but creating an environment which helps them meet those needs. And the impact is not just feeling good, it creates an environment for extraordinary results. We even see personal transformation in the teams that really go for it.

Sally Stamp:

Brad, I was going to jump in before we go to the next slide on that. For the first time I’m noticing that solid line between task and relationship and you I think did a nice job of sharing the fact that it’s rarely an equal division and it’s often very fluid, transitioning back and forth from dominance in one area to dominance in another, not just in the workplace but in all of our relationships.

Brad Britton:

Right. Yeah. Just keeping that awareness and noticing where it’s floating that line and is more the important aspect. Right. It’s not about one is bad or wrong or one is right. It’s more about where you are at any one moment.

So we want to go a little deeper into this concept of why needs matter and yet I imagine some of you are out there like do we really need to dwell on this? I mean, can’t we just focus on getting our jobs done? Well, the research says that if people aren’t getting their basic needs met, their ability to produce at a high level is compromised. And one of the foundational pieces of research on the motivation and needs was done in the late ’40s by Abraham Maslow. And then he updated it actually in the ’70s. And a lot of you may be familiar with the pyramid you’re seeing here on your screen.

Fundamentally, his research showed that we can achieve the highest level of existence, what he called self actualization without meeting the needs that are below that. And so, what does this mean in practical terms? So for example, we promote that one of the strategies we’ll talk more in depth later is this concept of embracing differences. Well, it can be really hard for me as a team member to embrace others differences is if I don’t feel like I belong to the group in the first place. Or another example is it’s hard to get really feel a strong self sense of self esteem if our contributions aren’t valued by our teammates.

So in extraordinary teams, they pay attention to the needs of their members. In doing so they get dramatic results in both task and relationship because their members are no longer preoccupied with getting their basic needs met. And fundamentally they can just focus their energy on being creative and problem solving and working towards goals together.

So we’re going to go a little further on this because it’s so important and Sally’s really going to give us a bit of an update on what that self actualization is and one of the needs inside of that because that’s a piece that’s really important as well.

Sally Stamp:

Well, and Brad, before we leave this slide… Oops, we did. I was… It reminds me of a story in early years of my practice where we were talking about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and I was with an audience of senior level professionals, who really discounted this at that time and thought that that was soft skills that people didn’t need to have. Well, in reality, as you said, this is some of the most important research now in terms of what we need for leadership and team effectiveness. So to move into what you were suggesting though when designing this webinar and thinking about needs, we realized that there’s been lots more research collected in terms of needs, theories and then expanded into this whole area of motivation. And thinking about teams, I know I’m working with a team right now that’s experiencing ebbs and flows in their levels of motivation.

And one model that we look to is Dan Pink’s from the book, Drive where contrary to what we’ve thought in the past about motivators such as pay and perks being the most important, this is what he has determined, autonomy, mastery and purpose. Autonomy for all of us. Being in control, feeling that we’re not being micromanaged. The mastery that’s constant and continual improvement of ourselves. And purpose, working towards something worthwhile.

So it’s interesting that these elements as Brad said, that tie into that level of self actualization actually relate very well to the extraordinary teams research and looking at the importance of these elements, especially purpose is critical in a team being motivated to work together. So we’re going to take a little time right now and do a poll and I think, Kevin, you’re going to read that.

Kevin Coray:

Yeah. Thanks Sally. As you in the audience think about your own experience on teams, either the team you’re on or teams you’ve been on in the past, we’re going to ask you about how well your basic human needs have been met. And in particular, we’ll just go through the hierarchy with you. And so our first poll is simply for you to answer whether or not you’ve ever been in a group where you or others felt unsafe. And then we’ll take a look at the results and see how prevalent that is in the world. And Sarah if you’d open the poll.

Sarah Cirone:

Yes. So you can give people a couple of minutes here to cast their votes or a couple moments, I guess I should say. We have some responses streaming in and this is a group of any kind.

Kevin Coray:

Yeah. And we’re already up to seeing a pretty stable result of over 70% say yes, they’ve been in a group where they felt unsafe. About 30% saying no. So there you go. I mean, and imagine in that group whether or not it was the one that you would say really performed at an extraordinary level in a place where people could be positively transformed or changed for the better.

Besides safety, let’s check out another need being met and we’ll start another poll here. Have you ever been in a group where you didn’t feel accepted, where you didn’t feel like you were part of it or in some ways you were held apart from the group? Sarah, will you open that one as well?

