The Truth About Team Building: Why Most Teams Fail (And How to Fix It)

What if the reason your team isn’t performing… has nothing to do with talent?

In this episode, Dr. Anthony Simmons breaks down the real formula behind high-performing teams and why most leaders get it wrong. 

It’s not about throwing people together and hoping it works. It’s about building individuals, creating trust, and developing relationships before expecting results.

You’ll learn the three critical stages of development, integration, and evolution and how mastering them can transform your team from average to unstoppable.

If you’re leading a team, building one, or struggling to get people aligned… this is the shift you’ve been missing.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Do you ever feel like you're doing all the right things, but success still doesn't last? If you're struggling with trust relationships or performance that feels harder than it should, then this podcast is for you. Here's your host, executive leader, and scholar practitioner, Dr. Anthony Simmons.

SPEAKER_01 0:26

Well, greetings, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Apex Performance Podcast. While I continue to offer you accelerated pathways to excellence, today's episode will feature team building. There's two aspects of team building. You got the legacy team building, and also I'd like to present my discussion today from a nuance perspective, which is team development, integration, and evolvement. Like relationships, teams are built from the foundation. So what is the foundation made of? People. So how do we make it solid through the development of these people? As I've often rave about building relationships from the foundation, alias, the technical level, which I've spoken to previously. Today, in case of building teams, this technical level consists of developing individuals that make up this foundation. And as we know, making this foundation solid will require these members to be empowered and inspired through leadership development. As I've often said, any human endeavor requires what I call my common act. You have to show appreciation, communication, and trust. Therefore, development is followed by integrating through this common act and then evolving this process through improving the situation by sharpening the assault. Considering Apex performance hinges on building relationships, many other principles I've discussed in previous episodes will be repeated throughout this process for effect. Now let's talk about me. What did I bring to the table here? You know, a key tenet in my command philosophy is teamwork, which I always felt that was pivotal to organizational success. It underscores the sum of the whole, what I call the collective intelligence aspect, the approach to building effective teams. This allows me to read an excerpt from my command philosophy. It talks about teamwork and unity. I said to foster a good working relationship, we must treat every member as an integral link. This approach will support continued success regardless of that person's work experience and time on board the ship. Remember, you are no better than anyone else, and no one else is any better than you. We are only as good as our weakest link. And that appeared in my command philosophy starting back in 1997 when I was in command of a patrol coaster, and also I repeated that throughout my opportunities as a commanding officer. And as always, I like to present what I call my three angles of leadership coaching, which is my empathy DNA, my 28 years of experience in the military, working across 65 countries, and also being a scholar practitioner. So sharing my experiences in sports, also building organizational teams, working in battle groups, partnership building across these nations I mentioned, and most recent performing as a bridge resource management instructor for the maritime sea lift community. Essentially, it was a team-building job. And also, I was certified in what we call train the trainer. I would leverage my successes with team performance as a damage control officer, executive officer, and commanding officer in ships while using my scholarly tools, such as my inverted Pareto 20 to 80, what I call Simmons Team in Team, where I employ 20% of the people to make the other 80% better. I will apply concepts from my book, Champion Organizational Wellness. I will use the Blanchard Situational Leadership Model. I will leverage them a crystal group, team of teams, and the Tuckman process to highlight today's talk. When people were connected in the pre-virtual landscape, we could pull teams together almost seamlessly. Now we must build individuals and relationships before building teams. You know, when you build people, you create teams with solid foundations. You know, for instance, for context, you know, effective teamwork is realized through deliberate team building, which involves solidifying the foundation by developing individual members and then integrating them and then evolving the process through what I call role responsibility and agility. Meaning is, you know, you have to be flexible enough to move these people around in order to optimize performance in order to get the right fit. Now, I like leveraging my experience in sports, as I mentioned earlier. Like football is a really a fit in the model, you know, and also the Navy, when I had to lead across organizations, also offer examples of how these stages of team building come together. Now, say amid the corporate dynamics and the hard turnover that we're in today and the continuous movement of people's, you know, stemming from the event of the sports and the transfer porter, you know. So, in that regard, it's essential to continuously assess and reinforce you know these foundations before we move to the integrating and evolving process. So that means we have to be very careful that we get these pieces to really fit and we build these pieces where they are agile enough to allow you know this adequate integration and also the continuous evolution of these teams in order to get better. Say, for instance, makeshift organizations they implode when situations are not ideal because people don't know each other, you know, they struggle when faced with adversity. Like the current landscape, for