“I know, I know; running Meetings is such boring stuff… not sexy at all. But….
I have on numerous occasions taught facilitation skills and there was always real interest in tricks and techniques for handling [difficult] people. “
We coach, develop and work alongside leaders and teams to shift ideas on leadership and provide the skills and tools needed to grow teams.
“I know, I know; running Meetings is such boring stuff… not sexy at all. But….
I have on numerous occasions taught facilitation skills and there was always real interest in tricks and techniques for handling [difficult] people. “
What do we mean by ‘a big ugly elephant in the room?’. We mean those things that teams tend to avoid speaking openly about. You know, things like…
Teams often do two things that get in the way of good and efficient decision making:
#1 They talk for too long without being clear of the point of the discussion
#2 They rely heavily on the leader of the team to make most of the calls.
Teams often miss the opportunity to genuinely collaborate because they enter into discussions without clarity of what the discussion is for and how the discussion should proceed to get the most from the time together.
We often ask leadership teams to review themselves against these four groupings.
At this point we introduce the Katzenbach & Smith definition of a team:
Maintaining trust in a team that has to work remotely is challenging, but there are some preventative and responsive steps you can take.
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.
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.
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.
“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.]
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.