It had been four years this startup company had been working together. They engaged us to try help them develop their BP10 Talents, hoping to get further than they had before. They were in a new product category with new technology, so the founding members had lent their time and effort into building the company without receiving any remuneration. The products had just started going to market and they had yet to create market capture. The possibilities that this team wouldn’t make it were large. The founders fought a lot and didn’t have psychological safety with each other. Some of the members were very quiet, while other members of the team were loud and aggressive. Sometimes yelling matches happened while the quieter members tried to placate the aggressive team members. Neither side had any idea that they were derailing the team with their behaviors and allowing the unproductive behaviors to continue to weigh the team down. Because the technology to make their product was a very specialized form of engineering and one of the aggressive team members was the one to create the technology, the power dynamics were off for the leadership team: quieter members felt the placation was needed because they needed the technology. However, over the years, the leadership team knew it didn’t have the right people on the team to turn the company into a well-oiled machine. People were placed in roles that weren’t the right fit for them which led to problems with the people or problems with the roles. And with the dysfunctional teammate behaviors, things always felt “off” – people didn’t want to come to work because they never knew if the aggressive behaviors would be waiting to greet them that day or not. They felt stuck.
We worked with this team for nine months, first with BP10 knowledge and then with the TeamAcumen Framework. Later, we went back to assess the team in the TeamAcumen Framework as opposed its original scores to look for additional developmental progress.
For the BP10 workshops, we helped them understand who each person was (apart from their behaviors). For each member of the team, this was their first type of any kind of Strengths-based training, so we built in the neuroscience of the strengths environment to help them learn basic concepts better. Since the team was technology-based, they loved learning the neuroscience inside Strengths-based development. During discussions in the first two months, there were no exhibiting bad behaviors while the team learned first about themselves, and then learned about each other. Because we knew this team had some relational problems with each other, we did many activities where they would explore the goodness of their talents, but then also explore the shadow sides of the talents as well – how they might react differently with separate stimuli. The team was very engaged in this – on both good and shadow sides of their talents. More importantly, they could start to see how their reactions to the triggers of the talents may not have been apparent to them before.
At the beginning of our work, we had the team take the TeamAcumen Framework Assessment. In Month 3, we worked through the Framework results. A number of Elements were far below the median score for the team, notably Interpesonal, Team Structure, and Psychological Safety. We started talking through problems on the team. As we dove into learning about Psychological Safety, the behaviors of team members came up – from the quiet members to the aggressive members, each person told everyone else how they felt when they were having problems. Things got a little heated sometimes, but then in other discussions, the team landed inside the sunlight of understanding – able to talk about the differences calmly with each other as well as discussing how other’s behaviors on the team impacted their own roles. At the end of Month 3, this team had vowed they would work better with each other, leveraging their own talents to lend to the services of completing the overall company’s objectives.
In the follow-up 6th-month checkup, we charted where the leadership team was after using the behavioral modifications we’d come up with in Month 3. The team rose from an initial Grand Mean of 4.08 to a 4.25, which was only 0.13 points away from the 75th percentile. They have moved on from their lowest point to start to work within, and accelerate, their abilities.
Outcomes: The team has now identified the role problems and is actively working on changing their executive team to fit their needs. Two members have left the leadership team and have been replaced with new members with skills better matched to their roles. They are effectively moving from Startup to a fully functioning Stage 2 company, having moved into a new building and are now actively growing their products line and co-creating with their partners. Their ability to discuss hard subjects without problematic behaviors overriding things have increased. All teammates are cognizant that to be true partners, they need to honor each other for what they bring to the team, as well as know that the team’s behavior balancing is respectfully done, and apologizing doesn’t mean you are weak, but you are actually strong. We will be working with them again for the next year with their entire 2nd Stage company team, many whom have never heard of Strengths or TeamAcumen.