At the interpersonal level, we focus on teams and leadership issues, both between individuals and within and between teams. This is about improving their relationships, communication, collaboration, interaction and performance. It is what we call the meso level. We look into two main areas:
Team Interventions
Our Team Interventions are designed to overcome team dysfunctions and to remove performance barriers in teams. Helping teams work on themselves is at the centre of our Team Interventions.
We train managers, leaders and executive teams in leadership skills, so that they can best deal best with current and future leadership challenges. The programmes are designed to explore the following questions:
How can I bring out the best leader in myself?
How can I become the best leader?
for myself and while staying true to myself,
for the people I am leading and
for the organization I am part of and contributing to?
Our Team Interventions are designed to overcome team dysfunctions and to remove performance barriers in teams. Helping teams work on themselves is at the centre of our Team Interventions. “How do we build the best team we can?” “How do we bring our team’s potential to fruition?”
The goal of team building interventions is to improve communication, interaction, cooperation, relationships, etc. in a team and by doing so, to improve or speed up a team’s productivity and performance. Team building can be carried out in many different ways. In our interventions, we concentrate on creating a shared understanding of the team: its tasks, roles, responsibilities and stakeholders, where it stands currently and what it wants to develop to. The focus of our team building lies in clarifying the intent of the inner team, in mastering team challenges, overcoming friction from failures and improving a team’s performance.
At the beginning of a Team Intervention, a Needs Analysis is carried out. We usually perform this with the team, and based on the results, we customize an intervention process to tackle the critical issues found. Below you will find eight team interventions that we have designed and facilitated and that led to the most successful results over the last 15 years of team interventions. We often use them as a baseline for our intervention designs.
How do we truly align ourselves around our team’s purpose? How do we shape a team’s identity and clarify and align team direction? This intervention is about creating the appropriate conditions for a group of people to pinpoint and pursue their collective purpose and, by doing so, becoming a high performing team.
The team members will uncover their team’s purpose, set of values, ambitions and pathways and will focus on achieving objectives that support the team’s greater goals. This improves a team’s performance and brings out the best in a team. Everyone ends up on the same page and begins to work together well. The intervention includes building alignment, increasing awareness of team issues and developing joint standpoints. A team going through this process develops a profound joint understanding and commitment to the central backbone elements and the ones that build a cohesive team.
Team Spark
Everyone on the team gets on board and sparks the best within him or herself, fully engaging with other team members and with the task at hand.
Team Spark supports the formation or development of a new team (or of an existing team with new members or a new team leader) and works to bond and shape the team in a sustainable and effective way. Team members get to know each other on a deeper level. They share their personal histories and values and reflect upon their contributions to the team. There is work carried out to define team values and to work out how they translate into behaviours and actions within the team and within the team’s context. The intervention clarifies roles and responsibilities and creates a shared focus regarding how to help the team to evolve and progress. A pathway with milestones for the team is mapped out. Regular communication is established with routines, rituals and meetings. This improves team cooperation and performance and brings out the best in a team.
Team Focus
The team works out its focus, so that it can be effective in achieving what it needs, short, mid and long term. Everyone in the team develops an understanding of their context and clarifies their own roles, responsibilities and interfaces.
Team Focus is designed to allow a team to position itself in its context and to its stakeholders. The future state (Focus) the team wants to arrive at and achieve is identified and visualized. Alignment is built by getting team members on the same page regarding the team’s history, current state and desired future. In peer coaching, the team members learn about each other by jointly working on their personal business challenges. The roles and responsibilities of the team and its members become defined and reshaped. The team culture and ways of mutual engagement are worked on by clarifying expectations in the team. Potential dysfunctions in the team are addressed in team feedback, practiced one on one. The team maps out its external context, by analyzing its stakeholders and creating a joint focus on how to engage with them. The team’s interfaces are explored: Where are any possible dysfunctions? What do the interfaces need from the team and vice versa? Actions and measures that need to be performed after the Team Focus are defined and assigned in an action plan.
Team Under Stress
Team members learn the essential aspects of their stressors and best practices to be able to build resilience in the face of complexity and times when they may be under pressure.
Identify the team’s sources of stress
Develop ways of tackling problems and challenges
Re-energize the team to improve motivation and collaboration
Team under stress focuses on teams operating in highly stressful, adverse conditions. It is designed to support teams in finding ways to get out of a reactive, responding state and to become proactive. The team works on how to sustainably de-stress itself. Current sources of stress and pressure are identified within the team and in its context, and ways of how to better deal with them are explored. The burning challenges that the team is facing are detected, and ways to manage them are explored. Time management as well as prioritization tools are introduced and practiced in order to allow the team members to focus on what is really relevant. The team’s workload distribution as well as the team members’ roles and responsibilities are revisited. Better ways to allocate them inside and outside the team to improve future collaboration are researched. Team Focus allows a team to re-energize and deal effectively with the situation it finds itself in.
Team Scenarios
Preparing a team for the future: How would good and bad look like for our team? How do we as a team influence our best possible future?
Team Scenarios concentrates on overcoming future pessimism in a team that feels overly dependent on its context and environment. The team learns to influence and master their own fate and rebuilds energy and optimism about its future. Starting from the current team situation, momentum is built in order to take ownership of a teams’ future and shift a team’s attitude from reactive to proactive. The team works out how the best and worst case scenario for its future would look. The consequences of both scenarios are analyzed, and measures developed to prevent the worst case scenario from happening and to increase the likelihood of the best case scenario taking place. An action plan is developed with how the team will actively work towards the desired future. Self-limiting beliefs held by the team concerning what is possible and what can be done or not be done are removed. New options for actions are discovered and the team’s sense of power and ownership of its destiny is strengthened.
Agile Teams
We support newly formed and existing teams on their way to become agile and self-organized.
Today, many teams operate in an increasingly complex environment, often also referred to as VUCA [Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous]. Dealing with high level of unknowns and volatility is the sweet spot for agile, self-organized teams. They figure things out as they move forward and keep improving using what they learn. Agility means constant change and quick adaptability. Teams work independently in defined frameworks and focus on their customers. They can take rapid and independent decisions, resulting in short planning and implementation cycles. The team is fully in charge of what it delivers, how it reaches its goals, for costs incurred and for decision-making. The same is true for the team’s setup, structures and processes. Self-organization means that the team has the freedom to act and it also means that it is accountable for results. The journey to agility and self-organization is an iterative one. It is essential to consider what needs to happen in order to be focused on the next agile implementation iteration.
Change Management
An organizational change affects a team. Change Management on a team level deals with how to tackle and master the effects of change on a team in the most constructive way.
The way we use Change Management makes it a situational approach that supports the movement, alteration and transition of individuals, teams, or organizations from a current state to a desired future state. The so-called “people processes” focus on managing the internal dynamics of individuals, groups and teams or the organization. These naturally arise in a changing business environment. In this team intervention we deal with questions such as the following:
How do we deal with the changes that affect us in the best, most constructive way?
How do we need to adapt and change as a team?
How do we deal with new structures, processes, work distribution, roles and responsibilities?
How do we engage with our new stakeholders? What is our new focus as a team?
Conflict Management
In our conflict resolution interventions, we create spaces and design processes that make it safe for individuals, teams or groups to jointly tackle their conflicts and work on finding ways to overcome them and move forward.
Disturbances naturally arise wherever people interact. If these disturbances are ignored for too long, they transform into open or hidden conflicts. By default, conflicts bring with them a waste of energy and resources. Communication breaks down, trust becomes eroded, dislikes and misunderstandings are intensified. In a Conflict Management process, we support parties in conflict to resolve their dysfunctions and constructively work on overcoming their disturbances. we create and hold open a safe place where parties engaged in conflict can open up, to examine and address their disturbances and conflicts in a constructive way. The process allows them to jointly explore their open and/or underlying disturbances and conflicts. There can then be an exchange on the emotional impacts that are emerging. This means that at the next stage, it is possible to clarify relationships, tasks, roles and responsibilities of the people involved. Finally, the parties are guided to jointly search for ways to overcome the conflict, as well as agreeing on ways to prevent conflicts in the future. In essence, they are helped to rebuild the trust necessary to engage and collaborate constructively with each other.
