Making Space for High Performing Teams
Leadership & Capabilities
Embrace Discomfort
In a facilitated workshop series, a client’s innovation team & extended network identified the need to embrace discomfort for disruptive, actionable insight. The outputs were core to new R&D practices & processes, & supported R&D commissioners in being willing to slow solution development & delivery – in a solution-oriented culture – to better understand & address risks in long term futures.
Successful 21st century teams collaborate across disparate physical and technology environments, and time zones, to deliver business goals. But a lack of shared digital behaviour and workplace customs can result in fractured communication, conflict, and suboptimal performance.
In a digitally layered and complex world, employees are resorting to survival tactics simply to carry out day-to-day work, and impaired performance introduces business risk. Leading Edge Forum offers proven tools and methods to help people calibrate their behaviour and maximize team performance in today’s high-octane, high-pressure work spaces. Even a one per cent improvement can make a big difference.
Broker trust for virtual projects
LEF helps permanent and temporary teams navigate new space together and establish a level of trust that’s necessary to execute the task or project in hand. These can be senior executive teams, high-profile project teams, or operational teams delivering business-as-usual activities. Cultivating behaviours that are task-appropriate is a critical success factor in today’s project-led workplace, and helps create 21st century work arenas that use distributed leadership effectively.
A common problem is that organizations can throw multiple digital collaboration tools at a project team, then expect them to ‘get on with it’ and deliver the required result. Experience shows that however good the individuals and tools, without reviewing and negotiating how they work together can reduce their collective effectiveness. But few organizations make time to support teams through the forming to performing stages.
Agree behavioural codes
Many organizations embrace a collaborative culture without hierarchical leadership, but don’t understand that behavioural codes and boundaries are essential when navigating such fluid terrain. Bring your own device (BYOD) is commonplace but often with different interpretations, rules and regulations: bringing together team members from different BYOD – or other digital cultures – can introduce unwanted tensions.
Cultural differences are also evolving in the ways organizations choose to give their workers more thinking time in a 24x7, always-on world. An organization surveyed by LEF said that meetings never happened first thing in the morning, allowing employees to settle, tune in and catch up. Large enterprises may instead offer employees a physical space to retreat to, reflect, unwind and recharge.
Make collaboration work for you
The ease with which meetings can be convened through digital channels presents a fresh layer of difficulty for today’s workforce. One contemporary problem is conducting virtual meetings where participants join using different digital channels, such as video or voice. A lack of shared visual cues can result in interruptions and misunderstanding, and valuable intellectual capital not being fully shared.
Optimize 21st century work space
For people working in organizations with multiple projects and partners in dispersed locations and geographies, these gaps and disconnects can be profound. It’s hard for staff to work collaboratively with new tools and team members when the digital fabric is incoherent, and trust and rapport is not yet established.
Because staff are thrust into an evolving digital world and expected to perform, they don’t question the norms of the workplace, and don’t notice good practice if they are in survival mode. LEF brings its deep research and experience of client interventions to help companies trying to create positive working spaces for the 21st century. Our workshop helps address scenarios such as:
- The CIO, CTO or CDO has developed a new digital strategy – how do you work with user groups to understand capabilities & mindset shifts that need to be embedded?
- An IT system has been installed but it’s not working well – how can you repair the dysfunctional implementation and usage.
- You’ve just set up a new virtual project team – what’s the best way to give it the strongest possible start?
Workshop agenda
Through a combination of presentations and breakout working sessions, this one-day workshop will explore key topics and challenges. The outcome of the day will be to identify and clarify barriers to effective team performance, identify how to make the required shifts, and an agreed action plan and next steps with accountability for personal changes that need to be made.
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Workshop session
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Outcome
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Introductions & objectives
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Level set & build confidence in language & approach, build dataset & workspace for day
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Agitate: what lies beneath
Key research findings, sense-making & prioritization of issues for team
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Clarity on key issues preventing high performance, inc. top 3 issues for team
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Activate: dive beneath the surface
Dig deep & challenge assumptions
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Identify a single shift that will most benefit the team
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Activate: swim back to the surface
Identify things we can do to make that shift
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Review/evaluate shared decisions on what & how to change
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Accelerate: what does success look like?
Build out future story & journey at organizational, team & individual levels
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Create framework to observe, adjust & accelerate new ways of working together
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Action: confirm what next
Reflect on achievements & next steps to progress journey
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Agreed action plan & accountability on personal changes
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Create trust that’s sufficient for the task
Enables teams to work at a high level from different physical locations, digital technologies & across time zones
Cultivate behaviour & boundaries
Enable collaboration & distributed leadership, liberating employees to work at their full potential
