Here's your latest Violet View, bringing you actionable leadership insights that cut through the noise.
Hi there, it's Stefanie (Founder of TVG), back with your latest dose of leadership insight... except today it's actually all about teams.
Your competitive edge is collective.
This is a prompt we use to kick off many of our Executive Team Offsites. It shifts people away from individual performance toward a shared, team-oriented lens.
Way back when, in my Doctorate program, I took a "Working Teams" course. My professor, Dr. Suzanne Bell, said something to the effect of: "The research and practice in teams is highly complex.
Studying team behavior, effectiveness, and composition is deep work. (By the way, Dr. Bell is worth the follow, she does fascinating work with NASA 🚀)
Years later, building and leading my own team while helping clients build theirs, I can confirm this is true, both in research and in practice.
People are complex on their own. Put a group of individuals with different goals, personalities, values, and needs together and ask them to perform as a true high-functioning unit? That's a whole other level of work.
It's also some of the most rewarding work we do.
Over the last several years, TVG has supported teams who are:
Newly forming and figuring out their mission and operating norms
In flux, navigating interpersonal dynamics that will derail their success if left unaddressed
Established but facing a shifting market that demands new ways of working together
Operating in volatile environments where debate, healthy conflict, and continuous improvement must become part of the daily culture
Through this work, we've built a thriving team effectiveness practice and developed practical exercises for everything from mission-crafting to accountability-setting to constructive conflict.
In this issue, you'll find: some of our favorite team effectiveness tools, what we're currently reading and listening to, and a few honest stories from inside our work.
Read on, share your thoughts, and tell us: How can we help your teams perform better?
Happy learning and leading,
Stefanie
Don't Skip the Diagnosis ⇣
Here's what most teams get wrong before an offsite: they skip the diagnosis.
They gather the right people, book a facilitator, and start workshopping, without a clear picture of what's actually going on beneath the surface.
What people are privately frustrated about.
Where the team's dynamics are working against them.
What's gone unsaid because there hasn't been a safe place to say it.
To truly support a team's development, it's critical to know as much as you can about their dynamics: what's working, what's getting in the way, and what they need to do differently.
There are many ways to get at this. Here are a few of our favorites:
Interviewing Each Team Member
This is often where the most important information lives because people say things in a private conversation they won't say in a room full of people. What surfaces: dynamics people recognize but haven't shared out loud, conflicts between team members, or misaligned priorities.
→ Want a lightweight version? Pull three team members aside individually and ask: "What's something about our team dynamics that we're not talking about but should be?"
Using Personality to Understand Working Styles
Using personality tools gives us a rigorous picture of how people are naturally wired and how they work. One of our most used tools is the Hogan Personality Suite.
At the team level, this helps understand where there are shared values, tension, or diversity that could be better leveraged.
→ Gut check: Can you anticipate how each person on your team will behave under pressure? Do you know how that impacts the team's effectiveness? If you can't, a personality tool might be a good place to start.
Measuring Team Effectiveness Directly
Built on The Rocket Model, The Team Assessment Survey (TAS), gives teams a shared, precise language for diagnosing exactly where they're strong and where they're not. Think things like: shared context, a clear mission, and talent in the right roles. No soft team building activities or vague conversations about "culture." This tool allows you to be specific, measurable, and practical.
From simple to more involved, these strategies ensure you're properly diagnosing where the team stands and never doing guesswork about what's needed next.
A Crowd Favorite: Where Do You Stand?
One of the most memorable moments in our team workshops is an exercise we call "Where Do You Stand?" It's exactly what it sounds like.
Armed with their individual personality results, team members line up along a wall from lowest to highest scores on a given dimension. Suddenly, the data isn't abstract... people look up and down the row and through lots of laughs and lightbulb moments, the team starts to understand each other in a more in meaningful way.
Take a team we worked with last month: The full group lovingly roasted their leader who happened to be the only one with a high score on a measure of "Recognition," while the rest were down near zero.
Those higher on Recognition are energized by public praise and prefer high visibility, sometimes splashy roles. Those lower on it may actually be demotivated by that and feel uncomfortable with public pats on the back.
Neither is right or wrong, simply different motivational wiring. There's real power in understanding what makes your team members tick and what causes them to retreat. The exercise itself allows the team to visibly understand the different motives and preferences that exist among them.
Try it with your team using the "this or that" exercise...
No assessment required. Pick a couple working style questions and have your team go on opposite sides of the room based on their responses.
Some examples:
How do you prefer feedback, right away or after time to prepare?
Do you think out loud in brainstorms or prefer to process first?
Do you address tension head-on or tend to soften your message?
Prefer to be recognized in public or private?
Let the team discuss and observe what happens as they get to know each other in a new way.
When the Plan Changes (And It Will)
Executive teams carry a lot. Business priorities, board expectations, market pressures, team dynamics, personal lives. All of it, all at once. So, when we say team development requires flexibility, we mean it in every sense of the word.
Last year, several of our team development engagements got reshuffled: sometimes the day before, sometimes the morning of.
In one, we pushed the session out a month to absorb an unexpected team change.
In another, a new team member joined the mix just one week before a planned offsite.
In a third, we pivoted the entire agenda on the fly to make space for a live issue that needed real and immediate conversation (rather than a pre-planned workshop). We had planned to review an in-depth assessment report, but with the emergent issues, we would have been staring out at a group of exhausted people. Trying to jam this report in front of them was the wrong move, and the leader agreed. So, we shifted.
None of these were failures (though they can feel that way). Teams are perpetually in motion, the variables are always changing, and the best teams learn to work through it.
Those that do this exceptionally well are the ones who've built the muscle to move, together and in alignment, through imperfect conditions.
You Can’t Hire Your Way to a Great Team
You made some good hires and figured gathering them would create something cohesive, almost magical.
But many executives make the same mistake: assuming strong individuals handed a shared goal will naturally knit themselves into a strong team. The team itself is a separate entity that has to be built.
Melissa Regester, Ph.D. shares three reasons even the strongest executive teams trip up, and what separates the ones running on a deliberate operating system from the ones still defaulting to unwritten rules.
The idea is simple: care personally AND challenge directly. Learning to do both is the difference between feedback that helps teams grow and feedback that erodes trust or never gets said at all.
Kim maps feedback on two axes: how directly you challenge, and how much you genuinely care. The most common failure mode isn't harshness, it's ruinous empathy: caring too much about someone's feelings to tell them something that would help them.
What We're Listening To: Uncertainty is Not the Enemy 🎙️
On an episode of The Curiosity Shop, Brené Brown and Adam Grant make the case that ambiguity, when handled well, can sharpen a team's thinking instead of derailing it.
If your team's navigating a lot of unknowns right now (whose isn't?), queue this one up.
In honor of Pride Month (June may be over, but Pride is important to us year-round), we’re highlighting the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the largest LGBTQ+ civil rights organization in the U.S.
We admire how they blend advocacy with education, pushing for policy change while creating tools that help individuals and organizations drive real inclusion.
If you’re looking to learn, reflect, or take action, their resource hub is an excellent place to start.
TVG is donating to HRC on behalf of our community this Pride Month. Three ways you can join us: donate, explore their resource hub, or share one of their tools with your team.
Until then...happy listening, learning, and leading, TVG community!
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