Team Building to Team Development (4 of 4)

Part 4 of From Team Building to Team Development. Why a one day workshop attempts all three at once, and what step three is actually worth.

This is Part 4 of a four part series on why CliftonStrengths® workshops fade and what to do instead. It follows an earlier series on facilitating your first workshop, and it starts where that one ended: with a workshop that went well, and a Monday that did not.

This is the last article in the series. Parts 1 through 3 argued that a workshop is an event, that events end, that booking another one is a nap, and that the alternative is unglamorous and cheap. This one is the map that all of it sits on.

The three steps

ONE. Learn about yourself.

TWO. Learn about others, as individuals.

THREE. Learn about your team dynamic.

That is the whole ladder. It is not complicated, and that is deliberate, because anything more complicated than this does not survive a heavy quarter either.

The thing I want you to sit with

A one day CliftonStrengths® workshop attempts two or three of those in eight hours.

And it follows the same order, which is the genuinely confusing part. You learn about yourself. Eventually, you lift your head up and start having a few aha moments about someone else. If you are lucky, you start thinking about what this means for how you work together as a team.

Do not worry if you never got there. It is very rare to be able to do that in a one day workshop.

That is not a criticism of the workshop. It is a great introduction to all three.

But an introduction to step three is not the same as being good at step three. And every frustration I hear from teams six months later is somebody standing on step three, having never really finished step one.

Why the order is not negotiable

Until you know how you operate, it will not help you much to learn about someone else. You will collect facts about your colleagues and have nowhere to put them.

And until you know how your own talent themes interact with Michael Bolton at Initech, you have no real chance of understanding the team dynamic. The team is not an abstraction. It is a set of specific relationships between specific people, and you build understanding of it one relationship at a time.

This is why teams that skip ahead get frustrated. Step three is where all the interesting problems live, so it is where everybody wants to start, and it is the one rung that cannot be reached directly.

I did not draw this on a whiteboard

When I led a team, our core leader meetings rotated among three topics. Learning about yourself. Learning about others. And learning about our team dynamic.

I came up with this model because that is what I used myself. I did not design it and then adopt it. I noticed it afterward, because it was already what we were doing.

Nothing about it was impressive. It had no name at the time. Nobody would have called it a development program. If you had asked me what we were doing, I would have said we were having our leadership meeting.

But it was on a rotation, so it kept happening. And things that keep happening beat things that are brilliant once.

That rotation is still the closest thing I have to a picture of Team Development.

It is not a program. It is a rotation.

The whole series in one line

Team Bonding is the short event that connects you better to your teammates.

Team Building is the day, or week long, event that hands your team a shared language.

Team Development is building what you learned into habits that actually move the dial of performance.

Those are rungs, not options. You do not get to skip one.

Mapping the series onto the steps

It is worth being explicit about where everything in this series sits, because they are not four separate ideas.

The Strengths Buddies program from Part 3 is steps one and two. Two people, once a month, learning about themselves and about each other.

The thirty seconds per person added to existing meetings is also steps one and two. Same reps, smaller container. That is the only difference between them.

Step three, the team dynamic, is the one you earn. You do not buy it on a Tuesday. It shows up after the first two have been real for a while, and by then most teams have stopped calling it a program, because it has simply become how they talk to each other.

That is the work I am booking with teams for this fall.

Where to start

If you want to begin on steps one and two yourself, the twelve prompt guide from Part 3 is still free. It works as a buddy program or as a meeting add-on, whichever fits where your team actually is. Reply to my weekly email or send me a message on LinkedIn.

And if you take one thing from this series, take this.

The workshop was never supposed to be the whole thing. It was supposed to be the start of one.

Which step is your team on?

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**More in this series**

Part 1: Why Does a Great CliftonStrengths® Workshop Still Fade?

Part 2: Why Your Team Stopped Using Their CliftonStrengths® Language

Part 3: What Ongoing CliftonStrengths® Development Actually Looks Like

Part 4: The Three Steps of Team Development (this article)

If you are planning a workshop

I facilitate CliftonStrengths®, team development, and first-time manager workshops. If your team has one coming up this year, connect with me on LinkedIn and tell me what you are planning.

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