For many organizations, the mission and value statement is designed as a guiding light yet often collects dust in a fancy frame in the boardroom. For some, it is the checklist through which day-to-day decisions are filtered. How do you make mission and values real for employees? Consider the gratitude circle exercise in your next full staff meeting. Just follow these five steps:

Election Day is one of the few times we get to participate in choosing a leader. Most other days, we inherit our leaders. However, you also exercise this choice when you decide to stay in a job or pursue a career change. Among the criteria for staying or leaving an organization is an assessment of whether the leader can be followed. Workplace culture cascades from leadership whether healthy or sick.  Let’s play follow the leader.

What competency do you wish to master? Life is short. It takes a significant commitment to specialize. Beyond baseline talent and the gift of opportunity, mastery requires repetition. By most standards, practicing a skill 10,000 times elevates it to a new level. Martial artists know this as they deliver dozens of kicks, punches, and self-defense maneuvers to their daily workout routines. Musicians know this as they pound out scales in every key signature. Writers only get better by writing. So what about mastering relationships? Perhaps every organization should have a team expert. How might this happen?

Stay in your lane! Teams can achieve impressive success without collaboration. The recipe is simple: work hard, ensure competence, and be nice. As long as everyone makes their contribution, business gets done and, often, the results are good. Greatness, however, is rarely achieved without a commitment to share ideas and resources. But inviting a teammate into your lane means having to be accountable for the overlap. It’s harder work. We all drive differently when there’s a passenger onboard.

Without exception, every team has work to do. Whether fixing something broken or fueling an opportunity, there is a conversation needed to move things forward. We all know which conversations are most important. It’s usually the ones that are awkward and sensitive. It’s often the issue not being discussed that fills the atmosphere with tension. Here are a few of the most common team conversations waiting to be initiated:

There are few intolerable consequences for settling for good-enough performance. Risking the pursuit of greatness isn’t for everyone. It comes at a cost not many are willing to pay. In most professional endeavors, good enough is good enough. Why, then, do some people, some partners, some teams, and some organizations reach for the sky?

If you take a snapshot of a team, you get a glimpse of the traditional forming/storming/norming/performing moment in time. If you film a movie of the same team, you get a series of cycles filled with obstacles, problem-solving, innovation, change, and adaptation. Teams rarely follow straight-line trajectories. Most often, they evolve through multiple iterations of talent, turnover, leadership style, and culture. As the story unfolds, team wellness and productivity rises and falls. How might this impact your team?

Try this exchange if you’d like to boost transparency and accountability on your team. It’s a simple exercise that unveils each teammate’s contribution to the group and a glimpse of the motives that drive their passion for the work. To implement this exercise with your team, follow these five simple steps:

These days, you don’t have to travel very far to run into someone playing Pokémon Go. They have a unique appearance. They’re wandering outdoor spaces holding their smartphones at arm’s length with simultaneous telephoto and wide-angle vision. Their posture is slightly more upright than the stereotypical smartphone addict since they are searching the universe. The creative team responsible for this phenomenon achieved their augmented-reality goal: the gamification of daily life. How did they do it?

The behavior of the team leader can drive employee engagement more powerfully than the mission statement. We all become complicit with the leader’s words and actions by our choice to work in an organization. Healthy or unhealthy, our career path choices are de facto endorsements. All too often, reasonably minded colleagues stay in situations that are making them sick. Some have limited options when workplace culture falls out of alignment with their purpose. Others become free agents. What we tolerate, we sanction.

Building a dream team involves both design and maintenance. In the design phase, gather a unique collection of personalities who share a common goal and diverse paths to attainment. In the maintenance phase, catch early warning signs of vulnerability and repair proactively. Whether anchoring the team’s infrastructure or tweaking performance, consider these guideposts and engage in a continuous gap analysis of opportunity:

Whenever you add or subtract a member, you have a new team. Depending on the role and profile of the transition, the change can be significant. To minimize the impact, most teams try to keep as much the same as possible. Let the new members join the old club. The healthiest teams recognize the window of opportunity to re-anchor mission, values, and engagement. Here’s how: