Team Leadership Coaching
“Is Your Team Really a Team, Or Is It a Mob?”
Teams come in all shapes and sizes, and with all sorts of results--everything for complete success to total failure. To help you decide what kind of team you are working with, start by asking yourself if you've wrestled with any of the following issues:
- You can’t get your executive team “on the same page”
- Your team confuses “consensus” with “unanimity”
- Finger-pointing often replaces accountability for results
- On capital-budget initiatives, your teams frequently underestimate costs and
over-estimate benefits
- Your team members protect their individual interests at the expense of team results
- Your impatience results in you mandating obedience rather than cultivating the consensus you need to be successful
- Your team often over-commits and under-delivers
Do any of the following myths about teamwork and teams make it difficult for you
to create effective teamwork?
- “When I hear about teamwork, I just want to get sick. It’s just too 'touchy-feely' for me.”
- “I don’t have time to get people to agree. I don’t need them to agree; I just need them
to do what needs to be done.”
- “Some people collaborate well; others don’t. There’s nothing I can do about it.”
- “Teamwork just creates bureaucracy.”
- “I’ve seen how consultants try to create teamwork. They take a group of managers into the woods with ropes and backpacks and sing 'Cumbaya' around campfires. ”
The Truth About Teams
and Teamwork
A team is a collection of people with a high degree of interdependence who are focused on the achievement of certain goals and results.
A team is NOT a group of people who gather in the boss’s office every morning for a group hug and to sing "Cumbaya." If team members focus on protecting their own turf rather than achieving team results, they aren't a team.
Teams, whether intact teams (like senior management teams) or initiative teams (like project teams) are successful only when they operate effectively (achieving planned results) and efficiently (doing so as expeditiously as possible).
What We Do and How We Do It
Our work involves two disciplines: working with business leaders to create successful teams, and embedding the knowledge, skills, focus, discipline, and momentum for productive and successful teams.
Individuals and teams must focus their energy on creating value for the buyers of their company’s products and services. Even in support or staff functions, value creation for buyers is the mark of successful teams. We lead business through a process of developing powerful answers to the following questions:
- What knowledge, skills, attributes, and talents do your team members require, and in what amounts and combinations, to create value for buyers?
- How do you recruit, select, develop, and leverage relevant knowledge, skills, talents, and attributes to create value for buyers?
- How do you translate people’s competence, passion, and confidence into performance?
- How can we integrate individual performance into a cohesive “whole?”
We help teams develop the wherewithal to attack specific business challenges successfully using embedded knowledge, skills, focus, discipline and momentum. Our work includes:
- Coaching team leaders to lead
- Assessing a team’s preparedness for high performance
- Ascertaining the appropriate composition of skills and disciplines
for a project team
- Completing executive assessments for succession planning
- Formalizing team roles and responsibilities for team members
- Imparting technical, problem-solving skills
Teams become effective when effective skills and tools are applied to business challenges. The “wilderness experience” approach to team building is not one that we endorse or practice.
Stop settling for “good enough” and let Rand show you how to build a team that exceeds expectations every time. Contact Us online or call at 1-301-482-2598 to discuss your team’s particular coaching needs.
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