Is your team like a Maserati engine….in pieces on the garage floor? You have excellent components, but they’re not firing together on all cylinders. Instead, your team is stuck in patterns that undermine performance, and you’re either not meeting crucial business goals, or you’re missing big opportunities.
Which of these patterns get in the way of your team producing results?
- People don’t speak up and say what they really think.
- Meetings go in circles, covering the same ground over and over.
- Decisions don’t get made, or when they get made there’s no follow through.
- People don’t get timely, specific feedback on their performance.
- The team wastes time complaining about “them,” rather than finding solutions.
- Disagreements and conflict fester – people take conflict personally and don’t resolve it directly.
- Team members look to you to fix it when something isn’t working.
When you’re not getting the best from your team, the bottom line suffers. The good news is that your leadership can make a difference.
What’s possible instead?
As difficult as it may be to believe right now, you and your team can shift the patterns that are getting in your way and begin to produce great results. What if, instead of being stuck in your current patterns, you and your team experienced this instead?
1. You’re aligned around clearly defined and meaningful goals that have the support of every member of the team. And not only that, you’ve got a grounded action plan for achieving those goals.
2. You and team members communicate directly and openly with each other. People speak up when they disagree or when there’s a problem, and skillfully tell each other the truth about what’s working and what’s not. The team knows how to use conflict productively, rather than reacting personally or letting it fester.
3. You and your team engage in highly productive meetings, staying focused on the most important issues. You explore all perspectives, find solutions to problems, make decisions that stick, and know how to get yourselves back on track if you get off.
4. Together, you produce great results. The team knows how to communicate and coordinate the work so that the inevitable breakdowns of organizational life don’t derail your success.
You and your team can raise your performance to this level with the Jumpstarting Team Performance Program.
The Jumpstarting Team Performance Program is an in-depth team experience that leads not only to better business results but also to stronger leadership from every member of the team. A common approach to addressing team challenges is to take people away from their work for skill training, leadership development programs, or team building exercises. While there can be value to these experiences, many individuals and teams report real challenges in transferring their learning and making it stick once they’re back at work. That’s because each of these approaches may help individuals gain more skill, but they rarely address the underlying patterns of interaction and communication between team members that are dragging performance down.
The Jumpstarting Team Performance Program does address these patterns, and offers you and your team a 3-for-1 deal. You get training, develop as leaders, and build your team – all in one package, and while you’re getting real work done.
This is what you and your team will get from this program:
1. A team culture of personal responsibility and shared accountability. Instead of waiting for someone else to fix what’s not working, every member of the team will be oriented toward doing whatever it takes to ensure the success of the team. Not only that, they’ll be willing to look at how they sometimes contribute to the team going off course.
2. A shared focus on learning from your experience together. Think about it: how can you ever get better if you’re not able to learn from each other? This program provides structured opportunities to experience learning conversations and practice the skills that are necessary for those conversations to be successful and become the norm for your team.
3. A higher level of leadership from every individual, regardless of role or position. This program emphasizes three fundamental leadership skills: 1) defining your position and taking clear stands, without steamrolling others; 2) staying connected to and being curious about others, without getting defensive; and 3) managing your reactivity, especially when the intensity rises. Can you imagine the level of performance your team could reach if every member skillfully demonstrated these skills on a daily basis?
4. A mix of specific skills and tools that every team member can put to immediate use to support success. In addition to the high-level skills of taking clear stands, staying connected, and managing reactivity, you and your team will learn and have multiple opportunities to practice with skills and tools related to effective communication, team performance, accountability, decision making, and productive conflict. And you won’t just be talking about these skills – you’ll be putting them to the test in real team situations.
What makes this program different?
We provide team coaching live, in real time. This program meets you and your team right where you are, in the thick of your work. In the course of your regular team meetings and two additional off sites, we’ll observe you in action and provide coaching and just-in-time training and feedback – all specifically focused on the actual challenges that are keeping you from doing your best work. Because it’s real and immediate, you and your team are able to shift in the moment to a higher level of performance.
We incorporate somatic exercises and practice to develop every team member’s capacity for leadership. Simply put, “somatic” means related to the whole body. It is, after all, the body that allows us to take action in the world. And for most of us, there are gaps between what we know or aspire to, and what our bodies are able to do, especially when we’re under pressure. The Jumpstarting Team Performance Program includes simple somatic tools that will help every member of your team bridge that gap and perform at a higher level.
We blend the best of 1:1 coaching methods with an understanding of organizational and team systems. Every member of your team is an individual, but you all work together within a human system. Our team coaching not only provides support and feedback to each individual, but also helps all of you together better understand the patterns you’re caught in and see how to function more effectively and less reactively when those patterns arise.
We always focus on results. At the beginning of the program, we’ll work intensively with you to clarify the specific outcomes you want to achieve, in three different areas. What are the business results that are on the line? What changes do you need in how your team operates in order to achieve those business results? And, what changes do you need to make in your own leadership behaviors? We’ll keep these outcomes front and center as we work together.
How is the program structured?
We implement the Jumpstarting Team Performance Program in three phases. Phase One focuses primarily on you, the leader. In Phases Two and Three, we expand our focus to work with both you and the entire team.
