To accomplish any goal, your team must work together. These team environments are never straight forward, static, or simple. They are often chaotic, dynamic and ever-changing situations. To operate efficiently, you, as the leader, need a team that is collaborating effectively to overcome challenges and work together. Ideally, your team self-organizes, leveraging the shared belief and mindset that the team working together, leaning on each other’s strengths, can overcome any challenge or obstacle in their path.
Unfortunately, many teams don’t function this way. Egos get involved. Frictions arise over competition for shared resources. Miscommunication and misalignment can derail even the best performers and best-performing teams. Disagreements can erupt when people don’t agree on how to accomplish a goal. Team performance declines, especially when the team is misaligned on the goal. If you allow these problems to persist, they inevitably create a toxic culture with a lack of trust and respect. This can infect the whole team and lead to mission failure.
To take ownership of building a team of highly motivated, passionate, engaged leaders at every level, it is up to you to get the team on track and focus their efforts in a way that empowers them to execute the mission. You need a structured set of principles that re-calibrate your team, allow them to refocus on the mission at hand, and offer them the flexibility to own the solutions to problems as they come up. They need to understand what good performance looks like–what their leaders need from them in order for the team to be successful. Your mission is to invest in your people so that they understand and believe in the mission and the team. You want to train your people to take ownership of overcoming obstacles, functioning as a team that puts the overall team and the strategic mission before themselves, and prioritizing their efforts on the things that truly matter to accomplish the overarching goal. The solution is simple. Team leadership training.
Team leadership training takes many forms. It could involve a trip with your team to a leadership conference, attending a workshop with your colleagues, participating in a team-building training activity, or participating in a book club at work. In whatever way your group chooses to engage in team leadership training, the ultimate goal is to foster teamwork and growth by learning and applying new skills together.
In Echelon Front’s 10+ year history, we have serviced thousands of clients through various team leadership training methods. We host leadership conferences, facilitate experiential training, run workshops, and develop and execute long-term training programs. One of our most scalable and affordable solutions is our Extreme Ownership Academy Implementation Program. This program is utilized by hundreds of teams as a standalone tool to introduce and reinforce the foundational principles of Extreme Ownership. But it can also be used in conjunction with our other offerings as well.
What Is Team Leadership Training – The Implementation Program
The Implementation Program was created to provide teams with a structured, curriculum-based approach to learning and applying the leadership concepts from the New York Times best-selling books Extreme Ownership (EO) and Dichotomy of Leadership (DOL) written by Jocko Willink and I. The intention of the implementation program is to use the training plan as a structured method to bring your team of leaders together to apply these principles and solve problems within your organization directly. It includes all learning modalities and provides teams with resources that allow them to run this program themselves. There are four main components to this program that make it a successful self-guided program.
- Learn
- Reflect
- Engage
- Apply
Assuming four weeks in a month, the ideal Implementation Program executes each of these four steps one week at a time for each chapter of the book (EO or DOL). This creates a 12-month training program that introduces these concepts to teams in a way that facilitates immediate implementation.
1. Learn
During the first week of each month, the participants learn about the principle with examples of real-world application from Jocko Willink and me. This includes three modalities of learning – Visual, Auditory, and Reading. Participants will:
- Read the book chapter
- Watch and listen to the course module for that chapter on the Extreme Ownership Academy
2. Reflect
The second week of the month encourages the team members to reflect on what they learned and their current application of the concept. Each leader will be challenged to identify where they can directly apply this principle in their roles and responsibilities. This is done through our companion workbook, which summarizes the book chapter and asks the participant to write an answer to five or six questions about how they currently implement the principle.
3. Engage
Once the learning and reflection are complete, the team schedules a meeting to be held during the third week of the month to engage in group discussion on the topic. This allows everyone to share more about what they learned and reflect, as a team, on how everyone can improve in this area. This is where our Implementation Program Facilitator Resources become crucial. Facilitating productive group conversations is not an easy task, so we equip our clients with two key components.
- Discussion Guides: These are curriculum-based one-pagers created for each chapter of the book. They include a recap of the principle, carefully curated questions to guide discussion, additional implementation tools or examples, and an immediate action drill.
- Program Success Manager: This is a member of the Echelon Front team who can support each Implementation Program team by answering questions and providing guidance on how to best facilitate meetings.
4. Apply
This final week of the month enacts the last modality of learning – kinesthetic. During week four, we ask participants to take action on what they’ve learned. As mentioned in the Engage section, each Discussion Guide has an Immediate Action Drill at the end that prompts the team members to leave the meeting and take action. This is something tangible that they can realistically complete the following week and throughout the following months to implement this concept.
By repeating this 4-step process each month with a new principle, you can complete leadership training for teams on a 12-chapter book in 12 months.
The Impact Of Team Leadership Training
This structure of Learn, Reflect, Engage, and Apply has proven effective for our clients. In fact, if we look at completion rates for our online training, clients utilizing the Implementation Program see an 80% higher course completion rate. Customers who just purchase access to the courses need to develop their own structured program to directly apply the lessons or risk the team de-prioritizing the learning for other priorities at work. That structured, intentional approach to team leadership training is what allows your team to realize the direct impact the principles of Extreme Ownership have on your organization.
We hear from clients in this program consistently about the progress their team is making by having these discussions and having a group to rely on as they work to implement these new skills. This digestible and actionable program creates an environment that is most conducive to deep learning. By only asking the team to digest and test one concept at a time, offering multiple modalities of learning, providing adequate time between concepts, and creating a network of like-minded teammates to rely on, you can create a culture of Extreme Ownership that lasts.
Here is a sample of some of the feedback we get from clients using this program:
- “Training has been going well. There has been a lot of positive feedback from the participants as well as their respective bosses. We’ve seen a pickup in production and change in attitude at each of the plants that we have been working with. …overall, positive.”
-Takashi DeHart, Operations Manager, UFP Site Built
- “A program so good it just sells itself. I now have VP’s, front-line workers, linesmen and project managers all asking to be a part of the next groups. How do I organize and think about this. It’s growing faster than I can keep track”
-Pat Bavis, Senior Director, PEC of CT
Conclusion
So, what is team leadership training? It is an opportunity to provide your team with the skills they need to succeed. Good culture, like leadership skills, doesn’t just happen. It develops over time through deliberate effort and a dedicated, consistent training program. Whether you’re training a large team, a small group, front-line workers, or high-level executives, everyone can benefit from team leadership training. The Extreme Ownership Academy Implementation Program is just one example of the many types of team leadership training options that Echelon Front offers. The Learn, Reflect, Engage, and Apply structure has proven to be a successful format for thousands of clients to introduce, reinforce, and sustain Extreme Ownership within their organization.
