How we Create Strong Teams

Nathan Freeburg Philosophy Strong Teams 2

What do we mean by Strong Teams?

There are many examples we might use. A championship winning sports team, an award winning musical ensemble, or a design team that has taken a new product to market. Within each of those teams there exists three critical elements which allowed those teams to thrive.

1. Strong People

Strong teams cannot exist in the absence of strong people. In our work at LVC, we focus first on building strong people. With the right person there is connection, community and cause.

2. The Right Role

A strong team is one where each member knows the role they play. What’s more, they know when to play it! A strong team expects each member to be fully present and ready to go when it is their time to shine. When it’s not, they serve the whole.

3. Shared Vision

For a team to be strong, they need to be about something larger than themselves. They must share a vision that isn’t about the individual, but includes the individuals. A strong team exists when it is composed of strong people working towards a vision larger than a single person.

How We Help Create Strong Teams

At LVC, it is our goals to help teams thrive and flourish regardless of the context. We do this by first by helping individuals understand their own strengths. This flows into the next three steps.

1. Cultural Assessment

This is used to gain awareness of the cultural elements contributing to the present environment, and to create a relational connection with key leaders.

2. Shared Experience

This can take many forms, we call it Vision Trekk. It’s purpose is to create an experience based application of the assessment learnings in a whole day or multiple day event.

3. Ongoing Development

Finally, the team must engage in ongoing development. These ongoing strengths based exercises build a collective awareness, apply the new common language and enhance the shared experience of StrengthsFinder. This could be coaching, weekly check-ins, or other status updates.

We use those learnings to help the entire team understand how individual people can contribute to the greater whole, and how their unique strength mix will move the mission forward.