Team Effectiveness
Achieving high-performing leadership teams is one of the most daunting tasks leaders face. Team members promoted because of their drive and ability to deliver results are now expected to subordinate individual objectives in service of team goals. Once-effective behaviors in functional/operational roles increasingly create tension and conflict on cross-functional management teams. Team leaders and team members join or leave the team, each change effectively creating a new team—with new dynamics and challenges. Additionally, complex environmental and stakeholder forces create further ambiguity and complexity that amplifies the difficulty in achieving a truly high-performing team.
With the rest of the organization watching—and being affected by—every success and misstep of the leadership teams, the benefits of optimizing alignment, collaboration, and trust at senior levels are substantial. The stakes are high, and failure is not an option.
What differentiates KSE’s approach is our experience with facilitating teams and coaching for high-performing team dynamics while the team remains in place and on the job, discussing and doing real work on substantive business issues. Our team effectiveness consultants have undergone intensive and sustained training in interpersonal and group dynamics. We are experts at diagnosing dynamics that are often invisible to the untrained eye, and we have the courage, skill, and agility to take action to transform ineffective team behavior patterns and to guide the team supportively to higher performance.
We work with the CEO, HR head, and the top managers to make step-change improvements in leadership team performance. We interview and survey team members and others in the organization to understand the degree to which team members have embraced the company’s strategy, and we explore the interpersonal dynamics that lead to team breakdowns and disunity.
We facilitate team sessions that shed light on these underlying dynamics and the potential consequences if left unchanged. We get team members to make specific commitments for improvement, and then monitor team dynamics to make sure these commitments happen. Central to our approach is building team member skills in giving and receiving feedback and having the difficult conversations that are necessary to successfully face and achieve disruptive change.
Team Offsite
Team offsites, whether in-person or virtual, should be high impact, learning rich, and fun. The team should have conversations that typically do not happen. The quality of dialogue should be high. The conversations should be expansive, leading in new directions. There should be laughter. Team members should leave feeling more connected to each other, and people should leave the offsite clear about next steps and action items.
Unfortunately, many long-form meetings simply do not measure up to these standards. Given the amount of time invested in offsites, you cannot afford not to design the best meeting you can.
We are often asked to design and facilitate breakthrough team offsites. We engage first with executive sponsors to map out what is needed. In most cases, we collect data about how the team is doing. We do this in two ways. We conduct interviews with individuals, and we administer a proprietary Team Effectiveness Profile (TEP). This qualitative and quantitative approach allows us to quickly get up to speed about the team’s functioning and provides rich information for discussion about the offsite. Oftentimes the executive sponsors wish for us to test alignment or solicit views about content areas to be covered at the offsite.
It is important to us that the executive sponsors feel in control of the offsite design and delivery. We conduct debriefs with the executive sponsors prior to the offsite and walk them through our proposed design and agenda.
We tend to play several roles during the offsite. In segments where we are the driver, we are on point to tee up the discussion and achieve the segment objectives. We often inject ideas into the offsite, often through pre-work, and then play a teaching role to help individuals make sense of the content and apply it to the team and their work. For other segments, someone else is driving and we are observing the dynamics, calling on individuals to contribute, asking questions to reframe the dynamics, and looking for ways to make the discussion better.
Near the end of the offsite, we ensure that the decisions made, action items, and parking lot items are understood, and everyone leaves clear about next steps.
With the right approach and professional facilitation, it is possible to have breakthrough offsites every time, leaving individuals feeling great about the time they have just invested.