Our firm just launched its first monthly “micro-training session” at our firm-wide Monday Morning Huddle meeting. The idea came from a presentation by Michael Canic called “Making Strategy Happen,” where he encouraged company-wide micro-training sessions as a way to increase engagement and development of teams.

Our first training session required us to recall the best team we ever worked on (past or present), and answer one question “What were the characteristics of that team?” We all took five minutes to come up with our individual lists of qualities that made up that team, and then we went around the room compiling the answers and ranking them by popularity.

Interestingly, there was a lot of overlap and alignment in what our team members thought was most important in building a strong team. And even more encouraging, two of the most popular characteristics identified ended up being the same concepts as two of our established core values (passion and commitment). Below is the list our firm came up with as the most important qualities of a strong team:

• Mutual Respect and Trust: each person being treated with respect and establishing a solid relationship between team members that fosters trust and safety.

• Passion and Commitment: each person loving what they do and being committed to the vision of the organization and to each other.

• Leveraging Strengths: identifying and understanding each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and being able to rely on team members to complement each other where needed to make an even stronger team.

• Good Communication: clear goals and expectations established, and an open-door policy for ideas as well as for questions and concerns.

We found it enlightening to identify these four team concepts and understand what was most important to our peers and leadership. If we can focus on fostering each of these qualities within our teams, we have a great opportunity to build teams we are proud to be a part of.