The Secret Ingredient that Ties your Top Team Together

“The secret ingredient of my Secret Ingredient Soup is … nothing! There is no secret ingredient!
It’s just plain old noodle soup? You don’t add some kind of special sauce or something?
Don’t have to. To make something special, you just have to believe it’s special.”
– Kung Fu Panda

Last week, when we talked about the 5 essential ingredients required for high-performing teams, I admit I left one very crucial ingredient out – the secret ingredient.

The secret that determines whether your team will fall apart or stay together is … the team itself! Each team is made up of individuals who have relationships with each other. No matter how good your team looks on paper, without the right intra-team relationships, it would not be able to achieve it’s potential as a high performance team.

How Do You Know If Your Team Has The Right Relationships To Become A High Performance Team?

Here’s a handy list of 10 relationship characteristics you should look for in your team:

1. Deep awareness of each team member’s background, personality and style
2. Commitment to build on each others’ strengths and a desire to support someone with his/her weaknesses
3. Willingness to care and look out for each other
4. Hold each other accountable
5. Willingness to disagree on issues that are important to the team
6. Ability to resolve conflict
7. To stand up for each other when confronted with an outside threat
8. To support each other and have each others’ back
9. Ability to give, and be open to receive, constructive feedback
10. Deep commitment not only to the team’s success but also to each others’ individual success

The big question, of course, is how do you get people to that level of respect and trust? This is where I come in and help CEOs in building high performing top teams.

The Helix Model of Top Teams

I have dubbed my high performing team model the ‘Helix Model’ as I see it as two strands that need to be ‘spun and braided’ together to create a powerful thread.

The reason this double helix model works is because I believe you can’t work on the ‘5 ingredients’ and the relationship between team members in isolation. It has to be done simultaneously.

So in my work with leadership teams I always develop interventions that have components of both strands: strategy and execution.

Related: Read this for insight into activities and tools for strategically aligning your top teams: The Questions You Didn’t Know to Ask for Achieving Team Alignment.

How to Improve Communication Within your Team: The Johari Window

What I often notice in teams that are not living up to their billing is that a real relation between members has never been established or is broken.

Even more surprising is that team members of teams that have been working for years with each other don’t even know the personal circumstances of their colleagues. It has simply never come up. How is it possible for team members to trust each other if they don’t even know each other?

To kick off conversations on the importance of getting to know each other for building effective teams I explain the concepts behind the Johari Window.

As you probably know this is a communication model that is used to improve understanding between individuals. The word “Johari” is taken from the names of Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham, who developed the model in 1955.

The Johari Window encapsulates two key ideas:

1. That you can build trust with others by disclosing information about yourself.
2. That, with the help of feedback from others, you can learn about yourself and come to terms with personal issues.

By explaining the idea of the Johari Window, you can help team members understand the value of self-disclosure, and you can encourage them to give, and accept, constructive feedback.

Making the relationships between team members more open and trustworthy does not mean that team members have to be or become friends for life. What it does mean though is that the relationship between high performing team members is that of respect and absolute trust.

The secret ingredient is the belief that you CAN be a top team.

Get More on Top Teams

Stay tuned for more strategies and tips on helping your team become a top high performing team. Just subscribe to the blog to receive the next post in your inbox (no spam, ever).

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