Team Development – Through Dialogue
At the heart of team effectiveness is the degree to which members feel they can share openly and be emotionally safe. A big factor here is the quality of conversation, and the process described here is designed to help individuals and the team explore uncomfortable topics through dialogue, to better achieve needed results.
Boosting Team Effectiveness
The best teams – whether executive, operational, or project – achieve synergies, complementarities, by bringing together the skills of individuals to achieve outputs and impacts beyond what could be expected from summing their various individual contributions. Yet often such synergies fail to materialise. Whilst the individual team members might all be high performers something is lacking in the way their efforts come together. When this happens, key factors are often a lack of trust and poor communications between team members.
To achieve that synergistic, 2+2 = 5 impact, it’s vital to help the team talk more openly, candidly, fully and with emotional safely about what matters to individuals. We work with teams to build the capacity of members to work productively and safely together and better leverage their respective skills, knowledge and experience, thereby boosting team effectiveness and impacts.
The Process
Let’s first clarify what we’re not doing. We’re not using instruments or tools to “type” or otherwise profile or categorise individuals. Instead, we’re working with team members as they are, focusing on actual challenges for the team. While the process will be tailored to your needs and those of your team, it typically involves:
Crucially, we practise collectively thinking-through and better understanding current and emerging issues that the team needs to progress. This is not just a learning exercise; the team is doing real work as it learns.
Benefits for your team
In addition to building their collective effectiveness and impact, team members stand to gain in other ways, including becoming better at:
