The five disciplines of highly effective teams

Photo by Isaiah Rustad on Unsplash.

With the first couple of months of the new year already under our belts and the end of the financial year in sight, it’s a great time to have a planning session with your team. And what better way to start your planning than with a new framework?

Recently, I fell in love with the Five Disciplines of a Highly Effective Team, from the School of Systemic Team Coaching, because of its clarity and depth. It made so much sense when I saw it, I wondered how I didn’t come up with it myself!

More than the sum of its parts

Developed by Professor Peter Hawkins, the framework builds on the premise that being a team involves much more than meets the eye. 

Hawkins writes that his approach is not only about “helping the team optimise the way it is communicating and learning together” but also about “enabling the team to define and execute its collective task in a way that creates greater value than possible from the sum of the individual members.”

What makes a highly effective team? 

According to Hawkins, the five disciplines that make a highly effective team are clarifying, commissioning, co-creating, connecting, and core learning. Here are some tips, ideas and practical ways to put this fabulous framework to work for your (digital) team.

1. Clarifying

To be effective, every team needs a clear collective purpose and agreed objectives. Often, this clarifying is skipped under the assumption that everyone is already singing from the same hymn sheet. But teams have different personalities and skills in them, and some people are more likely to share their views than others. So checking-in regularly on what core aims are in everyone’s minds is a really good discipline for getting your team to be more aligned as a collective.

It’s especially important when there are changes in strategy or stakeholder expectations which move the boundaries you’ve set out as a team. There can be a tension between supporting with strategic advice and delivering stuff. Digital, brand, media, creative and production people and teams often need to do both. But sometimes, stakeholder expectations are more skewed towards the delivery side, which can lead to people feeling undervalued and that their expertise is not appreciated.

2. Commissioning

This means that the team objectives are aligned with the needs of all their stakeholders. This is a balancing act between doing things that you know your team needs to do to add value to your organisation, and being supportive of the needs of other teams and external stakeholders. 

Some of it is a journey of getting your stakeholders to buy into your vision of how your team can support the organisation. The rest is about having transparency in your commissioning process – what support you offer and how people can commission it.

3. Co-creating

This means that all team members recognise that their objectives can only be achieved by effective collaboration.

I recommend two different models you can use with your team to assess where you are. First, the Tuckman stages of team development – forming, storming, norming, performing – which help you pinpoint where you are and what you can do next to develop.

Then my favourite is Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions model. It spells out problems in teams that are often overlooked. For example, accountability and focus on results are rarely done well, due to lack of skills to deliver constructive feedback or to collaborate in a non hierarchical way. 

4. Connecting 

This discipline is the thing that supercharges your team. While the first three disciplines are all important, “real value is only created when these foundations are converted into transforming the relationships with all the team’s stakeholders” according to Hawkins.

When I started my consultancy, one of the things I wanted to do was help digital teams see beyond their bubble. Having spent a good chunk of my career working in or with digital teams, I know that trust and relationships within the team are often built on an “us and them” mentality. The focus is often on delivering the long to-do list and how we go about it sometimes gets forgotten. Relationships with stakeholders who are not our mates suffer as a consequence. 

There are two tools you can use to help you think about how you manage your stakeholders as a team. And they’re both based on something that you’ve most likely been doing for some time.

One is a stakeholder mapping model (the same one you may have used in campaigns and advocacy planning!) The one here has two axes: low/high influence and low/high support of  your vision. You can change those to whatever makes sense for you. The main thing to remember is that you should always spend more time on the stakeholders who are influential or important but who are not your allies. It’s much harder than talking to your friends, but it’s helpful in the long term.

The think>feel>do model is borrowed from user journey planning, which many teams will have used as a part of website, email or product development. 

This model helps you step into the shoes of your stakeholder and understand why they do what they do, what is it that they may feel or think and therefore what they need from you. With stakeholder relationships, it’s not always what you do, but how you do it. 

5. Core Learning

Finally, a team is only sustainable if it can learn and adapt. Learning is positioned in the core of the framework for a good reason. Any improvement, evolution or progression stems from learning – from results, from failures, from experimenting and adapting.

Learning isn’t just about developing skills, although that’s an important part of it. It’s also about reflecting on how things are being done, asking for – and listening to – feedback. Sometimes this involves probing the things that are being left unsaid and are creating tension.

This is where well performing teams will show their strength – sharing honest but constructive feedback. The best way of offering feedback is to say what you’d like to happen, instead of what you don’t like or what you think was wrong. One good way of offering feedback is to phrase it as: “What I liked is… and what I’d like to see more of is…”

Project retrospectives can be a good way to get everything out in the open, assess your performance as a team, and improve based on what went well, what went less well and what you’d do differently.

In a team, members are jointly and individually responsible for their learning. Making a conscious decision as a team about your approach to learning is a great idea, as is making sure that learning is being dispersed throughout the organisation. 

How to use the framework

At your next team meeting, you could introduce this framework as a talking point, giving people the opportunity to discuss its possible uses and merits. 

Frameworks are great because you can use them like a shopping list, reminding you of all the things you need to think about. However you choose to interpret and implement the five disciplines in the highly effective team framework, considering them when leading or working in any kind of team will help you be effective and, most importantly – happy.

Bear in mind that embedding new ways of thinking into a team culture takes time. You don’t have to tackle all the disciplines at once, and you can always revisit the framework in the future! 

Good luck and let me know how you get on.