Extraordinary Teams Inventory: More Than Simply High Performance?
Bradford R. GlaserBy Kevin Coray, Ph.D. (Extraordinary Teams Inventory Co-Author)
Life is too short to spend on ordinary teams. HRDQ's team-based inventory, the Extraordinary Teams Inventory (ETI), can help you move your organization beyond high-performance to the rarified level of extraordinary. The ETI comes at team development from a perspective of what’s possible rather than what's wrong.
- Identify a team's ETI profile
- Pinpoint specific team actions to take
- Increase members' team commitment
Table of Contents
An Effective, Thought-Provoking Team-Based Assessment
People are hungry for work-related teams in which things flow; where:
- Contribution is valuable
- Purpose is inspiring
- They feel a sense of belonging and accomplishment
- They have valuable and meaningful relationships with others on the team
- Conflict is an opportunity to resolve things in a safe and positive way
- They learn profound things about our work, about others, and ourselves
Extraordinary teams are more than merely high-performing teams. Extraordinary teams combine high performance with opportunities for personal growth. Research has shown that these teams achieve great results for the entire organization while their members are themselves positively changed.
Wouldn’t we all like these experiences to be the norm in teams rather than the exception? That’s what it's like to work in an extraordinary team! To sustain this kind of extraordinary experience in a team, leaders and team members first need to learn:
- Where they stand on each of these elements
- What the essential elements of extraordinary teams are
- Their strengths and areas they wish to improve
That’s where the ETI comes in. Research with the ETI shows that most teams fall somewhere along a continuum from ordinary to solid, then extraordinary, on the essential elements of extraordinary teams. This inventory and team member materials provide practical and easy-to-use information and advice. The ETI is part of an HRDQ suite of products and services and is a powerful tool for team development and personal transformation.
The inventory can be administered in a do-it-yourself manner using the Facilitator Guide and the Participant Workbook. Or HRDQ consultants and team coaches can work with you to design the right level of intervention, team building, or in-depth coaching for your organization.
Understanding the Essential Elements of Extraordinary Teams
If you want to help your teams improve their productivity, culture, or dynamics, the ETI can help you do so. Together, the ETI, Facilitator Guide, and Participant Workbook provide a proven training program that begins by assessing how the team scores on an ordinary-to-extraordinary continuum.
We all want to work in an environment that resembles our best team experience. Research on extraordinary teams showed that these teams achieve amazing results, with group members highly satisfied and personally transformed. The ETI measures five indicators or essential elements of extraordinary teams. These are:
- Compelling purpose. In an extraordinary team, there is an inspiring, shared understanding of why the group comes together. An inspirational purpose sets the context for the team’s work. Since this purpose is shared, members understand everyone's motivation to make the team’s work a high priority.
- Embracing difference. In an extraordinary team, members see, value, and engage their diverse backgrounds. Differences in education, culture, gender, race, perspective, learning style, personality, and upbringing are seen as assets helping a team fulfill its compelling purpose. Members respect one another for their unique perspectives and capabilities.
- Full engagement. In an extraordinary team, members enthusiastically participate in the team’s work. Energy and focus characterize team meetings. Because they take personal responsibility for the team’s success, they take action. Together, they work hard and intensely outside meetings when deadlines are near.
- Strengthened Relationships. In an extraordinary team, trust, respect, collegiality, and friendships grow among team members. People get to know each other better by working together and taking risks in pursuit of their compelling purpose. Deeper bonds form when members share aspects of their personal lives.
- Profound Learning. In an extraordinary team, learning exceeds expectations, reaching beyond the work of the team to members’ careers, communities, families, and friends. Members are often surprised by how much they learn from their team experience. This personal learning links directly to the transformational impact of participating in an extraordinary team
Numerous studies on high-performance teams identify the essential elements of extraordinary teams. These include:
- Gallup’s research on employee engagement has shown that only about a third of workers are fully engaged. Further, they have shown that fully engaged employees exhibit lower absenteeism, lower turnover, and higher customer loyalty, business growth, and productivity. In extraordinary teams, the whole team is fully engaged, which is a big part of why they achieve amazing results.
- Google showed that teams in which team members perceived a sense of psychological safety were far more productive. In extraordinary teams, two essential elements are closely related to psychological safety: embracing difference and strengthening relationships.
- Additional studies show that mission strength, as measured by the compelling purpose essential element in the ETI, is highly related to co-worker cooperation, the climate for innovation, and work satisfaction. Extraordinary teams use their purpose to help guide their strategic decision-making and are inspired by it in their day-to-day work.
How the ETI Works
The ETI begins with team members answering 39 questions that take approximately 15 minutes to complete. The questions focus on the team, not the team leader or any individual member. Instead, they are about how team members collectively perceive the aspects of each of the five essential elements for the team as a whole. The team results are scored, and a team profile is produced with a total score and component scores. This profile is the team’s result as compared to the norm base. Individuals are not identified, as only the team-level result is produced. Here’s the overview page showing ETI results for a sample team...
Uses of the ETI
The Facilitator Guide helps us interpret the ETI results and explains how to intervene with the team to improve their results. The Participant Workbook supports seamless program delivery.
The Facilitator Guide offers a workshop outline for team training, team building, or laying the foundation for team coaching on the ETI. The workshop is a turnkey design for a four-hour workshop. And it can be easily scaled for a shorter debriefing on the ETI results or expanded for use in a team retreat. The ETI materials provide a practical foundation for moving teams from ordinary, disengaged, or dysfunctional to more solid or even high-performing teams. Plus, for already high-performing teams, it is possible to take them to an extraordinary level that team members will remember as the high point of their careers.
From a team coaching perspective, it offers a variety of ways to motivate a team to develop critical soft skills, including communication, leadership, team building, and interpersonal skills.
The Results
After completing the program, participants will be able to:
- Discuss the elements that make up an extraordinary team.
- Discuss their team’s ETI profile.
- Describe team members’ perspectives about the team’s ability to reach outstanding results.
- Commit to individual or team actions that will increase the level of team extraordinariness.
HRDQ Services Available for the ETI
Besides the ETI and the suite of materials described above, HRDQ can connect you with expert consultants and coaches from the Extraordinary Teams Partnership who will:
- Work with you to tailor your workshop to your team’s needs as you prepare to deliver it yourself.
- Be present on a team video conference to discuss the ETI results with the team and answer any questions they may have as part of your team training or team building.
- Conduct the workshop for you.
- Design and deliver an extraordinary team component for your next team retreat
- Engage your team through team coaching, coaching the team leader, pairs of team members, or individual coaching.
Discover more about how to build extraordinary teams on the ETI product information page.
Kevin Coray, Ph.D., is an author, organization development consultant, industrial and organizational psychologist, a master somatic coach, and a shared leader of the Extraordinary Teams Partnership. He lives in Alexandria, VA.
Resources:
1. The Gallup Organization. (2001, March 15). What your disaffected workers cost. Gallup Management Journal. The Gallup Organization (2004) [online]. Available at www.gallup.com.
2. The Gallup Organization. (2016, April 16). 35 Organizations Lead the World in Creating Cultures of Engagement. Ed O’Boyle and Jim Harte.
