What CEBE Reveals About How Your Team Really Works
Image Credits: KBPCreative
Most teams can describe what they do. Fewer can describe how they actually work together, day to day, under pressure, when priorities shift or a difficult decision needs making.
What CEBE actually is
That gap is where CEBE, our Collaborative Edge Behavioural Enquiry, comes in. It gives leaders and their teams a structured way to see their own patterns of collaboration: where curiosity, care and courage are already present, and where they're missing.
It isn't a personality test, and it doesn't produce a label to file away. It's closer to a mirror. It shows a team how it behaves in the moments that matter, not how it would like to behave in theory.
The patterns we keep seeing
As we share CEBE with more teams, some familiar patterns are emerging across different organisations. A decision gets agreed in the room, then unpicked afterwards in side conversations, because the real disagreement wasn't aired in the room. A leader is the last to hear that something isn't working, because raising it earlier hasn't felt safe enough. A team gets used to saying yes to more than it can deliver, because no one has asked, out loud, what needs to stop.
None of this is unusual. Most of it isn't even new information to the people living it. What CEBE does is put words to it, in a way that makes it possible to talk about together rather than carry alone.
Why insight on its own doesn't change anything
We build CEBE into our Team and Leadership Development programmes because insight on its own rarely changes anything. What shifts a team is what happens after the insight: naming what's getting in the way, and practising something different together. That might be as small as opening the next difficult meeting with a genuine question instead of an update, or agreeing to build in a pause before a decision gets made rather than after. Small changes, tried consistently, tend to move a team further than one big reset ever does.
Curiosity, Care and Courage in practiCe
Curiosity, Care and Courage sound simple written down. In practice, they show up as small, repeated choices: whether someone asks a genuine question in a difficult meeting, whether a leader checks in before checking progress, whether a team is willing to have the conversation it's been avoiding.
A version of this in our own team
We had a version of this ourselves recently, when the wider Collaboration Equation collaborators gathered in person, with one joining us virtually, to talk through what we all need to feel confident opening more conversations that help more leaders find their Collaborative Edge. Once we were actually in the room together, it became something close to CEBE in miniature. People asked each other exactly the kind of question we're describing above: direct, unrehearsed, about what was and wasn't working. Someone offered up an email approach they'd already been using with their own contacts, no hesitation, for anyone else to adapt. More than one of us admitted, out loud, to a conversation we'd been putting off, or a piece of content we knew we should have written months ago.
What we left with
Nobody left with a finished plan. What we did leave with was a shorter list of shared commitments: more thought leadership written by the wider group, a proper index of what already exists so it's easier to share, and a more deliberate way of inviting leaders into a Walking Partnerships day. None of it needed a formal enquiry to surface. It needed a room, good food, and enough honesty to say what wasn't working yet.
Three questions to ask your own team
If you want to try this with your own team, a few clear questions are a great start. Ask what decision, recently, was agreed in the room but never quite settled. Ask what someone on the team knows but hasn't yet said. Ask where the team has been saying yes when it needed to say no. The answers tend to show you where Curiosity, Care or Courage is missing, and exactly where to start.
Curious what CEBE could reveal about your team?
If you're curious what CEBE might reveal about you and your own team, we'd love to talk it through.
Collaboration Equation is the leadership framework built on Curiosity, Care and Courage, created by Anni Townend and Lucy Kidd. It gives leaders and their teams a practical, relational way through change. Send us a message or visit collaborationequation.com to find out more.