While competitors may pirate your technology, copy your strategy and imitate your marketing campaigns, they can never overcome the unique advantages your teams provide. Could training your team to create and deliver a superior overall customer experience enhance your business?

When people, whether employees or suppliers, are trained on how to come together and set aside their individual needs, they can accomplish what appears impossible. Everyone wins as your customers benefit and your organization builds a powerful competitive advantage.

Patrick Lencioni, author of Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team suggest that we look at team building as a pyramid with its base resting on a foundation of trust. Great teams trust one another and are comfortable exposing their humanness including their weaknesses, mistakes, fears and behaviors with each other. Real trust requires understanding and being empathetic about who the other person is and why they act the way they do. Myers-Briggs testing can help in this process.

Trained teams engage in conflicts not to win arguments, but to say what needs to be said in order to discover the best answers and make the best decisions critical to the organization’s success.

All opinions and ideas are respectfully considered by highly trained teams. This helps members achieve genuine buy-in on all important decisions. Buy-in is not consensus which often encourages teams to embrace mediocrity, causing delay and frustration.

Organizations normally hold people accountable for results rather than behavior. Team members are willing to call each other on behavioral issues because behavior produces the results. Teams that perform best hold one another accountable for implementing their decisions and keeping high standards. They don’t rely on the team leader to enforce accountability; instead, they go directly to their peers.

Because self-interest and self-preservation are powerful motivators that can undercut teams, members must learn to set aside their individual needs and focus on what’s best for the organization. You can avoid that fate by keeping results highlighted and rewarding people for achieving desired results.

Training effective teams will give your organization a unique and sustainable competitive advantage and will probably take two or three months, and a lot of focused effort. To build the trust needed, teams should be small, comprised of not less than three nor more than twelve members.

You may have to remove a team member in order to make progress but a willingness to lose a member makes it less likely that you’ll have to. If trained members know what the expected results should be, and that their compensation is tied to result attainment, they’ll be unlikely to pursue personal agendas that conflict with the team’s goals.

You may be feeling that the time and effort required to build teams is not worth the payoff. A winning team is all about getting more done in less time. The productivity gains from effective and trusting teams will far outweigh the relatively short time invested to train and build them.

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