instance, as I talked about, change and what we call the low person-to-person communication interaction, you know. So building teams through development integrating memories is more critical than ever. Bottom line, organizations can't afford to just throw people together, throw pieces together, inspect for them to connect and also be prepared to deal with adverse conditions. People must be shaped and mold to fit into these complex and even sometimes undefined spaces where you know members must be amenable and dynamic. Furthermore, you know, to build skeletal teams to pace the organizational change, to address adocracies, contingencies, and therefore, they must have the flexibility to develop and integrate in order to make this foundation uncompromising. And development, like different from the legacy team building, it's more emphasis is placed on strengthening individuals more so than just the overarching team itself. I like to offer another one of my personal excerpts that I wrote. It said, you know, building a successful team start with growing your EQ, which is your emotional intelligence. Leaders who listen, adapt, and respond with empathy create the strongest bonds. EQ is the glue that connects leaders and teams across generations, social groups, genders, and cultures. When leaders grow inwardly, their teams grow outwardly. That's Anthony Simmons. Now, as the tools and attributes, let's look at enhanced EQ skills, self-awareness, self-management. They are very critical to the development stage. Then as I move into the integration stage, I have to consider the social awareness and social interaction, which is essentially relationship management. Now, as I move through my book, Champion of Organizational Wellness, which consists of three critical chapters where I speak to assessments, suppressing blind spots, and connecting through a coaching conversation. The key is to create a trust and inspired culture within your organizations where people are encouraged through trust, through a sense of belonging and appreciation. The buzzword today is psychological safety. Some people think it's about not being toxic, but in the world I envision, it's about feeling appreciated, feeling as though you belong. It also you have to facilitate this summer-hold approach that I spoke to earlier in order to solve problems, you know, from the foundation. And this is the catalyst to having a foundation that can withstand, you know, pressurized conditions and adversity. Now, conversely, a weak foundation only works under what I would call good or ideal conditions. I like to pull forward the example of a University of Michigan basketball team who won the national championship this year. And what really made them different? How did they avoid having bubbles in their foundation? They were fortunate, you know, they were deception. They had some players that were mature, they had been around, they had experienced failure, and they was willing to make the sacrifices, they was willing to reform, reshape themselves to fit in these undefined spaces in order to make the process work for the best interest of the team. As I continue to harp on a solid foundation, as I said, it supports phase two and phase three, which is integration and evolving. And this integration and evolvement can be done in tandem. You can isolate between the two. It's sort of blended approach. And I was just reading recently about how the brain works, you know, like you got your creative side of your brain, then you got more like your logical side of the brain. These two left and right hemispheres, how when they best work together in order to be more effective, is when you oscillate between the two, when you got a good blend or good mixture. That's how I look at integration and evolving. It allows you to move people around and get a good feel and continue to allow you to evolve the process in a manner that best works, you know, with the group writ large. And this hinges on Tuckman's team of team, and once again, the McCrystal group, and the Blanchard Situational Leadership Model, and the concepts I talk within the coaching organization where you have the coach protege model and when the team of teams where other members are making each other better through repetition and filtering. And the Tuckman process goes through four stages when you bring a team into the forming process, and then you go through the storm, then you go through the norming and then the performing. So far as it's the forming process, it focuses on how you identify those common threads in order to work out the differences. And then the storm is what a lot of people like to avoid. That's where the tough conversations take place. And then the norming process is about transparency and also exchanging information. The efficacy of this concept, though, is just based on communicating and establishing an environment of trust, candor, and where friction is allowed because it moves processes along faster. And also, if you get through the first two stages of the forming and storming, then the norming and performing process become more expedient. And like forming, as I spoke to earlier, you know, this is where a lot of the magic really takes place. This is where you learn how to set the team up where you have interdependencies and where you have collective intelligence and the proper alignment and better to understand and appreciate microcultures within your organization. Then also storming moves into a more pivotal part of integration and where it can be more dominant in integrating there because now you're really talking, you're having a hard conversation, you're doing the critical information sharing, you're ironing out the differences. You know, it's the key to preventing assumptions by people. It's assumptions can oftentimes introduce risk and also incite divisiveness. I was once reading of the Virginia pilot here local, and the mayor of Norfolk, Ken Alexander, said there is nothing wrong with having a little fight, and there's nothing wrong with friction because it brings forth a better product. And that was in the 6th November 2022 version of the Virginia pilot. I just took note of that because I thought it resonated so well in what we're lacking now within organizations. And as we move throughout Tuglin, we talk