Sarah Cirone:

Yes. So again, we’ll give people up. Their responses are streaming in. You can your vote.

Kevin Coray:

This one is even more profound. I mean, it’s, we’re getting close to 90% of people saying yes to this.

Sally Stamp:

That’s not surprising.

Kevin Coray:

So safety is 70% are people who’ve said they’d been on teams where safety was unmet. 90% of people are saying they’ve been on a team or a group where you didn’t feel accepted. Let’s check the one more human need here with you all. Have you ever been in a group where your input was not valued or you or others were not respected? So that in a sense you didn’t feel a sense of worth or sense of contribution?

And this one is even higher is that results stream in, it’s over 90%. So it’s getting close to 95%. Pretty remarkable that so many teams as we found in our research are really unable to get to the extraordinary level because we’re not meeting even the basic human needs. And as we said before, without having these met, for the majority of the group, there’s really no chance of getting to the extraordinary level. Brad, and you want to carry on with this to talk about what happens in those situations?

Brad Britton:

Yeah, and in fact as Sally said, we really do want to take a coach-like approach, which is we want to hear more from you, so want to go deeper with you and get the details of what it’s like out there in your team. So our first question, and you can put this in your questions box, so if you can start typing your… What happens out there when safety, acceptance and worth is an issue on your team and you felt uncomfortable talking about it? What was that like?

Sally Stamp:

We’ll have to see what people answer in. I know I had a lot of people comment to me what happens, and there’s some pretty consistent themes usually. Oh, I’m seeing some things come in now. Okay.

Brad Britton:

Yeah. Morale plummeted.

Kevin Coray:

Donors increased.

Sally Stamp:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). People shut down. Yeah.

Kevin Coray:

Yeah. People don’t give their best.

Brad Britton:

Feeling of unrest and people won’t… Yeah.

Sally Stamp:

Oh, yeah. More stress.

Kevin Coray:

Gossip.

Sally Stamp:

Oh, and there an outcome projects didn’t get completed.

Brad Britton:

Yeah. Little binding for team success.

Sally Stamp:

Mm-hmm (affirmative), no engagement, no motivation. Yeah. Pretty powerful when you think in terms of what teams are expected to do and perform. Yeah. Afraid to speak up, low productivity. Not seeing any positive things occur as a result of this.

Brad Britton:

Yeah. I think these fit into some categories, right? They either endure it, they work around it, they confront it. Yeah. It’s just not [inaudible 00:21:24].

Sally Stamp:

There is indifference. I haven’t seen a lot that suggests that it’s often talked about or confronted.

Brad Britton:

Yeah. Right.

Kevin Coray:

Yeah. One kind of category that might come up as the low morale is a way of describing some of these comments.

Brad Britton:

Well, why don’t we move to the second question on the more detailed level and this is where the rubber meets the road, is around results. Right. So we’ve talked… There a little bit of that came in, but we want to hit this one directly is what’s the impact on the outcomes or results for the team when you’re feeling that sense of not safe, not accepted or, your worth was in question?

Kevin Coray:

Yeah. Retaliation.

Sally Stamp:

Yeah. Uh-huh(affirmative).

Brad Britton:

Yeah. Lower productivity. Poor service.

Sally Stamp:

Yeah. Failure to debate new issues. Yeah.

Kevin Coray:

We got sidetracked.

Sally Stamp:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). Derailed.

Kevin Coray:

Lack of innovation.

Sally Stamp:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Kevin Coray:

We didn’t meet our goals.

Sally Stamp:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). Not pulling weight. Yeah,

Kevin Coray:

Yeah. Poor results.

Brad Britton:

Yeah. Quality suffers because [inaudible 00:23:03]. They either drop in trust.

Sally Stamp:

Right.

Brad Britton:

Yup. Well-

Sally Stamp:

Is there something we didn’t mention, when those needs are met, safety, acceptance and worth, it typically leads to a much higher level of trust, which is foundational for a team to be effective and fun.

Brad Britton:

… Yeah. Upper management that I am happy with the results. Yeah. I think the bottom line here is results go down and stress goes up, right? This is not fun, a place to be. And so, part of this is coming to terms this and being willing to objectively takes part of the impact of this is a huge first step. Our time is just too valuable to let these kinds of dynamics persist, and at times, these are sticky situations and sometimes you can work through them on your own, but a lot of times it’s going to take some outside help and that can be the game changer.

