Connie and I attended a training session for a very impressive new tool – Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team ™. The tool is based on Patricks Lencioni’s best selling book, “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team”, which has sold more than 2.5 million copies. Lencioni and Wiley, the purveyors of DiSC, have teamed up to offer a very powerful team assessment that integrates the concepts of DiSC with Lencioni’s diagnostics for team cohesion. Each team member completes a DiSC communication style assessment and a team dynamic survey. The results are displayed at an individual and at a team level. The team report is an elegant diagnostic and opens the door to very rich conversations.

As you might recall from the book, which is a fable of team growth, there are five key elements critical for team cohesion.

• The first is trust. Lencioni specially defines trust as vulnerability: “I can say I don’t know, I made a mistake. I am in over my head.”
• The second is healthy conflict. Team members can say- “I don’t agree and here is why”.
• The third is commitment- specifically to team goals versus individual goals.
• The fourth is accountability. This is peer to peer accountability. We often tend to think of boss/employee accountability, however in this model, the focus is on how peers are able to call each other on non-productive behavior.
• The fifth is results. Again, Lencioni is referring to collective team goals- not individual goals.

The power of this process begins with the assessment which drives an understanding of how the individual and team DiSC are related to performance on each of these critical elements.

With collective data in hand, the team embarks on a series of conversations about each team metric and formulates an action plan.

If you are interested in viewing a sample report please email me at ann.chinnis@matrixexecutivecoaching.com.