This is the fifth post in a series on Improving Teamwork within your organization. In earlier posts we’ve clarified the results we’ll use to track improvements in teamwork and identified two vital behaviors that can drive these improvements. These vital behaviors are:

• 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.

We also discovered a number of challenges that could prevent people from acting on these vital behaviors. We looked within each of our six sources of influence, and found the challenges in every one. In this post I’ll outline influence strategies that focus on Source 1 of our model--Personal Motivation. The goal will be to make the undesirable elements of teamwork more desirable.
 
Source 1: Personal Motivation: We want people to derive enjoyment, fulfillment, identity, and self respect from employing these two vital behaviors. We want them to take pride in speaking up and holding others accountable, to see these behaviors as essential parts of who they are, and to feel a loss of self respect every time they fail to speak up or hold another person accountable. In short, we want these two vital behaviors to be intrinsically motivating.

Connect to Human Consequences: In lab studies we’ve asked people to “think out loud” as they decide how to approach a crucial conversation. Here is what more than four out of five of them do. They total up all the bad things that could happen if they speak up. They end up talking themselves out of saying anything.
What we need is for people to reverse the math—to think of all the bad things that will happen if they don’t speak up. But here’s the challenge: These bad things happen mostly to other people, not to themselves.
The solution is to connect them to the human consequences that happen when they fail to speak up or fail to hold someone accountable. Think of ways to have them connect with the victims who are hurt by their lack of action.

In this extended example we’ve been using medical teams. Arrange to have team members meet with patients who have been injured by their team. Have them lead post-exit interviews with groups of people who have chosen to leave their team. Make sure these meetings happen face-to-face, that they aren’t delegated or held over the phone. You want the maximum human connection between the team members and the people their actions impact.

Get People to Try the Vital Behaviors: People catastrophize. They imagine that speaking up and holding people accountable will be far more painful than it really is. Get them to try the vital behaviors in small doses in safe environments. Once their confidence is a bit higher, try hitting them with a few zingers so they can experience setbacks and realize that even failures aren’t too painful.

Use Motivational Interviewing: Ask people to explain all the excuses they use during the crucial moment to excuse themselves from speaking up and holding others accountable. After they’ve made an exhaustive list ask them to, “Look at each excuse objectively and decide whether it’s really good enough to excuse you from speaking up and holding others accountable.” Ask them to argue against their own excuses. They can change their own minds far more effectively than you can.

In the next post we’ll look at strategies designed to improve Personal Ability.