The Leadership Evolution approach to team building

We know that when teams come together with due care and attention, the collective potential for innovation and performance is greater than that just for one person. We also know that leaders and team members are so often caught in the “tasks” of the team, that they rarely have the opportunity to focus on the team itself. This is where professional facilitation from an external expert can really support a team to grow and develop to its fullest potential.


Team development is a great idea for new teams, teams that have been restructured or moving through change, project teams that need to come together and operate quickly and effectively, teams that have had relationship problems, and great teams that want to be even better.


At Leadership Evolution, we will tailor a team development program for your organisation based on the results that you want to obtain. This will include reviewing our Team Development Checklist that we use to ensure that fundamentals common to virtually all teams have been taken into consideration.
  


  
What is covered in the Leadership Evolution Team Development Checklist?

  • Helping to create or confirm a mission statement, team purpose and charter, agreed by the team leader and sponsors of the team. Why does this team exist?
  • Ensuring the team understands its relationships to key stakeholders and the communication and behaviours required for those relationships.
  • Checking that Team members really do ‘buy in’ to the team’s objectives.
  • Helping the team understand how to communicate and relate internally.
  • Assisting in the development of effective team leadership, potentially supported by individual coaching.
  • Detecting and resolving any team problems at an interpersonal level – this is where problems in the team typically show up.
  • Ensuring that all members of the team are actively involved in the success of the team, understanding team roles and how individuals contribute - noting a team of champions does not necessarily make a champion team.
  • Preserving constructive discussion and healthy disagreement, which among other things helps to prevent ‘groupthink’.
  • Helping the team towards self-sustaining performance by continual improvement not only of what is does, but also how it does things.

  
Leadership Evolution tools and methods used in team building and development

The following is a sample of our approach to tools used for team development. See our section on Team Building Tools for more information.

  • Workshops with senior leaders and stakeholders to help define the purpose and charter of the team.
  • Team building exercises, where each exercise is typically designed to address a specific aspect of how team members will need to work together.
  • Analysis of team roles taken by members, and comparison with models such as Belbin team profiles.
  • Communication skills programs based on NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) and brain based research for more effective internal communication and external networking.
  • Coaching and development programs designed to meet your particular organisational context.

  
How do I know what sort of Team Building we need?

When deciding what sort of professional development might be right for your team, these questions will help Leadership Evolution develop a program that is right for you:

  • What is the reason for doing these sessions? What are the two to three reasons that immediately come to mind?
  • What would you like to see as the one key message or learning outcome that the team leaves the room with?
  • In what specific way would you expect this new message or learning outcome to help the team directly in their work (in a practical way, what would you see them do differently with a client, for example, if they understood the key learning)?
  • Imagine that the session was really successful. What sorts of things would you see during and after the session to know it was successful?
  • What key challenges are faced by this team?
  • How well does the team know each other? Some profile information, such as age, gender, length of service, qualifications, any history (ie., Is there a lot of conflict?), may be useful in designing the right intervention for your team.

  
Leadership Evolution Facilitation Philosophy

The methods, models and processes used in Leadership Evolution team building are based on the tried and true disciplines of psychology and leadership.  They are based on effective adult learning so that:

  • each person is engaged in the learning because they use their own examples, their own work, and their own existing wisdom and observations about life
  • the message of the learning is embedded for the individual because it is delivered and reinforced through a variety of techniques and learning strategies
  • the participants don’t just cognitively understand something, they walk away being able to do something immediately different in the workplace for a quick win (to again, reinforce and embed the learning)

With this approach and with these tools, Leadership Evolution can help you to put in place effective teams, improve the performance of teams that are already in place, and transform a team into a high performance team. If you would like to improve the performance of your team, then call Alison Jardie on 0400 340 171 for an initial discussion on ways in which your team can improve and how we can help you get there.