So we want to talk a little bit about what you can do if these situations are part of your team, which obviously they are at least in the past or maybe right now. So Kevin’s going to talk more about that, and I really want to, before we move on, thank you for your candor and your openness on this. This is not necessarily easy to see or hear, but awfully important.

Kevin Coray:

Yeah. God willing, life’s too short to spend in these teams that don’t meet the basic human needs. It’s just too painful. So the question comes up from what’s happened both in the polls and what you’ve answered here about, how do we get away from that pain? How do we move the team forward? And this slide speaks to that. You can’t change this without a different kind of action that’s happening already in the team. So you can’t leave it to chance or you can’t leave it to doing what you’re doing today. You have to be highly intentional in making these kinds of changes. You have to have an intention to meet people’s individual needs.

And so that may change or take, require that behaviors change. And it may be that that’s difficult to get this information on the table in the first place. So you may need help to get these needs on a table in a nonthreatening way, particularly if there are people in the team in authority or others in the team that are kind of blind to the fact that some people’s needs are not being met. And so if we can measure it in a low charge way and debrief the results using a coach and then continue with deeper coaching of the team and/or individuals or pairs in the team where individual needs are not being met.

Well, imagine for example, a pair of people in your team where one person feels they’re always being dissed by another one. And yet that could probably be changed through coaching with that pair of people.

And then finally, even with that coaching, that takes a lots of practice because we’ve learned over lifetime some of these dysfunctional behaviors for some reason, when somebody is dissing somebody else that has served them in the past. And now as we move into the present and into the future, they’ve got to really change their habits. Not easy to do and we have to practice new ways of being with each other. So we have to change behaviors, habits, culture, norms, ground rules, how candid we are with each other. And the fact that being candid is something that’s, okay, so what’s the structure, for example in our meetings? How do we manage the dynamics in such a way that it values and supports people’s needs being met?

Brad Britton:

Yeah. I’ve been working with a lot of teams lately on this, especially the behaviors and habits and some of that just as a flavor of what we’ve been doing out there that works. And it’s some of this might feel a little overwhelming. Like, can I as an individual or just as a team, can we change the culture? And that takes up probably a broader commitment, but you can change your culture and your team and your personal culture. So one of our favorite tools is we call it Responsible Straight Talk, which is just this basic way of saying how do we be straight and direct, right? And not avoid sharing something that’s important without creating blame, right? So it’s that constructive, honest feedback that if we don’t deal with it, it festers, right?

So that’s one of the tools and we could spend probably an entire hour, half day, full day on all these kind of tools. But these, we just want to give you a flavor. Another one we call, Playing Above the Line. And that to us means that we are committed to curiosity and openness. So when we come into a meeting, a conversation, a new project, our commitment is to be open and curious about what’s possible, what other people’s views are. And that usually creates flow and creativity in forward movement.

Another one we use is this one of about a commitment to learning. One of the big bugaboos in most systems and even my own behavior, right? This is something very human as we want to be right? And we commit to that. Right? Well, the anecdote for that one is committing to learning is to say, “Oh, I’m going to be curious.” Even if this call was a client didn’t go well, I can either choose to look at it as a failure or I could choose to look at what I can learn from it.

And then one of our last ones is that this concept of listening for positive intent like that, when somebody comes at us, they may not come at us in a most productive way. But if we have the ability to sort through what they’re bringing and look for their positive intent, we usually can find it. And then usually that helps us move forward. So even if a manager who’s got a lot of, maybe has negative feedback, right, their true intention might be to really want you to be better. It’s not always easy to do, but something that can help move forward.

Sally Stamp:

Brad, I’m hearing you describe things that we as individual team members can do. And at the same time I’m understanding that these are tools you can take to your team to practice.

Brad Britton:

Absolutely. Yeah. And you know the research out there is when you learn together and you play with things together in a group, you learn faster and more thoroughly. So I’d definitely encourage people to do that.

Sally Stamp:

Yeah.

Kevin Coray:

Sally and Brad, I’ve seen that we’ve had a question come in and it says, sometimes you know that change has to take place but managers aren’t willing to do so. How would you respond to that?

Sally Stamp:

Yes. Who wants to go first? I’m guessing we’ve all had this experience.

Brad Britton:

Absolutely.

