This is the third post in a series on improving teamwork within your organization. The first two posts framed the overall issue and identified the measurable results we want to achieve. This post will focus on finding the vital behaviors that drive the results.


A key insight at the heart of our book, Influencer, is that a few behaviors can drive a lot of change. Even the most pervasive problems will succumb to a handful of high-leverage behaviors. Find these high-leverage behaviors, the ones we call “vital behaviors,” and you can drive amazing levels of change.

Here are the mistakes to avoid:

Too many behaviors. Limit yourself to three or four vital behaviors. This is an optimal number. Of course there will always be additional behaviors that are also important, but limiting the number to three or four will focus your efforts to great advantage.

Results or qualities, instead of behaviors. Here are some “vital behaviors” that aren’t really behaviors at all: “Respect all team members,” “Achieve all team targets.” The first is a quality, while the second is a result. The vital behaviors describe actions people can perform. A good test is to ask yourself, “If I told 10 people to demonstrate this vital behavior, would they all perform the same actions?”

What makes a behavior “vital”?

Sometimes a behavior becomes vital because it leads directly to desired results. For example, 30 minutes of aerobic exercise daily leads directly to improved cardiac fitness.

Other times the behavior is vital because it stops an escalating or self-defeating pattern. For example, recognizing that your spouse is going to silence or violence, stepping out of the discussion, and restoring safety stops the escalating patterns that lead to divorce.

The vital behaviors that improve teamwork

First, remember we’re using a specific set of Measurable Results to define “improved teamwork.” You might want to review last week’s post on results to see the dimensions we’re measuring. 

As you can imagine, there is a lot of research on the characteristics of successful teams. However, most of these studies focus on qualities instead of behaviors. Our own research on teams has used the “crucial moments” and “positive deviance” approaches.

We’ve identified crucial moments in a team’s life—times when it’s especially likely for the team to switch from the right path to the wrong path and especially costly to their performance when they do. Examples of these crucial moments include: when a team is given an unachievable goal, when a powerful team member tries to dominate the team, and when a team member fails to keep a commitment to another team member.

We’ve observed positive deviant teams—teams that succeed against the odds in these crucial moments. What we find is that successful teams face just as many of these crucial moments as unsuccessful teams—but they behave differently when they do. Here are the two vital behaviors that we repeatedly observe among successful teams:

• Whenever anyone has a concern, he or she speaks up and explains the concern in a complete, frank, and respectful way.
• Everyone holds everyone accountable for meeting expectations, for commitments, and for bad behavior—regardless of role or position.

These two behaviors differentiate the best teams from the rest. So, these vital behaviors will be the focus of our teamwork initiative. In the next blog posting, I’ll begin building a six source influence strategy for making sure everyone on the team acts on these vital behaviors every time.