High value-creating teams are not born, they’re made. Organizations and leaders have tried to build them for decades – often throwing high-performing stars together, only to see the collective performance decrease instead of increase.
High value-creating teams, however, become greater than the sum of their parts. And in these teams, those that could traditionally be considered low-performing are empowered to excel.
BreathingBusiness helps you build capacity in teams to perform and transform – creating teams that are ready to tackle your organization’s complex challenges now, and in the future.
Teams are the backbone of your organization. How strong is yours?
The Challenge
- and Opportunity
Have you ever been part of a high-performing team? Where everyone worked together towards a shared set of goals, knew their role, and there was mutual respect, cooperation and collaboration – letting you leave every day feeling you created impact?
Or have you been on the other end of spectrum? Part of the team from hell, plagued by mistrust and conflict, where you counted down the days till your next vacation – making you leave work feeling unaccomplished?
Working in highly effective teams isn’t only fulfilling for team members – it’s necessary for an organizations successful transformation.
The qualities of effective teams are:
- Being more than the sum of its parts: each member is unique in contribution, but all are united in purpose
- Serving the totality, delivering value in the chain: committed and reliable in delivering high-quality work, and always working in the best interest of the whole organization
- Solving complex challenges, ahead of the competition: consistently learning through experimentation and listening to diverse perspectives, helping them turn challenges into opportunities
For a team to unlock it’s full potential in solving complex challenges, it requires each member – and the team as a whole – to build the ability to listen, learn, and act in another way.
In today’s fast-paced world, the pressure of performing quarter after quarter requires not only optimization of work within the team, but also its collaboration with the rest of the organization. Effective teams see the opportunities in collaborating across silos, refusing bureaucracy or sub-optimization and instead welcoming diversity of thought and perspective, and helping each other and other teams to improve.
Many of us think we can move faster alone and others only slow us down. But collaboration enables us to create the greatest impact for the totality. Letting go of beliefs and behaviors like this is part of building Transformational Capacity – and releasing more potential in the team to perform.
The Team Effectiveness Journey builds your team’s Transformational Capacity through a journey designed to deliver impact in each session, and supports you and your team in sustaining the change through practices and peer coaching. Your team stays connected to your business’ needs, developing your team effectiveness by working with your real business challenges.
The Journey can be powerfully supplemented with Transformational Coaching for those wanting to accelerate their personal transformation as well.
Do your teams have the potential to create more value for your organization?
When teams create waste instead of value, it not only affects their delivery and performance, but also the culture they create within the team and around them.
There is another way...
When teams build the Transformational Capacity to solve complex challenges, it doesn’t just increase their performance. Their contribution to the transformation grows as they enhance ways of working together – both within and beyond the team. Great teams become known for how creating positive ripples throughout the organization.
Our Team Effectiveness Journeys are built on our Assess-Build-Sustain approach: a focused and flexible journey to build the Transformational Capacity your teams need – delivered to fit their needs, schedule and learning preferences.
What is wanted from our teams?
What mindset do the challenges we face require?
How will our teams continue to solve our challenges with resourcefulness?
Case study
People may come and go, but team ambition sustains
Challenge
When a new CEO started his tenure at a large technology company, he found a team that was not working well together, not taking a joined ownership for the company and not setting a high enough bar for the performance of the company. He also saw the potential for the team, and he knew he wanted to take his leadership team on a journey to become a truly effective team because. He saw the potential. He was hesitant when to start the journey as he considered it likely that not everyone would be part of the whole journey as they would raise the bar for what it required to be part of the team.
Opportunity
Much to his positive surprise, the team welcomed the honest conversation he facilitated. Together they the aligned on the future ambition level and together build a plan for achieving this new ambition. No one denied the situation they were in and their joined calibration of current although mediocre reality revitalized the team – many of them leaning in – in a new way – reaching different levels of performance.
This team’s journey went on for 3 years with especially high intensity the first year. Over time many team members decided to leave as the new way was not the right match for them, some were asked to leave because they were unwilling to adjust fast enough, and new ones joined along the way.
Initially, he was concerned that the changes in people would have been disturbing to the journey – but it was received as a natural part of the journey: people leaving gracefully, and new members welcomed warmly.
The journey was the glue for the team throughout these many changes keeping them focused all along.