Sally Stamp:

I’ll jump in since I already did. Coaching up is something that we talk about that in terms of a team experience and if there’s a team in, for example, the designated leaders of the team are less resistant or more resistant and less engaged, then this is a conversation that needs to happen and some of the things we’ve talked about in terms of getting it out on the table are critically important. If it’s individuals outside of the team who are not aligned with it, then that’s again, some individual conversations. Perhaps sharing the research, the evidence, some of which we’ve just shared with you on why this is so critical, not only to teaming, to outcomes for the organization. And so that can be a real compelling argument. Brad, did you want to jump in too?

Brad Britton:

Yeah, I think that this is a tough question. It’s, I don’t want to minimize the difficulty of when you’re in this place. I just really want to empathize with this. At some point I like to talk about it as separating content and process, right? Like people get tripped up when they start to talk about, having a disagreement about pursuing some project or idea and they misinterpret that as the problem when the real problem is that the feeling is that the manager doesn’t feel like a partner to them. Right? That’s the real essence of the issue. And that’s something that well, in the sense of responsible straight talk is that you can say that in an unarguable way, you can say my perception of, and my feeling is that I feel like I’m trying to pursue something positive for the group and I’m not feeling their support as a partner in getting there with you.

Now I know that takes a lot of courage and yet unarguable and it’s a place to start. Because I think most people will respond to that even if they are defensive to say, “Hmm, this person who I can see is a good worker and is committed to the right things, is telling me that the way I’m showing up isn’t really helping them get the job done.” Oftentimes that is a starting place to get their attention about building a new way together. And those are the moments of truth that some we’ve got to take, that’s what you can own. You can own your feelings about where you’re at with that person. Now that safety might not be there. So we understand that, but if you don’t, there’s no other place really for you to go.

Kevin Coray:

A follow up question I’ve seen Brad is here in the question box is that, is this possible when not a leader committed to it? And I just say, it’s interesting to wonder why the leaders not committed to it, where are they committed to? Is it that they’re not committed to it because they themselves don’t have the skills, they don’t feel they have the time. They feel like time spent on relationship as opposed to task is not what work is all about. Or the short term results are more important than longterm results. I mean, there are hundreds of reasons why they might appear not committed to it. And one of the possibilities here is to explore that with them from a different angle, from the angle of what they are committed to such that the notion and importance of meeting group needs can come up in a more neutral, less charged way, and then they can become aware of what’s important to the longterm results and the extraordinary possibilities for teams.

And so, I just want to move to this next slide which talks about what we mentioned earlier that one way to do it is to bring in something like the extraordinary teams inventory and the extraordinary teams inventory is about fundamentally from most leaders perspective when they’re thinking about tasks, how to get outstanding results, what is it that it would take to get outstanding results? And when that happens in an extraordinary team environment, people also get personal transformation.

And you can see here that the five indicators that are measured by the Extraordinary Teams Inventory are the purpose of the team. Profound learning that is to what extent are people in the team really learning new things about their skills, about themselves, about working in general, about practices and ways to make and do things in a new and innovative way and embracing differences.

And by embracing difference, we of course mean diversity, but we mean more than diversity. We also mean that we’re embracing differences in working styles, differences in our willingness to speak up in a team, differences in how we act around engaging or respecting others in a team. And so the embracing difference score is a place that often if it’s low for a team as a place we can scratch under the surface and see if it’s about human needs not being met. Full engagement, the Gallup Organization has shown that less than 33% of people in less than extraordinary teams are really engaged. That we’re really missing a huge opportunity in our organizations around engagement. And yet, in extraordinary teams, people are just completely engaged. They’re so engaged, they’re just really excited to be working together and producing on their compelling purpose.

So the opportunity for a manager who might not be committed in the first place to see their results really shift forward in a positive way is to use something that has this neutral way of getting stuff on the table and for them to begin to understand the utility of working on new practices, new behaviors, new ways of structuring the organization so that human needs are better met. That’s not the only outcome here. It’s one of the things we can work on task and relationship with regard to getting this on the table. And then that way it’s far less threatening to some managers.

Sally, why don’t we show them a couple of examples from the Extraordinary Teams Inventories from a couple of different teams.

