Top team development

Harnessing the individual talent in your organisation into high performance teams that produce outstanding results can be an elusive goal. Our approach concentrates on the critical human factors that can make or break great teams.

We work with teams at board, executive and management levels including special project teams and multi discipline teams. Some are already high performing, but recognise that they have to raise their game still further, some have just been formed and need to come together quickly, others are in difficulty and need to urgently address their issues and get back on track.

Over many years we have developed our method to produce sustainable performance improvement with minimal downtime. The components of this rigorous programme are individual assessment, situational analysis, team profiling, team facilitation and coaching.

Our approach

We see the core challenge for Leadership Teams is to have a clear, focused, consistent and powerful impact on culture. The existence of an analysis of the current and desired future cultures is of great benefit in defining the change leaders need to engender. The focus of our approach is therefore on improving the capacity of the leadership group to deliver that change. Whilst there are contextual factors which will be important to maximising their effectiveness, we concentrate on the following:

1. Equipping leaders with a common understanding of the key domains of leadership, so that the team operates with a common set of assumptions about their role
2. A common understanding of their goals as a leadership team, and of their implications for what leaders need to do in their particular context, and how the team needs to work together
3. Support for each leader to understand their own strengths (which they can contribute to the effort) and limitations (so that they know where they need help)
4. A process to help leaders understand one another’s strengths (so that they know who to ask for help when they need it) and weaknesses (so that they know where colleagues are likely to need help)
5. An agreed way of working together which promotes collaboration and enables each individual to access the help they need
6. Support for individual leaders to develop their own capabilities

Underpinning these ideas is our belief – based on compelling research evidence - that no leader is complete on his or her own. Instead, our personalities equip us to be naturally good at some things, and make it hard for us to excel at others. This is not to suggest that personality determines performance directly, but that it tends to make some capabilities easier to develop than others. As a result, strengths which are built on helpful underlying personality features tend to be relatively easy to maintain and develop, whilst those which have been developed in spite of unhelpful personality features tend to need constant maintenance and are hard to improve. Correspondingly, weaknesses which stem from personality are sometimes better addressed by working with someone with complementary capabilities than by trying to develop capabilities that work ‘against the grain’ of the leader’s personality.

The process typically is as follows:

1. Each team member receives 360° feedback, to help them understand their strengths and weaknesses
2. Each team member completes a set of 3 personality questionnaires, to help them understand the underlying personality features which help or hinder their effectiveness (as measured through the 360° feedback)
3. The team comes together in a two day workshop which includes:
   • Input from us on the core capabilities leaders need – this would introduce the team to the Edgecumbe leadership model, showing how it relates to the client’s competency model (if they have one), and hence providing a common, memorable and easily accessible understanding of leadership
   • Discussion on what the leaders need to do
   • Agreement of how the team needs to operate in order to do what is required
   • Discussion of how the team operates now, and therefore how it needs to change in order to operate in the desired manner
   • A review of current helping and hindering factors which impact on the ability of the team to operate in the desired way, including a comprehensive review of team members’ 360° feedback and personality
   • Agreement of an action plan
4. Each team member could be provided with access to the support of a coach, to help them clarify and work on their own development needs, using the 360° feedback and personality data to focus the discussions.

We have experience of using similar processes to this in a very wide range of organisations, including the use of the Edgecumbe Primary Colours model of leadership and the associated 360° feedback tool. We know from our experience that this process produces a powerful degree of alignment among teams which go through it together and a substantial improvement in the leaders’ capacity to engage their people and execute their plans.