Team Coaching Program
Growing companies live a life of exponential complexity. No company is on a solid footing unless they gain clarity on their Leadership, Teams, and Culture. It is crucial to have the right – motivated – people doing the right job right – in other words, know how to lead and manage.
Goal: Increase the team’s capacity and capability for high performance.
Outcomes:
- Stronger team leadership (clarity of roles, responsibilities and goals)
- More effective communication due to shared experience and vocabulary (less costly misunderstandings)
- Common, shared goals (“we are in the same boat” feeling that leads to caring for everyone’s results rather than working in “silos”)
- Sense of Team rather than internal competition between individuals
- Trust and respect that “lubricate” more productive work (get more done)
- Innovation through co-creation
Process:
Below is an overview description of how the Team Coaching process typically progresses over 6-12 months. The team members’ time investment in the course of the program consists of approx. 20 minutes to respond to the survey x 2, approx. 2-3 days of debrief/off-sites spread over time, monthly 60–90-minute team meetings (can be virtual) and creating deliverables from the action plan.
Leaders need to harness the collective power of their people to solve the increasingly complex challenges that come with growth. For a growing company, it is vital to intentionally design a culture that works as a strategic lever to execute on the key strategies. It is often said that “people don’t leave organizations; they leave their managers”. Team leadership development is the most impactful investment for creating better leaders and cultures.
According to Verne Harnisch, author of Scaling Up: “Expanding from three to four people grows the team only 33%, yet complexity may increase 400%. And the complexity just keeps growing exponentially. It’s why many business owners often long for the day when the company was just them and an assistant selling a single service.”
This kind of a scaling up calls for leadership that firmly focuses on the vision, performs with team skills, and is deeply disciplined in execution. It is smart to invest in team leadership development.
The so-called “Greiner’s Curve” graph shows the critical points of growth of a business and what is needed in an organization at these transitional growth points. Investment in a company’s leadership development serves like an “insurance policy” that lowers the risk of failing and increases the probability of success. It’s a smart investment.
Get The Team On The Same Page
Most teams do not know how to be truly effective. Even after a team skills workshop they usually quickly fall back into their default ways of working and focus on individuals rather than the team performance. Our team development program, Team SmartsTM is designed to optimize the collective intelligence of the teams. This is especially important for innovative companies that are scaling when resources scarce and the organization cannot afford people working in silos. Teams become a solid source for innovation when collaboration in optimized through developing clarity of the charter and commitment and establishing psychological safety.
This program consists of systems-based team skills learning and coaching, two Team DiagnosticTM Assessments, and development of competencies in Productivity & Positivity for sustainable results. The goal is to increase the team’s capacity and capability as a team for high performance.
The teaming process is developed through establishing 1) psychological safety which creates the “container” in which even the hardest conversations can take place, 2) clarity about the level of commitment of each team member, and 3) the charter – the “Why” and the “How” of the team.
The Team DiagnosticTM Assessment is an internationally tested and rigorously validated diagnostic instrument focused on team level capacity building. Research shows that when the ratio of positivity to negativity is increased, business outcomes improve.
This tool assesses the level of the 14 competencies of teams:
7 Productivity competencies (Team Leadership, Alignment, Decision Making, Goals & Strategies, Accountability, Resources, Proactive) and
7 Positivity competencies (Trust, Respect, Constructive Interaction, Camaraderie, Optimism, Communication, Values Diversity).
Applying the Team DiagnosticTM and the subsequent team coaching model typically creates a 20% improvement in Productivity and Positivity. The assessment is administered at the beginning and at the end of the engagement to measure the change over time. The debrief process introduces the team to a proprietary set of collaboration tools and practices.
The outcomes from the team development process often include some of the following:
- Stronger team leadership (clarity of roles, responsibilities and goals)
- More effective communication due to shared experience and vocabulary (less costly misunderstandings)
- Common, shared goals (“we are in the same boat” feeling that leads to caring for everyone’s results rather than working in “silos”)
- Sense of Team rather than internal competition between individuals
- Trust and respect that “lubricate” more productive work (get more done)
- Innovation through co-creation
Kristiina is one the earliest adopters of the Team Diagnostic based team coaching methodology – and even translated it for the Finnish market. She has also taught the methodology to other executive and team coaches internationally. Her client companies who have developed their teams using this approach range from startups to departments in publicly traded multinational corporations.
One of Kristiina’s clients was a startup in Seattle. The CEO hired Kristiina as the team and culture consultant. She said:
“Kristiina worked with our team to develop and implement a corporate culture, with specific, actionable constructs to enable the team to interview and hire candidates who embodied the attributes we were seeking in growing the company. Kristiina worked very well with the team, drawing out important perspectives and using tools to capture and interpret results, and agree appropriate follow-on actions. Kristiina is very warm-hearted, intuitive and insightful and does everything for the betterment of all. She is a consummate professional and a very good person. The work she did with BYNDL enabled the team to successfully grow 7X over 12 months, creating a strong organization to drive the business to the next level.”
A Senior VP of medical equipment company said about the team process:
“It was clear from the beginning that Kristiina understood the situation of the organization at that point in time; we built plans together on how to interact in the critical situation, how to learn from one another and how to be as a team stronger than the sum of the individual performances. We were able to freely talk about the differences in approaching critical business situations, about the ways of dealing with conflict amongst each other; we were definitely a team much more than we were at the beginning of the interaction with Kristiina.”