Team Coaching
"Great teams are about personalities who complement each other, who bring different strengths to the table and understand how to maximize those strengths together." – Daniel Coyle
The teams we work with, work hard. They're highly committed to something they care about - and that's why it's all the more important to carve out time to STEP OUT of the busyness, to find fresh PERSPECTIVE, and to DISRUPT routines. These 'liminal spaces' open-up possibilities for new thinking, behaving and performing.
We will partner with you to co-design a team away day that meets the unique needs of your team, at a location that suits you.
Well-known researches into Team Coaching have found that typically around 30% of a team's performance is determined by the quality of the team 'launch', when the right people, with the right skills, connect around a clear purpose, with the creativity to realise their ambitions.
'Team Launches' are typically 1-3 day off-sites for teams forming, or reforming, or needing to adapt to significant change.
We like to say that 'only highly connected teams create moments of magic under pressure'. Through team coaching workshops, we support teams to communicate better, coordinate their actions, focus their effort, and achieve greater impact.
Creative Collaboration Workshops are team coaching sessions for teams that are 'on their way'. They support established teams to optimize their ways of working and continuously improve.
Team Away Days
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For teams wanting to continuously improve performance ✔
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Enhance levels of connection, communication and understanding ✔
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Increased visibility on collective and individual roles and responsibilities ✔
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An opportunity for the team to be re-inspired by vision and purpose ✔
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Higher levels of engagement, responsibility-taking and accountability ✔
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Greater alignement around key goals, challenges and areas to focus effort and attention ✔
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Fun ✔
1. Team Away Days
We partner teams to co-design an away day that meets the unique needs of your team, at a location that suits you. The first step is to review what outcomes you're looking for, and then bring our energy and experience to create an inspiring and motivating shared experience.
Overview
Wherever the location, away-days are times to change the context, disrupt the routine, and find time to 'play'. Typically we partner leaders within the organisation to co-design a programme that creates time for fun, to encounter new ideas, to share stories and personal experiences, and to reflect on how these creative parts can be welcomed more fully into everyday life. Ultimately this will benefit the individuals, teams and wider organisation.
What we bring
As well as bringing decades of experience of working with teams and groups, and expertise with a number of tools, models and techniques to help people bond and grow, our 'input' is as much about holding space, creating the conditions for people to come alive, and noticing the energy of the group so that we can adapt in the moment to what's happening in real time. This often includes sharing our own vulnerabilities, stories of hope and inspiration, and anecdotes of things going wrong! It's making it safe to take risks, experiment, and 'unplugging' any fear of failure.
Outcomes
As anyone who's worked with us will testify, 'What does good look like?' has to be just about our favourite phrase! It'll be no surprise, therefore, that establishing a clear checklist of success is the first step of the proess. We then work with team leaders - providing additional coaching and support where necessary - to ace our 'right-sized' wish-list, and walk away celebrating what we've achieved together.
Team Launch / Re-launch / Reset
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For teams that are forming, or re-forming, and want to set themselves up for success, by...
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Getting to know each other ✔
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Understanding individual and collective strengths and weaknesses ✔
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Uniting around a shared vision of success ✔
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Taking collective responsibility for creating a high performance team culture ✔
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Celebrating diverse behaviour preferences, communication and leadership styles ✔
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Setting intentions for harnessing conflict and 'creative controversy' for better decision-making ✔
2. Team Launch / Re-launch / Reset
'Team Launches' are typically 1-3 day off-sites for teams forming, or reforming, or needing to adapt to significant change. The Team Launch is a vital opportunity to inspire with vision, to clarify purpose, and to co-create ways of working that can achieve the desired results.
1. Who are we, and what are our collective strengths?
Leadership expert Jim Collins says, 'First Who, Then What?' We believe that Clarifying The Team Task - why we exist, and how we serve the world - is a really important question; but to explore that most creatively, it helps to better see and hear one another in as much of our uniqueness as possible. As Steven Covey put it, 'Seek first to understand'. Through 'checking-in', showing up, using our voice, sharing our story, and owning our strengths and weaknesses, we create the conditions for a healthy, fruitful team.
2. Vision and Values
The more present we can be in the here and now, the better we can collaborate to co-create the future we want to see. Taking time to enhance a HD picture of success - a collective visualisation experience - provides the North Star that helps teams grow more aligned, inspired and energised.
"We are a vision-driven species... where our images go, our energy flows..."
3. "A dream, without a plan, is just a wish."
One of the reasons that teamwork is hard is that it requires holding the Creative Tension of different kinds of energy and concerns: moving between 'Big Picture' and detail; Innovating and Integrating; People and Profitability; Autonomy and Accountability... and the list goes on. Part of the coach's job is to help teams navigate these creative tensions, and grow more self-aware about their own biasses and preferences so that they can manage their collective behaviours (culture) more successfully over time. A good team launch / re-launch results in a high level of engagement with the apirations, and how the team needs to work together to achieve those aspirations in practical, day to day rhythms and routines.
Creative Collaboration Workshops
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For teams whose next step is to optimize the conditions for creativity, innovation and experimentation, by...
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Transforming levels of trust and shared expectations ✔
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Learning to get the best from each other, even under pressure when default behaviours resurface ✔
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Enhancing the qaulity of listening to create deeper bonds of empathy, insight and understanding ✔
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Upgrading team meeting culture, systems, processes and routines ✔
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Evolving how feedback flows within the team for improved individual and team performance ✔
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Establishing a 'no blame culture' where people feel emboldened to take risks, learn, and take responsibility for continuous improvement ✔
3. Creative Collaboration Workshops
Creative Collaboration Workshops are team coaching sessions for teams that are 'on their way'. They support established teams to re-energise, re-focus, and update their ways of working to continuously improve strategy, learning and performance.
1. Learn from living stystems.
The mechanistic age pushed mental models into our thinking that don't help living things thrive: "cogs", "spanners", "gas", "clockwork", and "well-oiled machines" are not animal, and are certainly not human. As living organisms we are more similar to - and connected with - the natural world: plants, trees, ant colonies, bees, starlings, forests, ecosystems... 'Creative Collaboration' better mirrors behaviours modelled by woodland, insects and starlings in a 'murmaration'.
2. The free-flow of communication
In healthy systems, information flows; the more that relevant information is able to circulate through teams, threats can be avoided, decision-making is more robust, and changes can be adapted to more quickly. This is why many successful organisations in the modern age strive to adopt the practice of 'slowing down to speed up.'
3. "Creative Controversy"
4. Experimentation and fear of failure.
We've all sat in boring meetings. Why are they boring? In my experience it's because people aren't saying what they really want to say - the moment that happens, things start to get interesting! Many books on leadership and teamwork talk about the importance of both trust and healthy conflict, psychological safety and candour. 'Creative Collaboration' exists in that space where there is enough safety to take meaningful risks.
A well-known organisational psychologist used to say that can't really understand a system until you try to change it. This is why, with the best will in the world, so many strategies - and change programmes, in particular - fail to deliver lasting results. Once again we find that the path to health is through a creative tension of action and reflection, of theory and practice. 'Creative Collaboration' requires a discipline of making plans together 'off the pitch', but then going and putting them into practice to generate real world feedback.
