“The power of a team lies in its capacity to perform at levels, and deliver results, greater than the sum of its parts.”
Patrick Lencioni
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Let’s say your company has a new leadership team. Everyone is at the top of his or her game: talented, experienced and ready to move forward. Everyone knows what’s required to succeed, but they haven’t had a chance to learn the best ways to work together. No matter how good each executive is individually, a team that is not aligned risks conflict, tension, and even dysfunction.
Maximizing your leadership team’s collective talents to achieve and surpass goals takes planning and focused effort – high-level collaboration doesn’t just happen. But the demands of the day-to-day business often take precedence over building a cohesive group and establishing best practices for working together. To help companies align their leadership teams through better communication and collaboration, I offer intensive, interactive one-day leadership development workshops. These programs are customized to the specific needs of the client and are designed to build trust, identify team strengths, and establish a set of operating principles for team collaboration.
Recently, for example, I conducted a leadership development workshop for a client who has a relatively new leadership team. Our day began with self-reflection, an opportunity for each executive to thoughtfully consider how he or she feels about his or her position and the company overall. Then each participant shared their key thoughts, which gave the group the experience of meaningful communication, empathy, and trust.
Our next activity was a strengths assessment, and again each member shared their results. This exercise provided participants with an opportunity to view individual strengths within the context of the whole team and develop ways to leverage each member’s strengths for the betterment of the team. They could see where they might support each other, and which peer partnerships could prove most valuable to the company. And finally, the experience of sharing individual strengths provided an opportunity to celebrate their talents as a group and feel confident in their abilities.
Next, I led a discussion on the key elements of a high-performance team, which allowed the group to reflect on how their team was functioning in relation to a high-performing one. From this segment, several key improvement areas where identified along with an action plan and steps to starting making positive changes.
Our final activity was to define and agree upon the team’s operating principles – how the team works together and interacts to achieve organization and department goals. These principles were solidly grounded in their understanding of one another’s strengths and a shared vision of who they are and want to be as a leadership team.
By the end of the session, the team had cultivated a deeper level of trust, safety, respect and an understanding of how to become more effective as a team. They were on their way to becoming a high-performance team.