Building Teams

“Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence wins championships.”

(Michael Jordan, American NBA basketball player)

Our Building Teams practice works with both individual team members and complete teams to give them the understanding, professional skills, and team working practices which they need to ‘win championships’. We believe today’s organisations need to attract and develop individuals who have the motivation and skills to perform at the highest level-and of course they need to keep on building their skills, to build their ‘bench-strength’ as the world changes and makes new demands on them.

The type of questions which we help Teams and Individuals to answer are:

“How do we become a real team-rather than just a collection of individuals?”

“Do we have a shared understanding of our goals and what success looks like?”

“How can we get everyone in our team working well together?”

“How do we help individuals face today’s challenges and make sure they have the top class skills they need to succeed?

Typical problems we have been asked to help address by clients include:

• A newly formed team which needs to perform at a high level as quickly as possible
• Work with a group of individuals who need to start acting like a real team and take shared responsibility for decisions
• Working as an effective team-even though people are located in different geographies?
• Increase the quality of team communication and build higher levels of trust
• Helping senior professionals to specific skills they need to be successful both today and tomorrow
• Help our technical experts to develop their communication and people skills
• We want to show that we are willing to invest in the development of our people

Our approach is to work with Teams and Individuals to understand their team/individual strengths and style and how they can have the greatest impact on performance.   We use a variety of approaches to develop capabilities including:

360° Surveys-these can be tailor-made or we also offer the Zenger Folkman Extraordinary Leader and Extraordinary Coach questionnaires which give individuals the ability to bench mark themselves against the top percentile of leaders in the world.

Psychometrics-we can draw upon a range of psychometrics to help Teams and Individuals develop their self awareness and understanding of their team members and the dynamics within teams which can impact on success.

Assessment & Development Centres-we can design assessment centre programmes based on our clients competencies to help identify the ‘match’ between individuals and the requirement of different roles and offer practical development plans to help them ‘bridge’ any gaps.

Professional Skills and Team Workshops-we deliver a wide range of workshops for individuals and teams; making sure that the content is directly relevant to their current needs using tailored role plays and case studies. Some examples of the topics we cover include:

• Effective influencing skills
• Coaching skills
• Effective Meetings Skills
• Presentations skills
• Developing Assertiveness and Personal Impact
• Negotiation Skills
• Problem Solving & Decision Making
• Consultancy Skills
• Personal Organisation & Effectiveness
• Understanding Business Finance

Our workshop designs are highly interactive, with a high tutor: participant ratio and with plenty of time allowed for practice, feedback and more practice!

When we work with ‘intact’ teams we like to spend time getting to now the individual team members and the business context in which they are working. We facilitate team workshops and meetings to help teams clarify their shared goals, understand each others roles and contribution to the team and establish agreed ways of working with one another. We also recognise that high performance teams not only deliver the best results but that they also have fun together and we support this through a variety of team exercises and challenges that fit the style and culture of the team.

Coaching – for professionals at all levels, building their personal capabilities and working with them to tackle issues such as; personal impact & reputation, preparation for promotional boards, developing work-life balance or handling difficult personal or organisational challenges.

Action Learning- within our workshops we encourage everyone to continue their learning back in the workplace. Action Learning groups are one way that we support this and we offer a range of action learning techniques and facilitate groups so that learning becomes a natural part of the business not just something which takes place on workshops.