Team Management Services have a range of profiles that can be used to further team development.

An engagement that we facilitated played out for us in the following fashion...

We received a phone call from the CEO of an organisation with a $100M turnover for whom we had previously facili-tated a Team Management Profile day.

This organisation was working through the transition from private “family based” ownership to a more corporate governance structure with an eye to an eventual Public Listing. They were seeking a further Development initiative for the Senior Executive Team.

The specific range of challenges that the team were dealing with included:

• The Executive Team was widely dispersed geographically - limiting the effectiveness of their communications.
• A lack of clarity existed around the scope of some roles, causing frustration and a breakdown in trust between individuals.
• The Chairman of the Board of Directors (the sole owner of the Company) provided direct in-structions to team members and reversed critical decisions without respecting the formal lines of authority.
• As a result many of the Executive team had adopted a “hands off” policy - doing nothing proactive without first securing the express approval of the Chairman.
• The other members of the Board were questioning the effectiveness of the Executive team.
• The CEO was tiring of managing the dysfunction and was investigating alternative employment options.

We agreed to schedule a 2 day “offsite” event at a venue with accommodation and dining facilities to provide an environment that would further their “informal” team development over the course of their time away from the office.

The Board were also invited to attend the workshop to encourage greater engagement with the Executive Team. Only the Chairman expressed reservations about the process - his concern being whether the team could be using their time more constructively at the office! Fortunately the other Directors disagreed and undertook to secure the attendance of the Chairman. They also provided us with their own insights into the overall functionality of the organisation, ideas as to how the Chairman could best be managed and also a view that certain members of the Executive Team needed to “harden-up” and take ownership for delivering in their own areas of functional responsibility.

Facilitated workshops provide an opportunity to stop and take a close look at how things are going in a team. Our view, these are conducted far too infrequently due to the more immediate requirements of responding to the needs of our clients and marshalling those that we work with. So we advocate a “check in” at least once every 12 months to see how we can improve their own effectiveness. Having such sessions facilitated by an outside party allows the entire team to remain fully engaged in the process.

For this workshop we decided to use some of our 360˚ assessment and feedback tools to help participants develop their own self-understanding and pinpoint development opportunities. The workshop would be interactive in nature so participants could learn from the insights and the experiences of others. All of the key insights would be documented and formatted into a post workshop report to ensure that they were captured for implementation in the workplace.

Specifically we used the following development methodologies:

This instrument is a team 360° assessment and the process requires team members to provide ratings and written feedback prior to the workshop relative to 10 factors that measure effective Team performance. The perspective of the internal team members and any other stakeholders can be separated, so in this instance the collective view of the Executive Team, that of the Board and that of a group of external customers were grouped separately in order to compare views and develop our insights.

The viewpoint of the external customers was especially insightful for the Executive Team. During the workshop a group analysis of this profile output provided a comprehensive assessment of the areas where a team was doing well and the areas where further work was required to maximise team performance.

The introduction of individual 360° feedback profiles for the Executive Team that measured each individual's capabilities against the factors that are essential for effective Leadership, provided for a performance and development focus going forward.

The LBP 360 is a multi-rater assessment that requires a subject to self-assess or "rate" their own performance while real written workplace feedback and inputs from up to 12 other raters (such as their manager, their peers and their direct reports) is collected for comparative purposes. The anonymity of the responses from the “other” raters is preserved and a comparison between one’s self assessments and the views of others provides insights for a subject regarding their own level of Emotional Intelligence.

Individual 360° feedback assessments are fantastic tools to use to secure absolute clarity about the areas of strength that we can leverage and where areas exist for further development and improvement. Our workshop process is designed to communicate these results in a “safe” manner and to assist each participant to create their own personal development "action plan" for implementation over the course of a further 6 – 12 month period.

Elements of experiential learning were also used throughout the 2 day process. Experiential training (action learning) provides a platform for experimenting with new concepts or approaches and practicing these in a fun and “low risk” environment prior to more formal implementation on real tasks once participants return to the workplace.

Experiential training is provided in the form of “team challenges” where the team is pitted against the clock or even split into opposing teams to create a more competitive environment! Always interesting, such activities break up the classroom time and are enjoyable - but more importantly they are formally debriefed by the team in order to link any learnings back to the workplace. And as the challenges are designed to be memorable ones - the exercises are proven to be extremely effective as mediums to provide for the long term retention of learning.

There were some great outcomes for this team. Most significantly the team achieved the following:

• The team re-familiarised themselves with the Task Achievement Cycle - a methodology of working that ensures they secure the best possible outcomes to a project or task.
• Using a simple flip charting process, role clarity was determined by brainstorming what was expected from each Manager, of the Board and of the wider Executive Team.
• Every team member furthered their own emotional intelligence through the process of “seeing themselves as others see them” using the 360° feedback.
• Each of the Executive Team developed a personal development action plan to work on for the next 12 months, thus satisfying the expectations of the Board.
• And most significantly the Board Chairman agreed to accept a 4 month long “all expenses” secondment offshore with his wife that favoured his interests in developing new markets and travel – thus allowing the Executive Team to settle in for an uninterrupted term and bed down their new way of working....

Team Development initiatives provide a great deal of insight and enjoyment for the subject team and fortunately the facilitator also derives a great deal of satisfaction from an intervention of this kind. The highlights of the 2 days for us were as follows:

1. The Chairman of the Board at the start of the session had publicly made it known that he “had done these things before and considered them to be a big waste of time”. But he was also good natured enough to admit at the end of the programme that he “really enjoyed the process, had learned a lot about himself and was 100% adamant that the organisation should revisit the process on an annual basis to further their own development”.
2. The HR Manager when asked (as part of a dinner time activity) to disclose something interesting and fun that no-one else on the team knew about them yet - confided to those that she worked with that she was just starting to explore relationships with partners of the same gender!!
3. We received a phone call from a team member the morning we were scheduled to discuss the individual 360° feedback to tell me that he had read his profile the previous evening, been quite annoyed, slept on it and now agreed with some of the assessments of others who had viewed things differently than he had himself. So he was really looking forward to arriving at the workshop that day to work out what he needed to do about that going forward...

So a great outcome for this team . But not an unusual outcome for Team Management Services - more like a typical couple of days at the office. And like many of our interactions with our clients that develop into the ongoing provision of service, our next intervention with this organisation was to assist them with their Strategic Planning towards the end of the financial year.

Peter Robinson, Facilitator – Click here to email Peter