Do you know what prevents your team from being effective and productive?
How to find time in your busy schedule and dedicate to your team conversations?
And the most important of all, as a leader, why should you care?
I will try to answer all these 3 questions by describing a real case scenario and give you some practical Tools that you can use with your teams. There are so many techniques that Systemic Team Coaching offers for your team to convert it from regular to extraordinary. But let´s start from the beginning.
So where to start when you feel that your teams needs a boost to continue giving their best?
Lets take a real example, the team I am currently working with and which consist of 4 people. Let´s call them ¨Team A¨.
Their initial request and objective for the Team Coaching was: to convert our team to more cohesive and productive (pretty much a standard request I get from majority of the team leaders).
The very first thing which I did is to establish the Coaching Alliance which is a basis of each relationship. This is so important because you want to make sure you as a leader work WITH your team, that means that you establish common grounds and everyone participates in the creation of this Alliance where you cover such questions as:
-What spirit do you want to create while working together?
-What do you need from me as a leader?
-What will help us (as a team) to rich our highest potential?
Seems very basic but it is a basis of every professional relationship. This will empower you, as a leader and your team to create common grounds that you will be happy to work on (Resource 1). And this is when you discover what prevents your team from being effective and productive, when each one is able to share what they need from you, as a leader and a group (as promised, hopefully I answered your first question).
Once we did this, I send to the Team A the survey where I asked them to individually score their sense of productivity, team spirit and purpose. After presenting the results of the survey, the leader of the Team A shared that ¨they failed¨ in several areas of this survey. In short, this survey revealed that the purpose of the team, their productivity and their sense of team spirit were quite low. Does that seem familiar to your team as well?
So what I offered them is to work and complete very useful exercise, which is often forgotten but has a direct impact on teams values, roles definition, needs and expectations. This is called Team Canvas (Resource 2). Use it for every team in order to plant a small seed of the importance of the collective results. Result for the Team A? They came up with an ¨out of the box idea¨ to block their agendas for several hours to work on the topics that matter. (Answering to the second question, your people are the priority and finding time for topics that matter makes your team better, quicker and is building confidence with you, as a leader).
We continued with the sessions and each time they kept raising their voice during our meetings and had that feeling of not really listening to each other. Have it as well in your Team? So in this case, I offered them to work on 4 types of toxic communication and question the root cause of it (Resource 3). The results were amazing because the Team A became aware of their toxic communication and came out with another idea how to tackle it – every time they perceive or transmit any toxic communication pattern, they will raise a hand and make another team member aware of it. The way your team members treat each other directly affects their motivation to belong to this team and hence, work in your company and be creative (and this is my answer to the third question, why should you care).
Let´s remember Henry Ford´s words: Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success.
The question is – are you really committed for success?
Please find the link for the free resources that I have described above:
And if you need any additional resource or advise, just get in touch with me!
Jelena Vetockina 