Executive coach James Scouller introduces an innovative methodology to freshen up your approach to team building and create new purpose within your company

Most people in business don’t realise it, but there are three basic points you need to know if you want to succeed in building winning teams, not just once, but repeatedly. These are: 

• Your work group faces hidden psychological traps, meaning it takes conscious effort to turn it into a successful team.

• Not every work challenge demands a team because what I call a “performance group” – which follows a hub-and-spokes approach – may be enough.

• Every team faces three psychological issues it must resolve if it is to succeed. I call them Commit, Combust and Combine (C-C-C).

In this short article we don’t have the space to discuss the three basics. All you need to know here is that the Seven-Principle (7P) action model outlined in this article addresses all three points, especially the three C-C-C psychological issues.

Seven Principle (7P) Model overview

The 7P Model assumes that teams exist to deliver results its individual members couldn’t achieve by working on their own, even if coordinated by a leader. They do so by creating collective work products. 

Examples could include crafting a company vision, creating a design for a new car, or jointly carrying out a company transformation plan. It also assumes there’s a payoff for team members: that in working together they’ll experience personal growth and fulfilment. 

The 7P Model says that if you want to steer your work group up what I call the Team Progression Curve towards high-performing team status, you should apply seven action principles:

• Motivating purpose – Define a common motivating purpose that matters to all members and creates a feeling of urgency. A purpose powerful enough to carry you all through your journey. A purpose you express through a number one goal – the result that, together, you must deliver in the next 12 months – with supporting metrics and targets, to which you dedicate your best efforts.

• Performance group or real team? Decide whether you need to act as a genuine team in achieving your motivating purpose or if working as a performance group makes more sense. Sometimes a motivating purpose doesn’t need a real team approach, in which case it’s easier to apply performance group disciplines.

• Shared flexed principled leadership – Share power, so everyone co-owns decisions, problem-solving, planning and delivery. And if you’re team leader, exemplify the team’s ethos and standards while flexing your approach in line with the task’s urgency, your teammates’ profiles and whether Commit, Combust or Combine is to the fore.
  
• Task progress and results – Know the blend of knowhow and team behaviours you need. Create a vision for your business unit or project. Back it up with plans, milestones, creative thinking, clear team roles (not the same as job titles), assignments, action and results. Apply the joint accountability discipline. Make sure you’re not trying to nail too many tasks simultaneously. 

• Group unity – Create and uphold a team identity: a sense of “us”, that “we succeed as a team or fail as a team”, while pushing for results by agreeing a common ethos and standards. Build a climate where you all open up, develop close bonds, trust one another and put the team’s aims before your selfish interests. 
  
• Attention to individuals – Recognise that although group unity is crucial, the members are distinct individuals with unique qualities. Therefore, if you’re the team leader, ensure you understand, recognise and address each teammate’s needs, concerns, motivations, potential, in-team behaviour and value to the team. 

• Renew or end – Create leading indicators like checks on your original planning assumptions. Work on yourselves as a team to promote joint learning. Bring in new opinions. If you’re team leader, act as a learning role model. Revisit the basics if the team feels “stuck”. If you’re a project team, manage your ending skilfully.
  
  

A jigsaw model 

Now here’s a key point: The Seven-Principle (7P) action model doesn’t work in a linear sequence. You don’t start with Motivating Purpose, move on to Performance Group or Real Team, then begin working on Shared Flexed Principled Leadership, before putting your efforts into Task Progress & Results and continue clockwise until Renew or End. That’s why I’ve presented the model as a jigsaw to show each principle as distinct but not separate. 

Each principle has its own helpful payoff, but it also affects the other six to build increasing momentum. This means you can’t overlook any one principle because they all have roles to play.

Applying the 7P Model to existing groups 

If you’re in an existing work group, based on coaching experience, you’d normally start with Motivating Purpose and then address the question of “Performance group or real team?” However, the other five principles won’t follow sequentially. What you work on next will depend on the specifics of your situation, especially your dominant psychological (C-C-C) issue.

You may, for example, find yourselves working on at least four of the other five principles in parallel, gradually “tightening the bolts” – just as you would if you were mounting a wheel on a car’s axle. 

Applying the model to new groups 

If yours is a new work group, you’d start with Task Progress & Results (TP&R). Why? Because, assuming you know your basic team purpose (its reason for existing), your first act is to decide who you want in the group. This is a TP&R challenge. 

Then you’d normally shift to the Motivating Purpose followed by the “Performance group or real team?” question. However, some new work groups have a fuzzy or ambiguous reason for existing, so the Motivating Purpose would be your first port of call. 

Then again, in my time as a team coach, I’ve seen work groups struggling to agree their basic purpose or failing to decide on a number one goal for the coming period because they were poor at collaborating. So even though their Motivating Purpose was foggy, I decided to flex my approach. With some groups, I worked on their collective skill in analysing issues, or problem-solving, or decision-making, or editing their priorities. Sometimes we worked on all four skill zones. My point is that I stayed with Task Progress & Results (which includes these skills). 

Other groups have unwittingly learned to speak in code, meaning they weren’t saying what they were really thinking and feeling. With them, I zoomed in on Group Unity and kept the team building focused on first-level trust-building and learning to speak plainly until they stopped playing political games with one another. Only then did I revert to Motivating Purpose.

Bringing it all together 

These examples reinforce my point that team building isn’t straightforward, meaning the seven principles don’t follow a neat linear sequence. That’s why I like the jigsaw metaphor illustrated in the diagram. And that’s why I usually help clients figure out whether Commit, Combust or Combine is dominant in their team and then – and only then – zero in on their most important challenges and decide which of the 7P principles they should address first, and in which sequence.

That’s just a short overview, but it should give you some fresh ideas on how to structure your approach to team building. I’d love to know how you get on. 

About the author
James Scouller is an executive coach and author of the trilogy, ‘How To Build Winning Teams Again And Again’ published by Hawkhurst Publishing. The three-part series is available on Amazon and all other major online bookstores.