High Performing Teams
We all have had challenging experiences working on teams. Even when teams include well-qualified and motivated people who like each other, each person brings different values, work styles, communication patterns, and contexts to the work. Sometimes things gel naturally, but often it takes effort to get a team to be really effective. When this is overlooked, teams flounder, and so do results.
High Performing Teams helps teams to work together by focusing equally on relationships and results. The key factor to making a team effective is clarity. That includes clarity of purpose, roles, responsibilities, and expected results. The other key ingredient is how the team works together: the intersection of their individual strengths with the team’s dynamics, culture, and relationships. We focus on both of these areas to help teams to improve the way they work together and the impact they create.
We take a systems approach, looking at how the team relates to internal partners, external clients, stakeholders, and rightsholders. We pay attention to what is going on “below the surface” in both the wider system and the team itself, to identity enablers and barriers to growth.
We then work with the team to develop systems and processes to maximize enablers and reduce barriers. As we partner with the team members to co-lead this journey of discovery, we empower them to take control of their impact and to become a self-reflective team that is constantly learning from experience and improving the way they work so the results continue long after we’re gone.
We centre well-being, love, and kindness while always focusing on increasing the team’s ability to achieve their goals.
High Performing Teams includes the following steps
Example:
We worked with a management team that was so frustrated with their ineffective management meetings that people had stopped attending. We helped them to transform their management meetings and increase collaboration and connectedness on their team. We did this by:
- Learning what each manager valued about and needed from management meetings through individual mini-interviews
- Sharing back what we learned about their goals, enablers, and barriers for effective management meetings
- Facilitating discussions that modelled different approaches to meetings, and with the team to co-developed an approach that would work for them
- Co-creating tools and templates to ensure the meetings would stay focused on results
- Supporting members of the team to take key leadership roles in implementing the new process
- Co-developing a check-in process that would allow them to continue to reflect on and improve their management meetings
