The Five Behaviors facilitation FAQs
We know that anyone facilitating a new program will have questions. Here we answer the questions we hear most often about The Five Behaviors®.
You’re right to be conscious of the amount of time it takes to run a team through the complete The Five Behaviors Team Development training. Some teams might schedule sessions to run over a year. Some will finish in a few weeks. There are three-day and one-day facilitation plans in The Five Behaviors Facilitation Kit, but completing a program to effectively build a better team won't be accomplished without time and significant effort by participants. Making time for reflection is an investment that will pay off in the long term and increase the strength of your team.
In the short term, just running through the Trust section thoroughly helps in terms of engagement and productivity. Make sure you schedule enough time to get through all modules without rushing the team. The time spent creating a cohesive team means less time spent in ineffective activities and behaviors. Remember, the last step of the training is Results. And isn’t that what the team was created to deliver?
Some training consultants want to capitalize on enthusiasm for the program and schedule discussion of all behavioral modules within a few days or weeks. If there is a significant delay in getting the team together, you'll want to build in time for reviewing the previous module(s) before beginning a new one.
Possible trainings: 3 full days, 1 full day and 4 half-days, 7 meetings (introductory half-day, then shorter ones)
Shorter training times are possible. However, having gone through this program ourselves, we recommend taking advantage of the complete program and fully investing in your team and The Five Behaviors Team Development.
You also have the option of delivering The Five Behaviors Personal Development. Since there's no team assessment and fewer opportunities to get into more complicated discussions about past performance of the team, this program moves more quickly.
That is not necessary, but we tend to recommend it. The book is highly respected and easy to read. We always recommend that facilitators read the book. As an introduction to the concepts covered, you might want to share this video that summarizes the book, or these articles of his: The Trouble with Teamwork or Conquer Team Dysfunction.
Larger teams can be harder to schedule for workshops and require more management when facilitating discussions.
From The Five Behaviors research report: “In all cases where there was a statistically significant difference, the larger teams had a lower average than the smaller teams.” For example, members of larger teams seem to have a harder time being unguarded, apologizing, asking for input, and getting to know one another on a personal level.
Large teams also find it less acceptable to go beyond the meeting end time to resolve an issue. “Small teams tend to exclude other team members from difficult conversations more often than those on larger teams.” They are also more accepting of members showing outward emotion. The research report provides much more detail, starting on page 16.
With large teams you might want to break them up into smaller ones or use The Five Behaviors Personal Development instead.
Download The Five Behaviors Powered by Everything DiSC Research Report
If your is making changes and moving many people onto new teams, we recommend delivering The Five Behaviors Personal Development with everyone joining these teams. Later, if you find a team is struggling, you can introduce The Five Behaviors Team Development facilitation.
We sometimes recommend using Everything DiSC Workplace® along with the Everything DiSC Facilitator Report with the team before beginning The Five Behaviors Team Development program. Reviewing these will help team members quickly learn how to work with each other and provide them with a way to talk through conflicts and form their own group culture. After they've worked together a few weeks, introduce the The Five Behaviors Team Development to build upon what they learned through Everything DiSC training and to work on any problematic issues that have arisen, or are about to arise, on the team.
In preparation for any program, you might want to ask team members to read The Five Dysfunctions of a Team to introduce the concepts of Trust, Conflict, Commitment, Accountability, and Results.
We do not recommend this. Bringing in someone from outside your group will make it much easier for you to participate as a member of your team. The discussions will be much richer with a dispassionate party to facilitate them.
You might find that you'll need to be more comfortable with emotion, vulnerability, and conflict in your teams than you'd normally experience with training groups. You might want to set a few ground rules and think of yourself as a facilitator rather than a trainer. The assessment provides numerous questions for the teams to discuss and lots of information to digest and ponder. You'll want to review all of those in preparation for a session.
You might find that your biggest challenge is keeping everyone to a time schedule so you can cover every behavior. Be flexible with your timing. Don’t rush through valuable conversations. Allow (or create) opportunities for follow-up. If you're more comfortable delivering an instruction-based, instructor-led training, you might want to hire a facilitator instead of running sessions yourself.
Team leaders should not act as the facilitator for this training. They need to be part of the team, experiencing the facilitation and training.
We recommend against skipping over any of the five behaviors. Because each behavior builds on the previous one, and incorporates it, we believe they should not be addressed in isolation of one another. However, if you're facing major time constraints, spend your time on Trust and Conflict. (After the team experiences the impact of these modules, you might get approval and resources to complete the program.)
Full names do not appear anywhere in the reports; individual responses are shown but not identified by respondent. Team members taking The Five Behaviors Team Development will learn the DiSC® styles of each of their colleagues.
A minimum of three participants is needed before you can generate this assessment. We do not suggest running a report until all team members have completed the assessment as each team member's data affects team results.
Team members need to have a meaningful understanding of themselves and their peers. DiSC provides this understanding, as well as a non-judgmental way to talk about behaviors. The DiSC conflict map is a useful tool to use when engaging in conflict in a productive way.
DiSC is a helpful tool for self-understanding and a model for discussing conflict, motivation, and differences. The five dysfunctions model provides clear and compelling reasons to use that model to build a more cohesive team. It also extends learning into real-life situations faced by every team.
The bar for this assessment is set high, so even if most team members give a lot of “sometimes” responses you might see a lower score than expected. It’s not easy to be a cohesive team. The specific scores are much less important than how your team responds to its relative strengths and weaknesses.
Before your first workshop:
- Meet with the team leader in advance. Learn a bit about the history of the team and what challenges they face.
- Review the sample annotated report, the facilitation kit, and the information available on this site.
- Share and walk through a sample profile with the leader so she or he knows more about what to expect. (A helpful handout is included in the facilitation kit.)
- Explain the purpose and value of the program to the team ahead of time. Ask the leader to give a clear endorsement of the process.
- Be sure to clearly communicate who is on the team prior to participants taking the assessment so members can fairly evaluate the team.
- Be ready to clarify the assessment process for team members, if asked.
- Get familiar with EPIC, the administrator account, if you have not used it before.
Yes. You can use the existing data function within EPIC for the Five Behaviors products. Learn how.
