There is no simple solution to helping teams to work more effectively, but there are a number of tools and approaches that can get things moving in the right direction. Our starting point is to conduct a Team Audit in order to find out what is working and what is not and to understand more about the motivation and intent of individual team members. This will then lead to specific interventions that may address work issues or relationship issues or both.
Central to this process is dialogue within the team. Teams need to talk and perhaps they are already talking. However, maybe they need to have different sorts of conversations if things are to change.
We rely on experienced consultants to work directly with the team and to use approaches that fit the personalities and the moment. Their tool-kit will include models and approaches such as:
Of course, we use many more approaches – and in fact train others to use them as well. All our interventions are carefully designed to increase the understanding and satisfaction of team members and to have an impact on overall business performance. In a nutshell we create team environments which maximise trust, motivation and delivery.
The core to good teamwork is continual self-correction which is only possible through openness and trust. Our client had undergone numerous team-building initiatives all of which had felt good. However, budget challenges were making it more important to demonstrate value – which meant ensuring that there had been significant changes that had followed through into the workplace. They therefore wanted to experiment with something different in order to test whether they could demonstrate more than a ‘feel good’ factor.
Previous approaches had focussed on either workplace issues in a facilitated environment or on behavioural style as a method of giving and receiving feedback. Team Focus proposed an approach designed to increase the emotional intelligence (EI) of the team. This was attractive because the company was already convinced that the team-building so far had been fun but relatively superficial and they had also introduced some EI ideas into their leadership training. A team was approached to pilot the event and was chosen because of their keenness to continue pushing the boundaries of excellence. The process was as follows:
The feedback from the team three months later was as follows:
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