It is very hard to both lead a team and to develop the cohesion of that team at the same time. You definitely want to be guiding the development and cohesion of your team and an integral part of it, but this is an area that it makes a lot of sense to involve independent and objective help with.

We work together with great leaders to design offsites, team coaching and strategy sessions to develop the cohesivity, effectiveness and maturity of senior and executive teams. We work with newly formed teams to establish a positive forward momentum, and with existing teams to redefine how they wish to work differently or resolve issues to facilitate growth.

This can be part of a wider consulting engagement, a starting point to work out how to shift the culture and to help you define where you want it to shift towards, or just a stand alone activity to help make your strategic team events and workshops super-effective. Contact us to find out more.

Case Study: Unstuck to thriving in a day

An executive team needed objective support to and kick start a cultural transformation for their organisation. The meeting culture was ineffective and painful; the leadership team meetings were listless, conflict-free, ineffective and boring. Even more so throughout the organisation, with many meetings for meetings sake, no clear agenda, people working while pretending to listen. It was a breeding ground for all the meeting dysfunctions of our time.

Each leadership team member was interviewed and we designed an agenda for a one day offsite to break the pattern and seed the shift. They were a well established and very serious team, so we ‘left out the fluffy stuff’ and integrated addressing the mindset and cultural issues into the practical and real business problems and outcomes that were most important to the team and the organisation.

We reviewed the strategy, which was well defined, but the connection of this to the day-to-day running of the organisation was weak, so we worked out how to align it and how to get every member of the organisation to feel this alignment.

We overhauled the leadership team’s meeting routines, optimising them for the value they all needed from them, ‘designing in’ healthy conflict, creating more structure for strategic needs and less structure for more tactical interactions, and planning how we could communicate the redesign and the key outcomes and decisions from these meetings to the wider organisation. This was to connect the organisation with the decisions, do this efficiently to reduce the meeting waste in communicating these outcomes onwards, and to model how the rest of the organisation could use meetings more effectively.

With that short intervention, after just a couple of months the impact was significant. The leadership team is thriving and they have further refined their meetings and communication routines to be more effective, with monthly reviews to optimise further. The meeting culture shift has been seeded in the organisation with about a 20% reduction in meeting time, and the remaining meetings starting to feel more useful and valuable. The organisation as a whole is more cohesive and starting to work together more effectively. OKRs were moving in the right direction, and the productivity changes had already started to make an impact on organisational throughput and outcomes.

Contact us to find out more about how we can help your team thrive.