The Secret to Thriving Teams: Mastering The Five Behaviors for Success
Meet The Five Behaviors® model helping your teams build trust, operate with healthy conflict, make and honor commitments, hold each other accountable, and ultimately succeed in achieving goals.
Written by Steven Urban and Kat Cox
The basis of success in any organization today isn’t revenue or your elevator pitch – it’s how well your team members work together. Collaboration drives employee productivity, engagement, and satisfaction, which all lead to organizational success through met goals, innovation, customer satisfaction, and quality output. But getting a team to work well together doesn’t just happen on its own.
Explore how The Five Behaviors® can improve your team’s ability to collaborate, meet goals, and enjoy work.
What Are the Five Behaviors?
The Five Behaviors is a system developed by Patrick Lencioni for Wiley that teaches individuals and teams new ways to approach teamwork. It’s based on (you guessed it) five basic behaviors that serve as the basis for good collaboration and success:
Conflict
Commitment
Accountability
Results
The system has been used by thousands of organizations, teams, and organizations worldwide for over two decades. Trained professional coaches (like those at Build Your Alliance) lead groups and individuals through the process of learning The Five Behaviors® and putting them to work. Each session is personalized to ensure success for everyone involved.
By learning and implementing these behaviors effectively, teams ensure success on many levels, from meeting organizational goals to improving personal relationships.
Benefits of Implementing The Five Behaviors
Teams that implement The Five Behaviors® model see numerous benefits, including:
Better interpersonal relationships – Using The Five Behaviors®, teams learn to trust each other and how to speak to each other in effective ways, building stronger bonds.
More self-awareness among individuals – The Five Behaviors® model includes understanding one’s own strengths and passions, which includes boundary-setting and self-advocacy.
Improved problem-solving skills – Teams that trust each other and are willing to engage in healthy conflict solve problems more quickly.
Reliability and accountability between team members – Each team member knows what they’re responsible for and when to call each other out when the team’s needs aren’t being met.
Higher quality work – Teams that collaborate better create better work more efficiently.
More innovation due to more diversity of opinion – Because team members know each other’s strengths, they’re more willing to call upon each other for different perspectives.
Increased understanding and willingness to work together – When individuals understand their strengths and those of their colleagues and trust each other, they work better together and have stronger ties.
Better job satisfaction and retention – Individuals on teams that follow The Five Behaviors® are able to live up to their full potential and enjoy working together more, which makes them more likely to stay in their jobs longer.
Improved communication and constructive feedback – Teams that know how to speak to each other and communicate constructively are able to implement changes more effectively.
Increased time efficiency
Exploring The Five Behaviors® Pyramid
The Five Behaviors® must be intentionally implemented in a specific order for the system to function properly. You can’t skip one behavior or assume it’s already working perfectly without diving into it.
The Five Behaviors® build on each other like a pyramid starting with Trust as the foundation:
The official Five Behaviors® model depicting that trust is the foundation for successful teams before you can move into healthy conflict, commitment, accountability, and finally achieving results.
Trust – The base of The Five Behaviors® is trust. Trust is not automatically earned and must be intentionally built among teams. To build trust, team members must first develop self-awareness and understand where their values and strengths lie. They must also learn the values and strengths of their team members. Most importantly, people must have vulnerable trust with each other for true change to happen. Vulnerable trust means people can be completely honest with each other, even when they may disagree or feel unsure. To build vulnerable trust in a team, everyone must be open, honest, genuine, willing to make mistakes, and open to feedback. Team members, especially leaders and managers, must act in consistently honorable ways to build trust among their teams.
Conflict – The second foundational element of The Five Behaviors® is conflict. This often catches people off guard, because when we hear “conflict”, we easily jump to “negative”, “bad”, “fighting”, or “angry”. However, healthy conflict built on trust is productive. When team members know they can voice their opinions without being torn down, dismissed, or ignored, they’re willing to discuss discordant ideas peacefully. In a team that uses The Five Behaviors®, there’s rarely an “I Told You So” moment – team members discuss their points of view fully, even if they disagree.
Commitment – In a team that is willing to engage in conflict built on trust, commitment is the following behavior. This means that even if team members don’t fully agree on an idea, they are willing to commit to the group’s decision with the end goal in mind. Most of the time, teams that use The Five Behaviors find an effective compromise to solutions because they recognize the validity of all team members’ ideas. Because everyone has had their say and everyone has listened to each other, individuals are more willing to give their buy-in to the decision.
Accountability – From commitment built on healthy conflict and trust comes accountability. This means individuals hold themselves and each other to their commitments. Trust and conflict come back into play as team members fully believe their colleagues will do their role while also believing they can speak up if work isn’t being done.
Results – The final behavior is results and is the cherry on top. While many organizations focus solely on results, teams that use The Five Behaviors® recognize that you can’t get quality results without first building the basis. These teams get collective results by unlocking trust, building healthy conflict, and solidifying with commitment and accountability.
How to Implement The Five Behaviors®
We start by determining who your audience is. Do you want to implement The Five Behaviors® as a way to influence personal development across a large group of employees (typically used to influence a culture change), or are you wanting to accelerate the trust and development of intact teams of 5-12 people so they operate better together and achieve their results.
From there, your Five Behaviors® program will be led by a certified facilitator who will work with your group of individuals through personal development or with the intact teams of 5-12 people. We start with the deployment of an assessment followed by a customized interactive workshop that will have your employees breaking down barriers and creating new ways of working to set them up for long term success.
During the workshop, the facilitator leads discussions and training sessions to find ways that the team can build trust, healthy conflict, commitment, accountability, and results one step at a time. Because each team and company culture is different, the discussions and decisions each team makes will be unique to their needs and goals.
Get Started on The Five Behaviors® with Build Your Alliance
Find out how The Five Behaviors® can help your teams thrive with guidance from Build Your Alliance. We offer customized coaching on The Five Behaviors® system for teams and/or to help drive the culture of an entire organization. Our tailored approach includes personalized assessments, customized workshops, and ongoing support to empower your teams to implement The Five Behaviors® effectively.
Build Your Alliance is an Authorized Partner of The Five Behaviors® and is certified to lead the workshops. As an authorized partner we can also enroll some of your employees in the certification program so you can bring The Five Behaviors® into your organization and deliver it as a long-term development solution.
Book a consultation to start your journey with The Five Behaviors and Build Your Alliance.