Team Collaboration and Communication
Using DiSC profiles, team members are able to better understand themselves and their colleagues' communication preferences, drivers, motivators and stressors.
Through enhanced awareness, team members are encouraged to work on strategies to connect, problem-solve, and navigate tense situations together.
By understanding how colleagues are likely to engage in a difficult discussion team members are able to minimize bad feelings and ensure more productive conversations.
Through enhanced awareness of styles, managers are able to become more effective with their subordinates.
Team Cohesion
Members of the team work on trusting one another on a fundamental, emotional level. Through various activities, members get comfortable being vulnerable with each other about their weaknesses, mistakes, fears, and behaviors.
Members work on reaching a point where they do not hesitate to disagree with, challenge, and question one another, all in the spirit of finding the best answers and making the best decisions. Conflict becomes an expectation rather than the exception and members ensure conflicts are around ideas rather than interpersonal issues.
By engaging in unfiltered conflict members are able to achieve genuine buy-in around important decisions, even when various members of the team initially disagree.
Team members are coached to be at ease holding one another accountable for adhering to decisions. They work on mastering peer to peer feedback and not relying on the team leader as the primary source of accountability.
Finally the team is encouraged to work on setting aside individual needs and agendas and focus almost exclusively on what is best for the team and the company (rather than departments, career aspirations, or ego-driven status). This enhances the value of collective results over individual results.
Team Alignment
Defining / re-defining a clear purpose that requires the team to collaborate and allows each team member to understand similarly WHY the team exists.
Co-creating a Transformation dynamic by envisioning the team in an enhanced and ideal future.
Aligning on WHAT the team should focus on amongst all the things competing for its resources, what its unique value proposition is, how the team differentiates itself from the rest of the organisation, the external world and competition.
Determining the principles guiding HOW the team works and members behave, whether within the team, the organisation, or vis à vis the outside world. Defining the behaviors attached to these values so values do not remain nice words on a website.
With the coach's contribution, aligning on specific time-bound goals, with clear attribution of roles & responsibility, together with an accountability mechanism.
Team Transformation
Through fun activities the team draws the picture of the current state of things, what works, what does not, the successes, the pains, bottlenecks blockers, etc.
With the help of the coach's prompts, the team projects itself in an ideal transformed future, aligned with the company's mission and vision.
The team is encouraged to take ownership of its own transformation and establishes its Transformation Roadmap, broken down into SMART goals.
Finally the team is encouraged to establish its accountability mechanisms so that members follow through on the Transformation Roadmap.
Team Offsite example
Through a fun exercise in small numbers, team members were able to share their thoughts and feelings about their reality, the positive and the negative.
Through a series of questioning exercises, team members were able to collectively draft their purpose, the vision for their team, and their strategy (what they will focus on and how). This has helped the team align, collaborate and communicate more effectively.
Next, the coach prompted the team to imagine themselves post transformation, where everything changed for enhanced impact and fulfillment.
Team members were prompted to build their transformation Roadmap, with key transformation pilars, subtasks, and SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-based).
Finally the Team worked on accountability mechanisms to maximize
results.
Coaching start-up founders
Using DiSC profiles, the founders were able to better understand themselves, their communication preferences, drivers and triggers.
Through a series of exercises using DiSC, they were able to better grasp each others' styles and needs, beyond what they thought they already knew.
The exercise allowed them to use a new language, and then modify the way they communicate and cooperate.
Founders became aware of the unconscious team dynamics and behavioral patterns developed over time and that were getting in their way.
They were able to visualize the informal roles each of them was taking within the team. This empowered them to decide What needed to be changed for improved performance, and How (including personal development plans).
The founders used the team coaching to re-establish what Tasks they needed to undertake as a leadership team, versus as siloed individuals with distinct technical roles. They were then able to fully embrace their collective role and rebuild the appropriate structure and organisation/ governance to support their leadership Tasks.