The Conditions for Success or 3Cs™ is a pragmatic and powerful approach for any team to work together and accelerate their performance. This set of conditions gives leaders and teams a common language to assess, discuss and work together to accelerate the performance of the team.
The 3Cs is underpinned by the philosophy that leadership is a set of skills and behaviors which can be learned and are not specific to role or hierarchy. Anyone in any role can lead themselves and others around them. This view of leadership serves modern organisations where speed of execution, innovation and collaboration are important to enable leadership at all levels to deliver results in what are often complex matrix organisations. Unlike many traditional views of leadership, we believe it is the responsibility of the whole team to create the conditions for each other.
The leader’s role is as an enabler; to role model the leadership behaviours, to champion the team in the organisation, and to facilitate conversations in the team about how they are working together. The Conditions for Success have been used in hundreds of organisations with thousands of teams. We have seen countless examples of where team performance has been increased through a common understanding of these conditions and how to create them.
All team members are responsible for creating the Conditions for Success for themselves and each other.
It is tempting for leaders to jump straight to competence when their team is not performing well, but by using the 3Cs you can explore whether everyone has the conditions they need to perform at their best together. This process can reveal a lack of shared understanding of goals and priorities, or a failure of team processes to support collaborations and leverage the strengths of all team members
Using these before making assumptions often reveals that the people are sufficiently highly skilled and motivated
but that they are unclear about what is expected of them.
This becomes a Clarity challenge and therefore the leader needs to focus on how they provide clarity for their team.
When conditions in the team are suboptimal, individual and team performance is impacted, the team cannot achieve their potential and often conflict will arise. When teams consistently pay attention to Clarity, Climate and Competence they are not only able to improve their ways of working but also become attuned to identifying suboptimal conditions and using the 3Cs to diagnose the cause.
Clear purpose
Shared goals
Collaborative strategies
Interdependence
Team processes
Resources
Culture
Stakeholder relationships
Team processes
Resources
Culture
Stakeholder relationships
Regardless of the coaching model you are using, the 3Cs is a useful tool to support you. As a principle it can be used to inform the coaching conversation at any stage. Here is an example of how the 3Cs supports the GROW coaching approach.
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