Helping good people become a better team.

Does this sound familiar?

We’ve got a team of good people, but something it isn’t quite working as well as it should. Communication feels harder and there are misunderstandings leading to frustrations; and perhaps there are even conversations happening everywhere except in the right room. Morale may have dipped and you’re left wondering whether getting everyone together for a team day might help.

Often, a shot in the arm is exactly what is needed. Giving people the opportunity to step away from the day job and spend some time together to look at how they work as a team can make a real difference. Sometimes, though, what looks like a morale problem can have been building for a while meaning there is a little more to understand.
That’s where we come in.

Why invest in your team?

A team can be full of talented, committed people and still find it surprisingly difficult to work well together.  This happens because we all see the world through our own experiences, beliefs, expectations and filters; that means two people can sit in exactly the same meeting, hear exactly the same words and come away with differing versions of what happened. Then we make meaning from what we have experienced.

• A delayed reply might become they’re ignoring me.
• A challenge in a meeting might become they’re undermining me.
• A decision made without us might become they don’t value what I think.

The meaning may or may not be accurate, but once we have made it, it can influence how we behave towards the other person. This is one of the reasons team difficulties can become surprisingly complicated. What started as a small misunderstanding can gather assumptions and become a story with all those frustrations around it until the original issue is almost beside the point. Understanding how this happens gives people a useful opportunity to pause and get curious. What else might be going on here? What might I be missing? And, perhaps most importantly, what part am I playing in this?

That last question can be quite powerful. It moves us away from looking for someone to blame and towards considering what we can influence ourselves. We cannot control everything that happens around us, but we can take responsibility for how we show up, how we respond and the impact we have on the people around us. When a team starts doing that together, trust has somewhere to grow.

How we work with you

Our team days give people the space to stop, take a breath and look at how they actually work together. We use conversation, theory, practical exercises, reflection and plenty of opportunity for laughter, because people tend to open up a little more when they’re enjoying themselves.

We explore how people communicate; how different perspectives develop and how easily assumptions can creep in when we don’t have the full picture. We look at what helps people feel able to speak openly, and what happens when they don’t.

From there, we get into the conversations that really matter to a functioning team. Can we challenge each other without making it personal? Can we disagree and still move forward together? When we make our collective decisions, do we understand what we have agreed and are we prepared to support it? Can we hold each other accountable in a way that is useful rather than accusatory? And when something goes wrong, can we look at our own contribution first?

These are the things that allow teams to become more trusting, more open and more comfortable with healthy challenge. They also make it much easier for people to commit to decisions and take responsibility for making them happen.  The result is a team that can have the difficult conversations, deal with differences and keep moving in the same direction.

What do you get?

The aim is to help people understand themselves and each other better, and to give the team a stronger sense of how it wants to work together. People leave with a greater appreciation of why colleagues see things differently, along with more confidence to ask questions rather than make assumptions.  Conversations become easier because there is more trust underneath them, and people become more comfortable speaking up or asking for help or challenging something when they think it needs challenging.

There is also a shift in responsibility. Instead of waiting for someone else to sort things out, people are more able to consider what they can do to influence the situation themselves. That can take a surprising amount of pressure off leaders, who no longer have to be the person who steps in and fixes every misunderstanding or disagreement.

Over time, that creates a stronger sense of ‘we’. People know that they will not always agree and that things will occasionally go wrong and that working with other human beings will always involve a few bumps along the road. They also know that they have the trust, understanding and shared responsibility to deal with those bumps when they arrive. A bit more understanding. Better conversations. More trust. A team that knows how to work together.

And sometimes, that is exactly what a team needs.