Phase One
This is where we lay the groundwork for a successful engagement with the entire team. Over the course of 4-6 meetings, we’ll work together to:
- get very clear about the specific, measurable results you want to achieve
- examine the patterns in your own leadership behaviors that will both help you and potentially get in the way during the team coaching process
- outline the process for team coaching and make sure that you thoroughly understand what we’ll be doing
- clarify our respective roles, and ensure that all your questions are answered
- enhance your learning about the patterns you’re in with your team and the leadership behaviors necessary to achieve the results you want
Depending on the situation, we may also spend some time during this phase observing you and your team in action.
At the end of this first phase, we will decide together whether to continue on to Phase Two. Whether you choose to take the next step or not, you will get significant value from our interactions and coaching in Phase One.
Phase Two
The heart of this phase is a 3-day off site business meeting with the entire team, the outcome of which will be a concrete action plan for achieving the critical business results you’ve identified in Phase One. Of course, you and your team will also receive intensive coaching throughout this meeting, and practice with all the tools and skills that are part of the program.
Here’s what you can expect from this segment of the program:
- a coaching session to prepare you for a kick off meeting with your entire team
- a 1-hour kick off meeting, where you lay out the business results you want to achieve and the process of team coaching
- individual interviews with each member of your team to gather feedback about what’s working well and what’s not
- an individual coaching session with you to hear the results of the interview data, and make any adjustments necessary to the agenda for the business meeting
- the 3-day off site meeting to plan how you and your team will achieve the critical business results you’ve identified
- intensive leadership coaching for you before, during, and after each day of the off site meeting
- live coaching and just-in-time training during the meeting for you and your team members, to help you get back on track when you get off and to support you as you develop new skills
- a minimum of two additional months of follow up coaching for both you individually and the team as a whole, as you bring new skills back to the workplace and integrate them into how you operate together (we’ll negotiate the exact duration of this follow up coaching together)
During the interviews and the off site meeting itself, you’ll have the support of two coaches. We have found this approach works best and provides the most value for you and your team. Using two coaches during this part of the process allows us to track what’s happening and respond on multiple levels, which provides a deeper experience and richer feedback for every member of the team.
At the end of Phase Two, we will again decide together whether to continue on to the next phase of the program. You may choose not to continue on at all, or perhaps to extend the period of time between Phases Two and Three.
Phase Three
The final phase of the program involves a second 3-day off site with the entire team. This time the focus is on intensive communication training and developing the skills necessary to have learning conversations among the team. The skills you and your team gain from this segment of the program are what will ensure that you’re able to keep yourselves on track in the future, once coaching has ended.
The process of this phase looks very similar to the process for the second phase. You can expect:
- coaching for you ahead of time to prepare you for the off site
- live coaching and just-in-time training for you and the team during the off site itself
- repeated opportunities for every member of the team to practice communication skills that enable team members to clear up misunderstandings immediately, give each other feedback on their performance, resolve conflict productively, and make higher quality decisions
- intensive leadership coaching for you before, during, and after each day of the off site meeting
- a minimum of two additional months of follow up coaching for both you individually and the team as a whole, so everybody begins to embody these skills and can use them even when the intensity rises
Just as with Phase Two, you and your team will have the support of two coaches during the off site portion of Phase Three.
Is this program right for you and your team?
The Jumpstarting Team Performance Program is a powerful way to interrupt performance-killing patterns and set your team on a course for success. However, this program isn’t for every leader or every team. Here are some things to consider if you want the results the program offers but are uncertain if this particular approach is a good fit for your situation.
1. Are you, as leader, willing to sit in the hot seat in front of your team? To be successful with this program requires, more than anything else, being open to learning. And learning isn’t always comfortable – it takes not only letting go of some perhaps-cherished ideas and assumptions; it also requires trying on new behaviors and doing things differently. As the leader of your team, you’ll be Learner-in-Chief. (Because, after all, you can’t expect anything from your team members that you’re not willing to demonstrate first.) Are you willing to learn in public for the sake of your team’s success?
2. Are you and your team willing to invest the time and energy it takes to make sustainable changes in how you operate? This program is not a quick fix. To change ineffective patterns that have been in place over time requires a substantial investment of time and attention. For you and your team members to truly embody the new skills you’ll learn from this program will take repeated practice.
3. Are there deeper issues of harassment and/or discrimination present on the team? While this program can easily address the garden-variety team conflict that comes from a lack of alignment, clarity, or good communication skills, it is not designed for teams where some members are experiencing discrimination or harassment at the hands of others.
4. Is your team smaller than 6 or larger than 15? This program works best with teams that are not too small and not too big, but just right. If your team is smaller or larger than this ideal range, there are other forms of team coaching that may work better for you. Please contact me, and I’m happy to explore with you what’s possible.
The bottom line is that the Jumpstarting Team Performance Program offers breakthrough results, but requires deep commitment from you in order to get them.
Ready to take the next step?
If you’ve gotten this far, it may be that the Jumpstarting Team Performance Program is right for you and your team. If you’re intrigued by what you’ve learned and want to know more, I invite you to fill out the form below to request a complimentary 90-minute Jumpstarting Team Performance Strategy Session.
In this session, we’ll explore your current situation and challenges, what results you’d like to see instead, and whether this program could be a good fit for you and your team. Whether we end up working together or not, you’ll get value from our conversation. And of course, if you decide this program isn’t for you, you’ll get no pressure to move forward. Just fill out the form below to get started.
To request a free Jumpstarting Team Performance Strategy Session, please fill out every field on the form below completely. I’ll get back to you within 2 business days, if not sooner. I look forward to hearing from you!