Sally Stamp:

Yeah. And before you go to that next slide, I was going to acknowledge that when you were talking about what could be going on with a leader or a manager, you were really looking at what are their needs, what are their unmet needs? And again, that’s typically an awareness discussion that they may not realize some of the underlying elements that are leading to them having that feeling or thought. So thank you for that though. I think that’s really important. And as Brad said, this is a prevailing challenge that people tell us they face. We’re not, everybody is at the same place at the same time in terms of extraordinariness of their teams. So yeah, let’s a look at an example, and we wanted to share an actual page from the assessment that we’ve been talking about just so you could get an idea. As Kevin said, this is a great way to open up discussion. It’s information that everybody can look at and then process and decide what’s important for them to consider.

So this is actually the report overview page. If you were to do the extraordinary teams inventory and it shows at the top what the team’s score is. And then those indicators that Kevin just described are graph below. And as you can see there are three ranges, ordinary, solid and extraordinary. And I’m not remembering if you said this, Kevin, about the distribution teams of a bell curve?

Kevin Coray:

Yeah. What we found is when we look at teams from every walk of life is that really around 70% of teams score in the solid category, and in that category usually task is working pretty well, not spectacularly well, but pretty well and relationship is working okay. But there’s a lot of stuff under the surface that could be looked at her and made significantly better. And so, with 70% in the middle, then we have around 15% on either side of that, teams that show up as what we call ordinary or those teams that are really great that show up as extraordinary. In this particular slide is one that’s relatively ordinary.

Sally Stamp:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). Well, thank you for that. I think it’s important for people to understand that solid is okay and in fact, not every team will be an extraordinary experience. This team, as an example, had some challenges before I was involved with some others in coaching them. There had been major changes in the leadership of the organization, in the composition of the team. The reporting relationships, just a laundry list of things that all added up to not much sense of team at all. And so the ETI was done fairly early on and admittedly people, their initial reaction was negative. They were very disappointed that they scored in their minds so low. Yet when we talked about that and what are some of the reasons for that? It was clear. They admitted that they didn’t have trust, they didn’t feel safe, they didn’t have respect for one another, they didn’t even know what each other did.

So after some team coaching, they were able to really develop the relationship piece. They revised their purpose and reason for being as a team. And a number of team members admitted that they felt an increased sense of belonging and all of that led to the team functioning better. Now, I don’t know yet if they’ve done a followup ETI, however, just the reported response and the outcome of their work was changed.

So another example that I think you have Kevin, to show us is something a little different. And in this team which scored in the extraordinary range. It was actually a team that was, I have to say highly functioning even before I began to work with them, with again, some others in our extraordinary teams partnership. And this was a smaller size team. They’d been together for some time. So they had longevity, they had relationship. They also had a truly curious mindset about the work that they did in each other. They really had a sense of continuous learning and continuous improvement.

Again, the work that they did was like that and yet they all carried that out. So when we did this assessment with them, again fairly early on, I can honestly say that they would not have scored this way without any help. And yet we did look at embracing differences and did some work around better understanding roles and responsibilities since there had been some changes in the team composition. So the postscript to this story is sometime later, I guess a little bit over a year after a new team member had been added, and then actually was discharge because they were a toxic team member. The team invited us back to revisit some of their areas and it really was helpful for them to again have this reference to what being extraordinary looked like and to go through the individual elements again and revisit purpose and relationship and all those things.

So I’m happy to report they’ve now added two other new team members, and they have worked out very well and we’re really involved in the process using this information. So again, it’s a great tool, it’s easy to administer and something that I think anyone would find value in, and in the results.

Kevin Coray:

So I wanted to mention, another question came in about how does management deal with the fact that you can’t please everyone? And in this particular example there was, earlier on had been a toxic team member and ultimately that person left the team. In other cases, you’re going to have people that aren’t pleased and then what do you do about it and what does management do about it? And it may well be that one possibility is that you are able to coach that particular person and help them see what it is that they do have and what is possible in this team. And fundamentally we’re talking about the basic human needs as the threshold to becoming extraordinary. So pleasing everyone is in part about how much we as individuals acccept ourselves in our roles and our abilities in a group and how well other needs in our lives or other commitments in our lives are met as well. And it isn’t easy. So a coach can really be helpful in those kinds of situations.

Sally Stamp:

Agreed. So Brad, I’m going to toss it back to you.

