Is your team dynamite or damp gunpowder?

I love this time of year especially bonfire night where we all wrap up and celebrate the failure of Guy Fawkes blowing up the Houses of Parliament in 1605. We all know who Guy Fawkes was, but there was a whole team of conspirators that fateful night that eventually ended up being captured, tortured, and eventually executed (although Guy Fawkes died by falling from the scaffold where he was to be hanged and broke his neck). It's kind of odd that we celebrate failure of teamwork year after year when at all other times it’s the one thing we want to improve on!

And of course, the highlight of bonfire night is the fireworks, especially the ones that don’t look very much but surprise you with the biggest bang or highest flurry of sparkles. Sometimes team members can be like that, not always explosive but surprise you sometimes, although that’s not always a good thing. Let me explain more.

Teamwork or high performing teams consists of many facets from high levels of trust to continuously learning new skills, but as a manager one of the best pieces of advice I was given when starting my career in leadership was to get to know your team.

Consider this for a second, how many of you (who are line managers) know the birthdays of all your team? Or know the name of their partners, children, or pets?  What do your team members do when not at work or the hobbies they have? Getting to know your team builds trust and according to Patrick Lencioni (5 Dysfunctions of a Team), is the foundation of high performing teams.

Trust is where the team feel they have a safe environment to speak up and support each other. Having trust then enables problems and issues to be resolved quickly and reduce the ‘office politics’ we all dislike. The team then develops a sense of commitment aligning behind a set of common objectives and everyone taking accountability for their work. This all results in success and having a dynamite team.

Helping teams become high performing is a passion for us here at Pro-Development. We love supporting small businesses to improve their understanding of their teams by building connections and trust and bringing out the best in each other. We also help businesses develop their leaders so they are ready, fit, and capable to face new challenges whatever that may be in the future.

We have 40% funded places available for many courses for the remainder of the year and are taking bookings for our next Leadership Development Programme and First Line Manager Programme. Alternatively, we’d love to talk to you over a coffee (and piece of parkin) about any challenges you have, from retaining your people to bringing on your next leaders.

And was Guy Fawkes and his twelve conspirators a high performing team? Well, when looking at the characteristics of high performing teams, they would score high on each, except for one – high levels of trust! We always say this is one of the fundamentals!  One of the conspirators tipped off the English Peer, Baron Monteagle who would go on to discover Fawkes and the gunpowder.

We hope you had a safe and enjoyable bonfire night everyone.