Building Organizational Health

Part 2 of 3 - How to Build a Cohesive Team

By: Dr. Nels Lindberg Production Animal Consultation

As we continue this series of articles on building great organizational health, we have arrived at Part 2, creating a cohesive team. The first article addressed how we are working in the business every day, by caring for animals, feeding animals, maintaining the operation, and taking care of accounting and paying bills. However, we challenged each of you to work on the business to improve your organizational health. Maybe it is your team or crew, or yourself you are improving. Whatever it is, we expect some action after this learning opportunity! We need to ask each of ourselves to be humble and take a deeper look at creating a healthy organization through the lens of world-renowned author and business leader, Patrick Lencioni.

As mentioned in the last article, to build a cohesive team, each member must be able to be completely open and vulnerably honest. Team members must passionately debate, hold each other accountable, call each other out, and always keep the common goals in mind. Harmony and balance among a leadership team occurs when every member gives up all ego, personal interests, and individual desires for the good of the farm, ranch, or feedyard. When all team members can speak up without fear of retribution and without fear of derogatory comments, the team becomes one. If any one member is insecure, complacent, arrogant, or authoritarian in nature, then a cohesive team will never materialize because not everyone is completely open and vulnerably honest.

As we dig a little deeper, Patrick Lencioni outlines five behaviors that we look to achieve in building our cohesive team. The first behavior is building trust. We must work each day to be completely honest in every moment, even if it hurts, even if it makes us look dumb, and even if it makes us appear weak in our own eyes. This aspect of being vulnerable is something most people are not willing to do. However, admitting your mistakes through fault leadership allows your team to see you being real, authentic, and even willing to be vulnerable with them. Admitting to your people when you screwed up, asking them for their help, or even telling them, “You are better than me,” are noble ways of creating deep trust. One opportunity for action is to sit down with your team and perform a team building exercise. Ask each person to say how they grew up and their biggest challenge or a couple of their biggest mistakes, and you share the same. This open dialogue creates a vulnerable trust, which is the best kind of trust.

The second key behavior is mastering conflict. Conflict is an everyday occurrence. Whether it be how we are going to pen some cattle, how we are going to set gates across the yard to ship fats, or what work is going to be done first for the day, there are always differing opinions on what, why, and how we are going to accomplish our tasks. However, we must create productive or healthy conflict, and we can only do this when there is trust. When there is trust, conflict is only seen as the pursuit of truth or what is best for the team or the operation in that moment. When there is no trust, conflict creates politics and more distrust of a person or the team. The greatest mistake many of us make is we avoid the conflict because resolving conflict takes time, intent, and energy, most of which we do not have enough of by the end of a hard day. Avoiding conflict creates bigger problems and creates resentment in our organizations. In conflict, we must allow people to voice their opinion, and the entire team must be open and honest in the pursuit of common ground and what is best for the team or operation. No conflict equals artificial harmony, and constant conflict is a nasty, mean environment. We all see things differently for most actions. We must be able to discuss issues openly by bringing all disagreements to the surface to be hashed out. Real trust must occur to resolve conflict.

The third behavior is achieving commitment to the team and its purpose from all members of the team. Each team member or caregiver must be allowed to weigh in. If they do not get to weigh in when they have an opinion, they will not buy in. When everyone is able to weigh in before the leader and the team make a clear decision, everyone leaves the meeting ready to rally behind the decision made and to help execute it. These are real opportunities we can capture daily in our feedyards and ranches. With trust and mined conflict, commitment occurs. Failure to get commitment makes leaders fail and look dysfunctional.

The fourth behavior is embracing accountability. We must stick to our decisions to achieve our goals. It is the job of the team to call out team members and keep them in line when they are not working to execute the plan. There cannot be passive commitment. We must have peerto-peer accountability, not just pressure and accountability from the leader. In my practice, we have worked on this for years, and we are just getting to the point of peer-to-peer accountability. Peer-to-peer accountability is the optimum accountability action plan because all members are empowered with the authority to call out anyone who is not carrying out our plan, mission, purpose, or core values. It is important that we have that person’s back when they call someone out. Getting a team to this point takes time and achievement of the first three behaviors, but it is poetry in motion when achieved. We must be honest with each other, and everyone must be strong enough to call someone out. If peers are willing to call each other out, the leader needs to do the “dirty work” less often. The team does the dirty work for each other. This style of accountability is about caring for each other and the love of helping someone achieve their greatest potential. Failure to hold someone accountable is being selfish. One action item for achieving this behavior is to have everyone write down one thing about each person on the team that they do well for the team and then one thing they do that hurts the team. Start with the words written about the leader.

The fifth behavior is achieving results. We can talk about all of these key aspects, but we must achieve results. We must hold people accountable to attain our goals. Great teams ensure that all members of the team accomplish their goals. To build a cohesive team, we must do four things. First, be genuinely vulnerable with each other. Second, engage in regular, productive, unfiltered conflict on important challenges or issues. Third, leave meetings with clear cut, specific agreements around decisions on what we are doing, how we are doing it, and who does what. For example, decide how we are going to prioritize the work of the day, from riding pens to feeding cattle. Fourth, hold each other accountable to the agreed-upon commitments and behaviors.

Which team do you want in your organization? A team of people performing up to the level of the behaviors previously discussed? Or a team with politics, lack of trust, arrogance, and individuals invested in themselves with an agenda of differing direction and objectives than the direction of the team? A cohesive team takes intentional, humble work but creates a harmonious experience once achieved. Now go execute the action items outlined above to build your cohesive team! Your team wants and needs you to!

Watch for Part 3 in the winter issue for more opportunities to build organizational health as we look at the six critical questions.