about smoothing things out. This is a blended version of integrating and involvement. This is where we begin to normalize the marin of the people, of putting the team in place. It's where transparency and a coaching culture sustain and accelerates the process. Then I move forward, where I become more evolutionary, where integration and involvement, what are the keys there? It's the team of teams. Uh, this is where I like to tighten up a crystal group. We talk about trust. That's where you have the bidirectional exchange, transparency, communication, also empower execution. It encourages people to act and inspire people to do better. You know, shared consciousness, what I see as autotelic relationships, where it's a collective good, where everybody wins. Like I talk common purpose, right? Common identity. You know, it's for the good of America. You know, you look at baseball fans. You may have a Yankee fan, you may have a Red Sox fan. But at the end of the day, what we have in common, we're all baseball fans. So everybody wins when you have that common purpose. So that's the beauty of the Macrusta group. Then how do I make my Tuchman process? This is just form and storming and normal pieces. How did I make it more effective? It really depends on that development part, how much integrity you have within your team members. You know, how viable was that process of developing members. So I go into once again my application of my common act, you know, where I talk depreciation, communication, and trust. This allows my involvement rate to move along faster. And it also identifies, you know, with the veracity of my integration and alignment in execution. So now, once I get to where hey, I'm really performing and I'm in this dominant stage now, where I'm beginning to sharpen myself for optimal performance. Where at this point I'm doing a lot of coaching, I'm really delegating in order to expand the capacity of my organization through building a deep bench. And I began to reiterate, you know, as the end game unfolds. And now this is where I really go and leverage, you know, the Simmons team and team, what I call my inverted Pareto 2080, where I have 20% of the people making the 80% better. And this is what I've done throughout my career within the military. You know, I always felt as a captain of a ship that I didn't have anyone in the ship that was not capable of being key performers, but sometimes you have to help people to appreciate each other. That's why I go with the 20% making the 80% better. And in that regard, you just always have a crew where there's everybody strong because I'm a firm believer in your own as strong as your weakest link. So with that inverse Pareto 28, the Simmons team within teams there. Hey, you're gonna have everybody moving when a team is really solid, and you're gonna have the pieces that's gonna be interchangeable for your max productivity. Now, let's talk outcomes. Well, what is all this team building pieces about here? It's about uh alignment, integrity, and agility. It's about facilitating a leadership continuum, optimizing memories and skills and personal attributes, you know, to improve efficiencies and organizational excellence. So I once had a vignette that I like to always leverage and uh think of. I was talking to one in someone in the medical field once, and we was talking about the Tuchman, you know, your team going through the process of forming, storming, norming, and performing. Well, this medical expert said, well, you know, that doesn't work as well in the medical field. We apply the Tuchman, but we don't need the storming process because we're all experts. So, you know, we really don't have to get in each other's way and try to hold each other's hand in that regard. I see that that's a problem. I say, no one knows so much that they can't learn and see things from a team vantage point. I see you guys are missing out on the opportunities to share collective knowledge in order to make each other better and getting after the real issues. So you cannot avoid any steps in this talkman process, no matter how great you are. And that happens in a lot of organizations where some people feel like they already understand to the point where it's their way or no way, and that's when you start getting the sum of the parts, the right, the sum of the whole approach to problem solving, which never works because you always get the smartest person in the room, and then personalities take over, which is sort of suboptimal for gaining wisdom and having a really well-oiled machine, as I say. Now that I talked through that piece there, I'll let me just give you some good examples, I feel, about how do you really bring teams together. You know, my first lesson in team building took place around the 1998 timeframe when I was going through a bridge resource management course at Harene Science International in Newport, Rhode Island, where I really learned to value the sum of the whole versus sum of the parts. We were broken off into groups, and I observed it was like three groups, we had a weighted scale on what group had the best opportunity to survive. So as I looked around the room, you had groups where everybody was talking, information sharing. Then it was a particular group where only one person was dominating the conversation. Lo and behold, and get to the point, the group that finished last was the one where that one person was dominating the entire conversation. And the group where you had more information exchange and more collective thought, that was the group that finished first within the assignment. So that really got my attention because it was proof in the pudding. And now let's look at I talked about football earlier, and then I like to compare football to some of the organizational teams I built, as well as the battle group, because you're dealing now interorganizationally. So I would watch when I went to college to play football, we had what we call the position room. I was a running back, and I was surprised how much time we spent at the individual level developing the running backs, training together as a group, and then we would come together at times to integrate. No integration process was very slow, but we rarely scrimmaged in college. I remember throughout my days in college, I don't