Brad Britton:

Okay, great. So what’s the payoff for doing all this work? I mean, this work is that we know that it’s not necessarily easy. It may be somewhat simple and clear, but we know that the work to be extraordinary, is not necessarily an easy journey. Even when we figure out how to get team members needs met and we figure out how to implement strategies that create a compelling purpose, embrace differences, share leadership, create great engagement, focus on learning. If you’ve been on a team like this, you know the experience and frankly it’s sometimes even hard to put into words. Yet what we see is when people do make this investment and they figure out how to get here, members are energized. The team and its work is like a fountain of energy, right? It’s just propels them and everyone forward, we see connection.

Team members feel a deep connection to each other and their mission. They feel as a part of something that’s bigger than they are, and extraordinary teams we see hope. The work of the team inspires them to see more possibilities in the move into action. And the bottom line is people are changed. The effect is like you’re a different person when you’re a part of an extraordinary team, and this is the type of personal transformation we see when teams really commit to becoming extraordinary, and what makes the work worth it. So where do we start?

Kevin Coray:

Yeah, I mean, before I move on, I just want people in the audience to think about a high point experience rather than a team where your needs weren’t met. Have you been on a team or teams weren’t met? We’re not going to do a poll here, but in those cases, what was your experience? What was your high point experience across your career? And if you just think about that for a minute, more and more of these aspects of extraordinary teams start to show up. You feel motivated by the purpose of the organization. I mean, we know this from the research. We know that you’re being more fully engaged. That the team will meet its goals more effectively and you know that your own words, you’ll experience the fact that your contribution is really important.

And so, again, ho do we move that? How do we make the shift from ordinary to extraordinary? Then the first thing is that we need the whole team to be aware that they could make the change, that we need to be aware of the need to meet people’s needs and aware of the possibility. What’s the benefit? The benefit is just really amazing and you know it yourself from your own high point experience. How can we get more of that in our work life? And second thing is we’ve already talked about is get some kind of a baseline. Get some neutral way, the UTI being one way to get a conversation started. And in most cases you’re going to need help with that conversation to shift what are really longterm embodied practices that are not particularly functional but which have made people including the manager successful in the past, but barriers to extraordinary ness in the future.

And then with that help, it’s our belief that you can move forward from ordinary to solid and from solid up toward and perhaps even up into the extraordinary category. But at that point you can repeat some way of measuring what’s going on with the team to celebrate its improvement and embrace continuing to get better. Sally, do you want to check with the audience on this?

Sally Stamp:

Yeah, we are going to do one more quick poll. And so as Kevin just said, first step is awareness. So think of the team right now that you’re a part of, the major team that you’re a part of and what’s your current reality? And we’ll ask Sarah to open up one last poll. It sucks. It could be better. It’s good. It’s very good. It’s that highpoint in my career.

Sarah Cirone:

Right. We’ll give people a couple of moments here to submit their answers. We see them rushing in now.

Brad Britton:

Yeah, the leaders could be better. 30 almost 40%

Sally Stamp:

Hmm, okay.

Kevin Coray:

Actually Brad, if you add them up, it sucks and it could be better. It adds up to 50% of today’s current reality for the people on the call.

Sally Stamp:

That certainly ties to what we learned at the beginning of the call in terms of needs. So, where do we go? We’ve talked about why it’s important, what are some things you can do and some tools you can use. And Brad, I think you’re going to talk a little bit more about that.

Brad Britton:

Right, thanks Sally. Well, based on the results from the poll, this feels even more important. We promised at the beginning to share some thoughts about how to take the material deeper. For some of you just building awareness is going to be enough for now. And that’s cool. Using the extraordinary teams inventory is the great way to establish that baseline as Kevin was talking about. Yeah, others and probably in that 50% somewhere are going to feel the pull to make more systematic changes. So you can get on that path to extraordinary. And I want to make a little comment about that. It’s not about, like Sally said with that one team, they get pretty disappointed if they’re down in ordinary. It really doesn’t matter where you are, because that’s just judging, just making yourself wrong. If you’d say, “Hey, we’re down in ordinary and that’s not a good thing.” Our advice is to really just focus on where you want to go and making progress from where you start.

So with that in mind, if you really want to make some shifts, our advice is to build a plan to really start to think through where you want to go and why. And you need a plan that’s going to help you through the challenges. And if any of you’ve done strategic planning or visioning, it’s that vision that pulls you through when you come back to your reality and you’re dealing with your workload that you know is going to be there, your responsibilities.