Leadership Development
We train managers, leaders and executive teams in leadership skills, so they can deal in the best way they can with current and future leadership challenges.
The programs are designed to explore the following question:
How can I become the best leader:
for myself and while staying true to myself,
for the people I am leading and
for the organization I am part of and contributing to?
Modern organizations deal with an increasingly complex environment. This complexity cannot be managed by traditional methods. Analytical, causal decision-making, top-down leadership, order and control are all becoming gradually replaced by a systemic, intuitive and subsidiary leadership approach. The role of the modern leader has changed and continues to change and grow with the challenges posed by this complexity.
Through intensive practice, participants develop a moral inner compass that allows them to make the appropriate decisions in the midst of complex challenges.
Effective leaders have an intimate understanding of themselves and are aware of their own inner strengths, values, purpose, and direction. Leaders who consciously cultivate self-awareness and personal mastery tend to be far more effective when facing organizational challenges, uncertainty, transitions, and even new opportunities.
Leading Self is designed to help participants deepen their personal and social awareness while fostering effective self-leadership skills, inner resourcefulness and professional best practices.
Leading Others
This provides a clear picture about good and bad leadership behaviour and designs a development plan to work on one’s own leadership behavior. Leaders analyze their teams and learn how to engage with them individually and collectively.
This programme focuses on the following: “How do we bring out the best leaders in ourselves when leading others?” We explore the current leadership realities, analyse the difference between management and leadership, work on appropriate and inappropriate leadership behaviours, learn about personality differences in co-workers and their correlated leadership needs. The learning journey is built around inputs from the facilitator, around individual and small group reflection, coaching and peer feedback.
Leading Change
This is about understanding the dynamics of change. Leaders learn how to prepare, plan and implement change processes and how to create buy-in for change initiatives and therefore increase their chances for success at the implementation stage.
Leading Change gives managers, project leaders and change agents the possibility to fully explore their roles and inner attitudes in situations of change. Throughout the programme, participants work on their own Change Initiatives and develop around those their understanding for the principles and dynamics of change. The focal point of this program is the human factor in change initiatives.
Experienced Leaders Programme
The Experienced Leaders Programme is designed to allow senior leaders to freshen up their leadership knowledge and skills while learning from each other’s leadership challenges.
Based on their own education and experience, influenced by the corporate culture, managers develop their own personal leadership styles over the years. It is easy to become frozen into a “this is the way I am” attitude; to avoid this, we want to jointly explore the roots of own understanding of leadership, identify strengths and develop areas of growth. This development process is supported by inputs from the facilitator, and by self and small group reflection, coaching and feedback from the peer group.
Leadership Hike
The Leadership Hike is a hybrid form of leadership teambuilding and leadership program. Going on a 3-5 days leadership hike, different team and leadership aspects are processed.
The intervention processes involved in the leadership hike are designed according to the leadership, team and organizational challenges that the leadership team is currently facing. Examples of topics to process during a leadership hike are:
Getting to know the leader inside oneself and inside others better
Removing performance barriers in the leadership team
Identifying and working out the Macro Areas of Attention that the team or organization needs to focus today in order to be successful tomorrow
Executive Team Retreat
An executive team goes on a retreat to work on its own and the organization’s:
An Executive Team shares responsibility for an area, a department or an entire company. Usually the success of the entity they are responsible for depends on their performance and collaboration as a team. In addition to other teams, the cost of an unaligned Executive Team is simply too big for any organization to consciously afford. Therefore, inner team clarity, alignment and buying into the common approach and joint direction are crucial. An Executive Team Retreat usually lasts 2-3 days.
The intervention process of the Executive Team Retreat is designed to fit the challenges faced by the team and the organization. Examples of topics to process during an Executive Team Retreat are:
Revealing and unravelling Executive Team dysfunctions
Analysing and removing performance barriers in the Executive Team
Identifying and working out the Executive Team Macro Areas of Attention for itself and the organization
At this level, we focus on personal growth, and enable people to develop the necessary skills and attitudes to successfully deal with themselves, their situations and the challenges they face.
Here we focus on bigger organizational units or the whole organization. We work on topics such as: organizational development, alignment, culture, vision, strategy and more.
Teams & Leadership
Team Backbone