think we ever scrimmaged over 15 minutes. That was always at the end of maybe a two-hour plus practice, and which was completely different from high school. How they spend more time in the development stage, you know, as opposed to the integration and the evolution aspect. Now, let's enter organizational groups in ships. I was had the honor of being what we call a damage control officer once upon a time, where I was in charge of all the five parties on the ship. This one, I was a young officer, all the five parties, all the damage repairs to the ship and what have you. And we had to do all this coordinated effort across the ship in order to take on battle damage. And how we were able to make that happen was we did what we call individual training and what we call the splinter aspect. We put certain members of the group together and just went through small episodes of the training before we integrated into the full-blown fire drills. Now I saw a situation in the Navy that that bothers me to this day. We got to a period where we had manning shortfalls, and we started augmenting the crew with, you know, with members from other ships. And they would come aboard like a days, a couple of days before deployment, and it concerned me because I said, these sailors have not been integrated into the fire parties of the ship, so I just can't take them and plug them in. You know, I thought as I look back on it now, that was similar to what some teams are doing now with the transfer portal. But that sort of bit the Navy in the butt as I moved forward into some of the incidents that took place in the past there. For instance, when I was teaching Bridge Resource Management, one of my case studies was the USS John S. McCain incident that took place over in the Western Pacific when they had the collision there back in 2017. And they had crew members that was in critical watch stations on that ship that was augmented from other ships. So once again, you can't just plug pieces in. You have to have the team where they are built, where they get that chemistry and they work together, and then you go through integration once that takes place. And now, lastly, went into the major command level where I was doing battle group operations and I was a sea combat commander. And my background was surface warfare, but my strike group commander came from the aviation community. And when he did the forming part of our bringing this battle group together, he brought the surface warfare and the other commanders out together to the top gun school, the aviation top gun school, so we can understand how they did business and appreciate you know their processes there at the top gun school. And that allowed us when we came together as a battle group to understand each warfare area. Myself as a surface warfare sea combat commander, as well as integrating with the air wing commander. I just thought that was just so critically important. And as we work together within battle groups, you'll see ships out there, you'll see aircraft, you see the carriers, you see all these submarines, all these different aspects. How do you bring these ships together? It's very similar to what I talked earlier about the football and also within organizations. You exercise, you do independent ship drills to understand what the requirements of each ship. Then you go through what we call a composite training exercise, and then you evolve that into what we call battle group events. And then once we get into a full-blown battlegroup event, we still allow time to go back to the individual independent ship level to do exercises so we can learn and build from those lessons that took place within the battle group. So it goes back to the foundational piece I talked to earlier about development as well as you know, the oscillation between integrating and evolution. So these concepts really work throughout, you know, no matter what aspect, whether I'm doing sports or whether I'm doing battlegroup integration. Then also I like to look at nature. Navy partnership building, building relationships across countries. As I talked about in my episode about relationship building, we always will go in to an allied country and get to know the members of that country through cultural events so we can build upon and getting to know each other before we get operations at sea. Now, going forward, you know, we have to just be mindful. In today's dynamic landscape where there's limited person-to-person and action, team building must start at the individual level before integration and evolution takes place. Well, this way the foundation does not have bubbles when it becomes pressurized. People are able to withstand adversity. So team building is about relationships. You just can't throw people together in sports or on ships. In order to prevent those foundational bubbles, you must proceed the integration involvement stage with development. Solid relationships are synonymous with continuous team member development, which happens at the foundation of a technical level, where team building is at the operational and organizational culture is strategic. And leadership coaches are really good at this. So development teams in sports and corporate organizations are pretty much the same. Leaders must acquire talented people, develop them, and put them in the right position, hold them accountable, and execute the plan in order to achieve their vision. Your team does all these things, you will succeed, just like in sports and damage control parties. Please subscribe to the next episode of Apex Performance Podcast, where vital game changing insights on accelerated pathways to excellence are right there at your fingertips. Thank you. See you next time.

SPEAKER_00 23:52

So that's it for today's episode of Apex Performance. Head on over to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen and subscribe to the show. One lucky listener every single week that posts a review on iTunes or Apple Podcasts will and a chance to win a grand prize drawing worth$5,000 for a private VIP day with Dr. Simmons himself. Be sure to visit ApexPerformance Podcast.com to pick up a free copy of your gift. And ask your questions for Dr. Simmons in your own voice, and he'll answer you back privately in his. Then join us on the next episode.