We coach, develop and work alongside leaders and teams to shift ideas on leadership and provide the skills and tools needed to grow teams.
Imagine if we could just give others a ‘trust me’ potion. Life would be so much easier!
Trust is the elixir, the magic potion for relationships between people. Once deep trust is established great things can happen. So, what are the benefits of achieving high levels of trust? Stephen MR Covey, author of ‘The Speed of Trust’ claims trust has wide ranging benefits for organisations.
As we are about to see some elite international rugby being played again with the All Blacks taking on Wales, I pondered what lessons we can learn from one of the best teams in the business. There are some things that are just plain obvious.
One of the reasons collaboration is highly desired is because as our world gets increasingly complex, there is significant benefit in bringing diverse thoughts and perspectives to difficult issues. But here is the problem…
“My team is a good bunch of people but they don’t really work much together. And we talk about how we should collaborate more, but nothing really changes. They all go back to doing their own things”. [A common team leader’s complaint.]
About this time two years ago, a friend and a client of mine said to me: “Phil, leadership teams in our organisation talk a lot of strategy, but don’t walk the talk. Nothing really changes. What we need is somehow to get them to follow through and execute on the strategy they’ve agreed as a team. If you can help us with that, I’ve got lots of work for you.”
Our search for the truth about what makes great teams has led us to do a review of the research and read stacks of books written by academics and team experts proclaiming they have the answer. It’s a bit like a search for the holy grail. There is a different model and list of key factors at every turn.
Our framework has eight distinct levels of engagement and performance. In the lower levels the team is under performing in one or more areas and may in fact be dysfunctional. Teams of this kind are more likely not real teams and probably need troubleshooting and special strategies for lifting up.