High-performing teams
Every successful organisation is built on high-performing teams, but lots of organisations are realising that high-performance can be hard to sustain over the long-term. It can be easy to feel overwhelmed by the pressure of multiple priorities and near-constant change.
We know how important it is to get the right balance between productivity and wellbeing – both at a team and individual level. Meaningful work is essential for motivating high-performance, but it can be a double-edged sword and lead to burnout when people care so much about what they do that they struggle to maintain boundaries, ask for help and empower others.
In the right environment, productivity and wellbeing are not opposites – they support and reinforce each other. Meaningful, productive work boosts self-esteem and good mental and physical health builds stamina for performance over the long-term.
Key to creating this environment is trust, psychological safety and candour within teams. With this team culture, where relationships are strong, people can speak openly and cut through challenges to deliver results.
The VUCA environment that organisations are navigating, along with hybrid working, make it even more important to continually develop these foundations.
Leadership Advantage
High-performing teams know why they exist and what they need to achieve in the context of delivering the organisation’s strategy. This is where we start – clarifying team purpose and vision. Our Leadership Advantage programme helps organisations deliver sustained exceptional results by harnessing the full potential of your executive team.
It combines clarity of purpose, ambition and strategy with the attitudes and behaviours that create a dynamic culture of collective responsibility. Where the organisation thrives, because everyone in it understands what is ‘most important’, is impelled by the cause, and is empowered to deliver at their best.
We provide this offering in partnership with Hedgehog, a boutique strategy house, each bringing their expertise and specialism to provide you with the best guidance and support.
Leadership Advantage starts with Executive Fellowship. Once this is in place you need Colleague Empowered Advocacy to deliver your best results
To truly engage people in developing and delivering organisational strategy, they need to understand the purpose and strategic context. How is the organisation doing against its current KPIs? What are the organisational strengths you want to build on or grow? What’s happening in the wider sector? What’s the financial context? What’s the legislative context? It’s usually more inspiring for people to get behind a “burning opportunity” than a “burning platform” – but it’s most important that information and analysis is balanced and consistent.
Teams whose ambition goes beyond themselves, who are determined to deliver their own goals to ensure the team’s success, achieve consistently better results.
Diagnostic tools
Teams who are ‘in flow’ dramatically outperform those that aren’t and experience greater levels of wellbeing. Creating flow is about enabling the team to bring out the best in each other and navigating blind-spots and friction points.
Our team are trained in a number of diagnostic tools such as EQi 2.0, Gallup Strengthsfinder, DiSC and MBTI to create personal and team insight.
Applying this insight to how a team works together in practice is where the value lies.
- How are strengths currently achieving successful outcomes?
- What weaknesses or blind-spots are getting in the way of performance?
- How can we harness team diversity instead of it creating conflict?
- What untapped talent can be dialled-up to help the team be more effective?
Strengths are a good indicator of team values and the conditions they needed to perform at their best
100-Day Leadership Shifts
Our 100 Day Leadership Shift programme creates a rapid, focused step change in performance when a team wants to accelerate change readiness, culture change and engagement.
The programme works through a combination of semi-structured team coaching and 1:1 coaching over 100 days. The team commits to shifting specific behaviours and working practices to address business change priorities.
Individuals are given tailored coaching, ‘working on the work’, to achieve their part of the shift. With robust frameworks to hold the team and each individual to account for progress made.
The intensive and practical nature of this approach catalyses rapid change that embeds within the leadership team and across the whole organisation.
Leadership coaching
For many years 1-1 coaching has been reserved for Executive leaders. We believe in the democratisation of coaching, giving leaders at any level in an organisation access to tailored support that helps them maximise their influence and impact.
Our approach uses a blend of psychological models, rapport-building and skilled coaching to strengthen emotional intelligence, build resilience and capability.
We go beyond the traditional package of six 1-1 sessions and adapt to whatever is needed to transform how someone is feeling, thinking and behaving. We coach on-line, in-person or walking and talking in the fresh air. We include gathering feedback from others where this is helpful in raising awareness and confidence to create change.
Challenges that our clients often bring to us are:
- Stepping up into new leadership roles
- Breaking through overwhelm to feel more in control and effective
- Establishing credibility, expanding stakeholder influence and building trust
- Maintaining focus, motivation and performance with remote teams
- Making tough decisions and having difficult conversations
- Balancing long-term needs with short-term priorities
Creating the space for meaningful conversations is essential to sustaining high-performance
Mediation and conflict resolution
Interpersonal conflict is often left unaddressed, having a ripple effect across teams, causing friction, inefficiencies and upset.
Whether formally labelled ‘mediation’, or informally described as a ‘facilitated conversation’, it’s an enormously powerful (and cost effective) approach to improving relationships.
The process involves a private meeting with each party (typically up to an hour) followed by, if all parties still feel mediation is appropriate, a joint meeting (typically up to three hours). Ideally this all takes place in a day with concrete, achievable agreements in place by the end.
Central to the approach is impartiality, equity of status and voice, helping each party fully hear and understand the other’s perspective and finding win:win solutions.
Interpersonal conflict is often left unaddressed, having a ripple effect across teams, causing friction, inefficiencies and upset.
100 Day Leadership Shift
