If there’s one common struggle that my clients face on their career path, it’s the challenge of bad teammates. You might already be familiar with them! Bad teammates can poison the team’s atmosphere, leading to apathy, cynicism, or even a fatalistic outlook that prevents the whole group from doing great work and achieving great things. If you’ve ever wasted time serving on a team like this, you may have fallen behind on your career goals. If you’ve ever had to lead a team like this, you already know how much its poor performance compromises your ability to make an impact with Senior or Executive leadership. Either way, you might not know how to change it, or prevent it from happening again.
Here are some classic examples of Bad Teammate behavior:
Failing to execute on important tasks, then refusing to be held accountable.
Being secretive, hoarding resources and headcount all for themselves.
Backchanneling with Senior leadership to make sure they get all the credit on every project.
Acting self-centered and ignoring the team’s common goals in favor of their own.
Being ungenerous or even openly critical of other teammates’ hard work, while being thin-skinned about their own.
So many of my clients were suffering from these challenges that I decided to do something radical about it. Over the summer I got a professional certification in a fantastic method of organizational health called, The Five Behaviors of A Team. Most teams don’t become harmonious and high-achieving on their own. To make genuine changes, they need impactful tools and skills that are sustainable over time. Of all of the methods I researched, The Five Behaviors Method most closely reflects the reality that I’ve observed inside companies and corporations, who are often struggling with low-performing teams.
Here’s what The Five Behaviors can do for a team:
Lays a deep foundation of trust that encourages peer-to-peer coaching and support.
Facilitates productive, idea-based conflict that yields high-level solutions to complex problems.
Unites a team around common goals that are clear, concise and compelling.
Prevents apathy by creating a framework for teammates to hold each other accountable for tasks big and small.
Enables teams to function at a much higher level, yielding higher results and greater talent retention.
In a nutshell, the Five Behaviors model consists of Trust, Conflict, Commitment, Accountability, and Results. Each one builds on the one before, and each creates new insights that enable teams to come together and build a strong and supportive framework that can yield consistent, high-level results. During a dedicated group training, even bad teammates can unlearn bad habits and start to flow into harmony with the rest.
I don’t want you to suffer another minute on a struggling team. I’m now a certified Five Behaviors facilitator, and I’m here to help. Contact me with questions, comments, or just to vent about your bad teammates!