Building Inspired Teams

Building teams that thrive in complex environments; they create value fast, with higher quality, greater agility, and less stress.

This article was written by Dr. Steven Wolff, author of Inspired Teams, a team-based survey featured on Comparative Agility.

An Inspired Team is a state of Being; it is not a destination to be achieved. As such, becoming an Inspired Team is more about the mindset and agreements of the team than it is about the competencies of the team.

In the early stages of development, before the outcomes of Energy, Innovation, Execution, and Transparency (explained in the previous article) have been fully established, your team must build Psychological Safety by progressing through the conversations that generate these outcomes.
The order is intentional because the Outcome conversations loosely build safety in stages, each building on the prior stage.

Once safety has been established, you want to heighten the team’s ability to sense when it is operating as an Inspired Team and when it has slipped into old habits, which is natural when learning.

Inspired Teams use their heightened awareness to initiate conversations that deepen their shared understanding of the situation and they experiment with ways to move back into the desired way of Being. These conversations can be difficult. To embrace the emotion inherent in these conversations, rather than avoid it, the team must rely on the Psychological Safety and Transparency it has built.

Becoming an Inspired Team occurs as a result of conversations that take place while the team works; it is not something that requires a large investment of time outside of work. Nevertheless, becoming Inspired takes dedication, effort, and practice; it requires a shift in mindset, a shift in the team’s way of Being.

If you decide to become an Inspired Team, you have committed to shifting the team’s culture; this happens by shifting the team’s habits (norms), one habit at a time.
The figure below shows the stages by which a norm is developed.

Unaware

Most of us go about our work without much awareness of our habits. We instinctively do what we think we are supposed to do without giving it much thought. This is the state of being unaware.
Step one is to move the team from being unaware to being aware of its cultural norms. One way to do this is by taking the Inspired Teams assessment and discussing the results in a workshop. As the team talks about the results, they are moving into the state of awareness.

Aware

Once the team has become aware of its culture, which norms are strong and which are weak, it will likely want to improve, but how does the team go about shifting its norms?
Norms are a set of agreements among the members of the team about how members will interact. Agreements on new ways to interact are nothing more than intentions.
If a team hopes to follow through on its agreements, it needs to implement practices and rituals that help it from regressing into old habits.

Embody

Practice
Like any new behavior, it needs to be reinforced or it will fade away; old habits die hard. Teams must periodically heighten their focus on how they are operating and consciously practice the desired behaviors as part of their normal work.

Mindfulness
The team must remain mindful of how it is interacting. Although everyone is responsible for helping the team, when the team is learning it often helps to assign a particular member to raise awareness when the team slips into an undesired behavior.

New Habit

Once the team has built a new habit it may occasionally slip into old behaviors; the team must be vigilant and constantly sense how it is operating and shift as needed.

Sensing
There are cues members can use to sense the level at which the team is operating. Operating with a new habit feels different. Similarly, the language used when operating at with a new habit is different. For example, when a traditional team is faced with a challenge it often feels anxious and uses victim language, e.g., “Why can’t they make up their minds? How are we supposed to get the work done when the requirements keep changing?” An Inspired Team, on the other hand, is more hopeful and sounds more optimistic; they focus on creating value for the customer, e.g., “Let’s put our heads together; we’ll figure it out. This does make more sense for the customer.”

Shifting
All members are encouraged to share their sense with the team. If they feel something, they say something by initiating a conversation. This creates a shared sense, which is the first step to shifting back to the new habit.

Levels of Development

Level 1 — Crawling

Most teams operate within Level 1; they get the work done, sometimes late and over budget, but they deliver, albeit slowly compared to Inspired Teams at Level 2. There is likely unresolved conflict that remains hidden and slows the team down. Level 1 teams are not good learners, and when they do learn, they often focus on the task and not on the way the team functions.

Walking/Building

This is a transition between levels 1 and 2 where the team is building its “muscles” so it can run.
Most teams don’t make it to level 2 or can’t stay there because they do not pay enough attention to this stage. This stage must involve more than intellectual activity, it must include the whole person, mind, body and heart.

Level 2 — Running

At this level, the team has developed the safety needed to have authentic conversations and reinforce its agreements (norms). The team can now accelerate value creation and achieve breakthrough performance.

Inspired Teams conversations

Fernando Flores studied language and advanced the idea that our conversations are not just used to describe things and communicate, our conversations are generative; they create the reality we experience.

Building a team culture is ultimately a product of conversations among team members. They must come to an agreement about what they value and how they want to interact.

The questions in the figure above are the main questions that a team must ask to build and sustain a culture that generates the 4 outcomes of Inspired Teams.

These questions also serve to help the team reflect on its current culture. Each question provides a focus; the specific answer depends on the particular team.

To assess whether your teams are average or Inspired — and identify where you need to make improvements — take the Inspired Teams assessment right now and take an intentional approach to continuous improvement.