Discipline – The Third Imperative for any High Performing Team
I used to flinch at the word “Discipline”. Not any more. Here’s why:
So far we’ve talked about two of the three Imperatives, Clarity and Intentionality. Number three is Discipline.
Discipline can mean a few things. Without any other context the word reminds of what I used to hear from the nuns when I attended Catholic school years ago. Fortunately, the version I’m talking about here doesn’t involve knuckles being rapped with a ruler.
This sort of discipline is about rigor. Or, as somebody once said to me, “This is really about good habits;” I couldn’t have said it better. The Discipline Imperative is about developing good team habits, simple, useful routines. Not routines for routines sake, but routines aligned with the clarity you gained through developing your purpose and the conversations you had about accountability for collaboration. That’s what we mean by Discipline.
4 Aspects of Good Team Discipline
There are four main aspects of good team Discipline.
Design your meetings to be fit for purpose, your team’s purpose.
Decision making is also a discipline; your team will want to develop repeatable, reliable routines for deciding.
Connectivity, how you use technology to stay connected between meetings, is the third vital discipline. Strong teams make appropriate connectivity into a good habit that everyone is willing to adhere to.
Learning as a team is a habit of high performing groups and it is an important one. Great teams have a routine around pausing to reflect, inquire and learn at regular intervals as well as during and after important projects.
Good Habits
So, that is the Discipline Imperative. It’s about habits, simple routines that are strongly aligned with the Clarity and Intentionality you have already focused on. Teams create these habits and routines to keep things running as smoothly and predictably as possible. The world’s crazy enough. Whatever we can do within our teams to foster a sense of control, a sense of focus around the things that matter, will go a long way towards helping us meet the commitments we have made to each other and to our organizations.
That does it for the Three Imperatives. In the upcoming blog posts, we go into detail about the six Practices that grew out of the Imperatives, what those are and how they are applied.
