The second most empowering shift teams that transitioned from floundering to flourishing, was to make the team a safer place to speak more of their truth.

Over the past decade, I’ve studied what separates floundering from flourishing teams. The findings are clear.

The #3 reason teams flounder is because of the time and energy wasted in unproductive and ineffective meetings. Teams who flounder claim over 40% of meetings are a waste of their time and energy.

The #2 reason teams flounder is as significant, given it’s a symptom of the first: team members aren’t open to learning with and from one another.

In my previous newsletter, I shared, based on a decade of data from coaching leadership teams, 80% of teams flounder more than flourish.

Over the past month I’ve been analysing ten years of data from coaching executive and leadership teams. The results are clear, whilst unsurprising, they present infinite possibilities.

In over a decade of coaching teams, I’ve noticed one differentiating attribute that separates high-performing teams from ordinary teams: courageous authenticity.

As humans, we are never not in language – we speak, listen, think and act in language. As a leader, your language is never innocent; there’s intention in everything you say.

Integrity, rightly so, is held to be a virtue of great leaders. But what does the word mean? It originated from the Latin word, integra which means ‘whole or complete’.

John Maxwell, a renowned leadership expert, once said, “a leader is one who is most like themselves.”  Having reflected, ask yourself, ‘so, who am I as a leader?’

I’ve come to recognise that leadership in teams is more organic and less ordained. There are three sources to the organic leadership in teams; it is either claimed, granted or owned.

We’re addicted to addition – we’re conditioned to think and talk about doing more, learning more, getting more and achieving more.