We coach, develop and work alongside leaders and teams to shift ideas on leadership and provide the skills and tools needed to grow teams.
We frequently hear senior managers complaining that the managers beneath them are working a level down; that is, they are doing some or a lot of the work that their own people should be doing.
I am an experienced and competent facilitator, but I’ve realised that I need to be teaching teams how to fish, how to cook and serve for themselves.
And, herein lies the difference between a strong facilitator and a strong coach.
Time and again we hear of meetings where groups of people walk away feeling frustrated that their time has been wasted. Discussions seem to go on too long and meander out of control. Often, people complain that they weren’t even sure what the discussion was meant to achieve.
So, we developed a simple tool that we teach teams to adopt during their meetings which seems to have made a big difference. We call it BOOST.
Accountability is a word that is often bandied about in the workplace by leaders and teams. It seems everyone wants someone to be accountable. Particularly when things have gone wrong. It appears having accountability is very much like wearing a sign that says: Blame me!
Who would want that?
Most teams suffer from the occasional conflict and team members losing their cool.
We work with a lot of teams, some of these have members who are competitive with each other and as a result struggle to leave the storming stage. Others move past this and capitalise on real synergy. This is the story of one leadership team that had some touchy issues and what they did about it.
“I have a lot of great people in the team and we go away for a day or two and make some brilliant plans. We come away charged up with lots of agreed actions and then we get back to work and very little actually changes. If you can find a way to overcome that, then I’ve got lots of work for you!”
The Neuroleadership Institute has done a lot of work, presented in their recent webinar, to try to understand what precisely it is about greater organisational diversity that causes higher performance. What they found is that diversity actually impacts performance at the team level.
And then the change day cometh. ‘D-Day’. It’s what everyone has been doing all that planning for. And now the key decision-makers and the planners responsible for change can take a bit of a back seat, as their hard work is mostly complete and the change implementation is now in the hands of the people; the leaders of new teams and the teams themselves.
Most of the leaders we get work with are pretty good leaders. They realise that they need to have a successful team to help them and their business succeed, and as such, invest time and effort in their team. This an honourable intent and typically means you are better than average at leading people. But kicking-off a few initial team development or team building sessions are never enough.
There is a lot written on what makes teams successful – just Google it – it makes for some interesting reading. There are certainly a lot of skilled practitioners out there doing good work who have strong advice about what helps. However, research showing causality between a specific factor or condition and high or improved performance is harder to find.
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.”