And also there’s, some of those old habits are going to show up. So having that plan is going to be critical. So why bother it though? Why bother with creating a plan and taking the time and making room in your schedule? Right. And maybe having those tough conversations with your manager or the support system around you. Well, in the words of our inspiring colleague, Kathy Ryan, let me go to the next slide. Life is too short to spend time in teams that don’t fulfill their promise. These are words I truly believe in and it’s just we spent so much time together at work in our teams doing our jobs, the investment of building something different, something new, something that can really get you to where you’re going to go it’s going to be something that you’re going to be proud of.

So some of you may be planners and have this dialed and that’s great. Yet for those of you who want some help, we have something we’ve had a lot of success with, with clients and we call it, our launch to extraordinary consultation. This is a complimentary consultation where we work with you to do four things. First, we build your vision about where you really want to go with your team. We get the essentials for what it looks like when things are really humming.

Second, we help you identify what it’ll take to get both results, right, task that you want and the team environment that’s going to sustain it. So both tasks and relationship.

Third, we help you discover the thing that’s holding you back. We have yet to work with a team in one of these consultations where we haven’t found something that’s holding them back. And by knowing what that is, it really unleashes power and energy for moving forward.

And the last thing is we’ll help you identify actions to move forward. Now I love this preface because it’s so fun to watch teams create their vision and to get really fired up about where they want to go. So our hope is, is that you take us up on this and we’d love to work with you.

Now the reality is that we do have a pretty big team. And the cool thing about having really talented consultants is that they’re busy. So we only have so many consultations available each month. And the big and which is important for you to know is that if you do have an interest in one of these consultations, we will find you a slot, so we look forward to working with you beyond this if you’re interested, or if you need more help with planning and you’re not one of those planners that can do it on your own. And the easy way to do that is just call the HRDQ with that number on the bottom of that slide and they’ll connect us. They will connect you to our team. I’m going to turn it over to Sarah to talk a little bit about where things go from here and then we’ll open it up for questions.

Sarah Cirone:

Thank you Kevin, Sally and Brad, this was truly amazing. We appreciate you looking to HRDQ for your training needs. We publish researched based, experiential learning products that you can deliver in your organization. Check out our online or print self assessments like Extraordinary Teams. The foundations of today’s session are up out of your seat games, are reproducible workshops that you can customize and more either at our website or give our customer service team a call.

And if you need help learning a training program or you’d like one of our expert trainers deliver it for you, we also provide those services. So now it seems here that we have a couple of minutes to fit into maybe one or two questions. So if you just want to type your questions into the question box on your Go-To webinar control panel and we can have the team answer some of those, and if we’re unable to get the remainder of those today, we will answer those via email after the session as well as post them on the event page. So make sure to check that out as well. And I’ll pass it back to you guys.

Kevin Coray:

Thanks Sarah.

Sarah Cirone:

Thank you.

Kevin Coray:

I see you have a question here that I’d like to take a stab at. I think Amy said, how do you have a difficult conversation with a manager who just doesn’t get it?

One way to do it is to go deeper around what’s the factor impact of the behavior that the manager is having? And so from a deeper standpoint of as a somatic coach you could have two people brainstorm the actual behavior that’s happening so that the manager and others can see it. I had a client recently who the manager just through all of their past experience had learned to really be a bully and in fact, this bullying was part of the scientific method and was very acceptable among other scientists but not with staff that hadn’t grown up with the scientific method, and he scared the other people to death when he would stand up, stand in their space, and people found it very threatening.

The approach here is just to mirror that, to have a role play where two people do that and then ask other people, including the management where the manager is party to listening to the observation. How does that make you feel when that person is doing that behavior? And then you start to hear things like, “I felt afraid. I feel aggressive. I feel like I want to be in a fight. I feel like I want to get out of there.” And when people start to hear that truth about safety, about worth, about acceptance, it really has a huge impact on the team and can make a huge difference to get people to like that particular manager to just think through whether or not that’s the impact they really want to have. And in a public situation, mostly they’re going to say no, they don’t want to have that kind of effect on people. And privately, they probably don’t have the skills to change. So they need help from a coach.

Sarah Cirone:

Great, Kevin, and now that’s going to bring us to the top of the hour. I wanted to give you, Sally, and Brad a big thank you for joining us today. This was a wonderful session.

Brad Britton:

Thanks Sarah.

Sally Stamp:

Thank you.

Sarah Cirone:

And thank you all for participating in today’s webinar. Happy training.