We are committed to working with teams on their excellency, not only functionality.
The Marketing Executive of a food industry client company contacted us concerned about one team’s ability to meet KPIs on innovation rate. Together with the team leader, we designed interventions geared towards the key characteristics of high-performing teams:
1.
The ability to recognise rapidly whether dissonances originate from the content or relational level of collaboration, and flexibly switching the focus of dialogue accordingly; meaning the team does not try to solve a relationship hick-up by disguising it in a subject knowledge dispute.
2.
The competency to sustain focus on the team’s overall purpose and primary task, thereby differentiating continuously between persons and their occupied organisational roles to enable effective interface management.
3.
The commitment toward preserving three facets of trust for a culture of ‘failing forward’: being vulnerable among peers, taking each other’s expertise seriously, and believing in the team’s ability to develop through conflict.
4.
The capacity to contain and remain with one’s own uncertainty, even in crisis, without premature jumps into solution-mode. This also entails the ability to withstand internal and external stakeholder expectations and move with a pace that allows the team to continue to draw on its pooled resources.
During this process, the team composed a list of hurdles to innovative thinking it has been experiencing on both, the content and relational level, and implemented behavioural change strategies that were actually targeting the source of their hold-ups.