Have you ever found yourself wondering whether you’re making progress or if the direction you’re heading in, is in fact the right way? I’m sure like me, you’ve had those thoughts more than once and it’s not a bad thing to be considering from time to time.
Sometimes it just feels like 1 step forward and 2 steps back!
It’s always handy to hit the pause button and check out whether the path you’re on is actually the one you want to be on, and if it is, whether you are taking the quickest route to get there or if it’s the scenic route!
Often when we’re working with a Leadership team, we are tasked with taking them from where they are currently on their journey, towards becoming a more cohesive team and being able to access more of their potential consistently.
The first step in any development programme has got to be AWARENESS, understanding what the past 18 months or so has been like for each of the team members and the up’s and down’s of the business and marketplace. We start by exploring this in conversations with each of the team members, this helps piece together an understanding of any potential patterns of behaviours that might not be supporting the team in their pursuit of their goals.
We combine the interviews with using JCA Global who are our partners in Emotional Intelligence, they have developed a number of online questionnaires that measure EI at an individual, team and organisational level. This approach helps us better understand where each individual’s strengths and development areas are and we can better tailor a development programme for that team, it also acts as a starting point for where they are individually and collectively.
On average there are 2,000 business books written each year, so it’s no wonder that it can be a little tricky keeping up with the latest thinking around what might accelerate your team into being world class. Once we’ve done a deep exploration, we can see the low hanging fruit and potential quick wins for a team, a lot of the time we are feeding back to a team leader and just confirming everything they already knew, but that in itself is very powerful.
Often the thought of Going Nowhere is in fact really about knowing that your are NOW HERE, you have a clear starting point and are then better able to remeasure your investment at the end of a development programme to see the shift. Measurement is one way of seeing the shift and yet, within a very short period you will have experienced the teams transformation.
They will be having better conversations, they will be displaying more vulnerability based trust, engaging in conflict in a healthy way, be more committed and taking more responsibility for themselves and their peers. The bottom line will be that you’ll be achieving better results as one team.
