Why Does it Work?

Have you ever noticed that fundamental teamwork skills, like effective communication, fast collaboration, trust and accountability, are really hard to teach? If you’re the proactive, optimistic type, you might have already gone to great lengths enrolling your team in courses, but find that sooner or later the results wear off and everyone is back to the way they were. Or you might be a bit more skeptical and you’ve decided that teamwork skills can’t be taught anyway.

We’ll let you in on a secret.

They can be taught – in fact we permanently transform clients all the time. Just not in the way you might think.

What we know about teamwork

While we refer to the qualities of good teamwork as skills, they are actually a combination of skills – knowing how to take action, and dispositions – your mindset towards what actions you take.

People are frequently trained in teamwork-related skills, such as how to solve problems or how to take action when they want to build trust. But they are rarely trained in developing the dispositions for effective teamwork, such as a mindset for listening effectively, or an inclination to take the actions that build trust.

About dispositions

Have you ever been to a two-day leadership workshop, got a lot of useful strategies from it, then stopped using them all within a few months? You would have learned some great skills, but without the disposition to use those skills, we can quickly slip back into old ways of doing things quite quickly.

Unfortunately, because of the nature of dispositions, they can’t be taught directly, and so it is impossible to be trained in dispositions at a workshop or regular training program. Dispositions can only be developed through experience.

So, how can dispositions – and teamwork – be developed?

Over decades of work in the coaching and consulting fields, we have sought out the solution for training people in both the dispositions and skills that produce breakthrough results in their teamwork and leadership. And based on the results of our program, we know we’ve got it right.

People need to engage in these key practices, all of which foster self-awareness:

• Learning conversations with others to share and listen to experiences
• Observing others and themselves in action
• Recurrent, intensive practice
• Reflective thinking
• Receiving coaching
• Giving and receiving feedback with peers

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