Strong Teams Are Good
The Pentathlon is primarily a solo event – you can have a great experience just as yourself.
And yet, teamwork, cooperation, and camaraderie are huge boosts to success and consistency. Knowing there's other like-minded people in it together with you goes a long ways in making work easier and life more enjoyable. We've seen people thrive to a higher degree on the Pentathlon when they're on a strong team, and we've seen great friendships and connections come out of it too.
What Matters and What Doesn't
The first point is the critical one.
The strongest teams establish a channel of communication for themselves, but it doesn't matter what that channel is.
We've seen teams create a Slack channel, Facebook group, WhatsApp group, or any other number of technologies for staying in touch.
What tech you use matters far less than that you use something, and that you use it regularly.
Leadership and Getting to Know One's Team
It's trivially easy to set up a discussion channel, chat channel, or group in most chat apps these days. Which one you use doesn't matter.
What does matter is getting engaged with it very early in the Pentathlon.
As with any event, habit, or discipline, the highest momentum and motivation is early. You want to use that early "rush" feeling to get established in norms and practices on your channel.
We do some basics of getting everyone's bio and sharing it amongst team, but going a step beyond and having everyone get to know each other a little bit, understand each other's goals, and understand each other's environments/challenges goes a long way towards establishing a good team.
A single person taking a leadership role in engaging people can make a huge difference. If you want to max out the chances of having a strong team, look to personally engage and ask questions to anyone in the group who might be a little more quiet or shy. In general, participants on the Pentathlon tend to be very engaged and driven, but additional leadership goes a long way towards having people get engaged with their team.
You might consider looking to understand about your teammates early:
- Who they are
- What their Most Important Work is
- What their schedule is usually like
- What challenges they anticipate might come up
- Sharing best recommendations and resources
Getting these discussions in on the first day or two goes a long way towards a strong team.
Momentum and Check-in's
The act of being accountable to someone besides yourself, and knowing you're "in it together" with others, is motivating and aids in consistency. It makes the whole program easier to stick with, and it gives you a helpful "last line of defense" on days any day you might feel unusually lazy or yucky. The strongest teams inspire and help each other hit higher levels of performance.
It's very helpful to establish a "check-in" schedule in the first days of the Pentathlon, and stick with it.
This can be just everyone giving a short update of how things are going for them. If you're using something like Slack (or a similar chat app), you might pick a couple days to check in with each other in real time and schedule it on the calendar, to discuss and plan. It won't be possible for every team, since sometimes people are on radically different schedules of work and personal obligations, but if you can check in daily at whatever time, and get on at the same time two or three times per week, that can help a lot.
Counterplanning and Discussing Challenges With Your Team
Finally, successful teams make it open for members to talk about upcoming challenges. If you've got eight hours of meetings scheduled in two days and are wondering how to fit your Most Important Work in, that can be great to discuss with your teammates and get some feedback and support.
We've seen successful teams discuss their challenges, share planning methodologies, note which days are going to be harder for them to hit their targets, and give each other feedback and encouragement around those type of days.
Once again, you can take a leadership role in asking others what challenges they might have and sharing your own. This doesn't happen automatically – it's a function of leadership to begin the process and get it going. It's a very valuable way to get feedback and support, so share potential challenges and ask teammates about theirs early, and start supporting each other in that way.
General Life Lessons Around Teams
You can learn a lot about general team dynamics and interpersonal dynamics through the Pentathlon. After all, it's a great jolt of peak performance, but the stakes aren't that high in the grand scheme of things.
Some teams come together better than others. Noteworthily, if one team member sloughs off checking in and participating, that can have a detrimental effect on a team. If two team members do it, the whole team norms sometimes fall apart.
We do what we can to sort teams logistically by engagement level (we ask it on a survey), by timezone, and otherwise to form cohesive teams, and generally speaking people who join the Pentathlon are highly motivated and disciplined, but not every team comes together strongly.
Even in that case, you can learn a lot from it: that's like real-life, too.
To really maximize the chances of having a strong team, you can do the guidelines here: get an external communication channel, get to know each other on it, commit to a schedule of checking-in, and share upcoming challenges and support each other in them.
Over and above that, though, people who join the Pentathlon with friends and colleagues from everyday life tend to form very successful teams. We've seen husband-and-wife teams join the Pentathlon together, as well as startup cofounders, and people who have real-life friendships. This is a great way to establish a strong team, get to know and connect deeper with people you already know, and establish more accountability and mutual support.
Over 30% of the people who newly join the Pentathlon do it through direct referrals from a past attendee, which is a fantastic rate, and those people often go to on succeed at a great rate knowing that their real-life friend, family member, or colleague is on the Pentathlon and seeing their results and encouraging them, and vice-versa. By all means, to max out the chances of having a strong team, encourage a friend, colleague, or family member to join alongside you, which is a great experience.
From there, you'll learn a lot about how teams form, and can get practice and become more skilled at putting together great mutual accountability and support with other people. Then, these lessons can carry forth into everyday life.