Clarity and Teams

As a team, getting clear drives how you communicate, how you relate and how you perform. Clarity creates the simple frameworks which literally hold conversations; clarity regarding goals and roles are the fundamental building blocks of healthy working relationships; clarity enables a team to perform with a speed and certainty that builds even stronger, more capable, more committed teams. How many teams does your organization have? How clear are they? What does that cost you? What does that cost them?

Communication

Communication - the exchange of meaning - is the foundation of human interaction. We are always communicating. And, given that over 90% of our communication is nonverbal, the question becomes "what are we communicating?". Authentic communication arises either from our own authentic curiosity or our clarity. The ability to rediscover our innate human curiosity and recognize whether or not we’re clear is fundamental to our ability to communicate in ways that add value to ourselves, to our team, and to our purpose.

Relationship

Cultivating authentic, value-adding communication is fundamental to our ability to establish and maintain the quality of relationship demanded by exceptional teams. Our individual need for healthy, productive, trusting relationships with others varies from person to person. Therefore, the ability to clearly and simply identify your own individual criteria for good relationship and skillfully manage your relationships in pursuit of the mutual benefit of the group is essential to building and sustaining high performing teams.

Performance

Finally, there’s the ability to actually perform - to establish clear, simple goals; jointly understood and agreed upon; at the team and individual levels; and, then, to achieve them. This is teamwork. But unless a team is grounded in authentic communication and trusting, mutually beneficial relationships, they will not be able to rapidly adapt to the inevitable challenges of our increasingly complex environment. This, then, becomes the final, most challenging practice of an evolutionary team - the ability to perform in adaptive, creative unison in unpredictable environments. Such teaming skills make up the basic building blocks of an adaptive, evolutionary organization.