Keith Ferrazzi

<article-ideainbrief class="article-ideainbrief">
 <h4 class="ideainbrief-title">Idea in Brief</h4>
 <div class="ideainbrief-contents">
  <h5>The Problem</h5>
  <p>Companies have traditionally prioritized leadership competencies over team competencies. In doing so they may have hampered both innovation and growth.</p>
  <h5>The Solution</h5>
  <p>To achieve breakthrough performance, teams should commit to a new social contract that emphasizes candor, collaboration, accountability, and continual improvement.</p>
  <h5>How to Achieve It</h5>
  <p>Team members can engage in collaborative problem solving; bulletproof upcoming initiatives; use candor breaks, red-flag replays, and safe words to facilitate constructive criticism; and hold open 360s in which they take responsibility for coaching and developing one another.</p>
 </div>
</article-ideainbrief><p class="mag-icon-teams-w30">Eric Starkloff was on a mission to reinvent his company. As the incoming CEO of NI (formerly National Instruments), a Texas-based automated test and measurement engineering firm, he wanted to speed up decision-making and accelerate growth. He wanted pushback and alternative directions from his leadership team but was met with conflict avoidance. One team member recalls, “We were overly polite but not necessarily kind to one another. And people certainly didn’t speak their minds.”</p>

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<p>Companies have traditionally emphasized leadership competencies, not team competencies. But the transformation of an organization must begin with the transformation of its teams; team leaders and members must commit to new behaviors to escape mediocre or even merely good performance, accelerate innovation, and unleash growth. Drawing on more than a thousand assessments of teams conducted over two decades of research and coaching, the author presents a simple diagnostic that enables leaders to evaluate their teams on critical dimensions that relate to performance. He describes several practices designed to move members away from outdated behaviors and facilitate lasting, positive change: collaborative problem solving, &#8220;bulletproofing,&#8221; candor breaks, red-flag replays, safe words, and open 360s. Although the examples often involve leadership teams, the practices outlined can be used at any level. They can be implemented in any context but are especially effective in virtual environments, where tools permit a broader range of collaborative practices than strictly in-person formats allow.</p>

A New Social Contract for Teams

Companies have traditionally emphasized leadership competencies, not team competencies. But the transformation of an organization must begin with the transformation of its teams; team leaders and members must commit to new behaviors to escape mediocre or even merely good performance, accelerate innovation, and unleash growth. Drawing on more than a thousand assessments of teams conducted over two decades of research and coaching, the author presents a simple diagnostic that enables leaders to evaluate their teams on critical dimensions that relate to performance. He describes several practices designed to move members away from outdated behaviors and facilitate lasting, positive change: collaborative problem solving, “bulletproofing,” candor breaks, red-flag replays, safe words, and open 360s. Although the examples often involve leadership teams, the practices outlined can be used at any level. They can be implemented in any context but are especially effective in virtual environments, where tools permit a broader range of collaborative practices than strictly in-person formats allow.

A New Social Contract for Teams

Summary.

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