Team Practices: How Congruence comes to Life

The concept of Mind Your How emphasizes the importance of understanding the complex elements and connections that underpin our work. Team congruence is often linked to how well team members understand their roles and the collective practices that guide their interactions. When teams are congruent, there is a shared understanding of how decisions are made and how tasks are accomplished. This alignment is cultivated through intentional habits and practices. For example, a team that regularly reviews its decision-making processes can adapt and evolve these practices over time, ensuring they remain relevant within the organization’s cultural context.

Learn from Consumer Practices

In the product world, innovators study consumer practices to understand how they carry out tasks and why they do things the way they do. Consumers are smart and creative – if a product or solution does not exist (either through availability or affordability), they will come up with compensating behaviors to accomplish their goals.  Once at an in-home visit, I observed a consumer manually stirring a load of laundry before starting the machine cycle. Why? Because she has been failed before by laundry powder that did not completely dissolve, requiring a rewash that would cause her money and time.   The job of the brand would be to come up with an elegant or efficient solution to reduce or eliminate the need of those compensations.

One on One of Possibilities

One of most valuable practices for new hires to people managers to executives is one on one conversations. It can take place on a weekly, monthly or ad-hoc basis, you can cover topics from priorities for the week to long term career discussions. Depending on the nature of your role and relationship with the other person, they can take place in many forms.

• With your manager - weekly: share your priorities and show your work to get feedback
• With your peers in other departments - monthly: connect to check in on current initiatives and how you can support your respective teams
• With your mentor - quarterly: brainstorm opportunities to get experiences beyond your current role for your development
• With a new contact met at an event - one time: explore each others' paths and interest and the possibilities to help each other or work together

There is no one best way to do this, and you can mix and match to suit your goal. As you become more experienced, it will be second nature for you to apply a helpful practice for the occasion.

Team Decision Making

Teams form practices out of the reality and options they have.  Take Decision Making as an example. Unless formally structured, each company / team has slight variations on how they make decisions. Who’s involved in the process? What inputs do they consider? How do they bring ideas to the table? Who gets the final say when there are differences in opinions? These are all elements of our team culture – while some practices are more helpful than others given the circumstances. Sometimes we hear stories about teams taking too long to make a decision, but that may turn out to be a wrong question. Why? Imagine two different scenarios:

• A strategic, billion-dollar decision involving multiple businesses and functions
• An operational issue where speed is of the essence and we already have the team closest to the matter at the table

Should we apply the same discipline and vigor to both situations? Our practices should reflect the goals and constraints at hand and be flexible.

Once we understand how our practices were established, we will make an important recognition that this is not a discussion about right or wrong. It is a journey on applying and adjusting more helpful ways to achieve our goals.  Improving Team Congruence requires Commitment to the cause, Curiosity to level up our craft, and practices happen to be how they come to life.   We can often improve performance by making our practices more relevant and effective.

What practices on your team do you find helpful that should be shared more broadly?