What stops your teams from accelerating and delivering impact?

We often think of teams as a unit when they are, in fact, a collection of individuals. In working with teams over decades I have found that understanding the individual is key to delivering the best out of a team. I work with teams in diverse environments to accelerate and deliver tangible results quickly - all without losing the individual motivations that are key to unlocking individual and team performance.

How do you deliver team results fast and keep the team together?

Many are now familiar with Tuckman's Forming / Storming / Norming / Performing framework of teamwork. However, I find that there is often a significant gap between knowing the framework and being able to build teams for fast, effective delivery. Having worked with teams at all levels of organizations for over 20 years, I have built a deep understanding of how to quickly identify issues, surface them constructively and resolve them in a way that sets teams up for success. There is a fine line between building a workable team foundation and spinning wheels in discussion rather than active work.

Are your remote team procedures as outdated as these payphones?

I have been working to accelerate remote teams long before ‘shelter in place’ became the norm. For more than a decade at Harvard Business School I have been working with remote teams of busy executives in over eight time zones. There is, unfortunately, no magic ‘remote solution’ that works for all industries, companies, functions or people. There are, however a number of key themes and missteps I have learned from extensive experience which I can use to jump-start my coaching of remote teams.

Adapting to remote work can be difficult - some things that worked in person can be replicated, some can be adapted, still others need to be hacked or discarded. The nature of individuals and their personal situations can heavily influence certain aspects of a team dynamic - but these need to be solved in the context of the broader need for delivery of results. Approached in the right way, remote working can become a catalyst for improvement as it forces re-evaluation of meetings, deliverables and interactions. Creating a bespoke remote working approach for key teams ensures effective results delivery as well as employee engagement.

How do you differentiate constructive conflict from harmful conflict and find resolution?

Conflict is not inherently good or bad - but it is inevitable. Indeed, some conflict is necessary to ensure the best ideas are developed. Differentiating between harmful and constructive conflict requires going deeper to understand the hidden nuances underlying the conflict.

Resolving conflict usually starts with identifying where trust was broken, perspective taking in service of rebuilding trust, agreement on path forward and, most importantly, mechanisms for what to do when it happens again.

Can we do more with an asynchronous process for remote work?

I worked with a global non-profit organization struggling with the difficulties of remote work and cross-border dependencies. After discussions to better understand the particular pain-points and objectives we settled on a number of key team work streams in order to deliver significant improvement in impact. I spent time one-on-one with key individuals in each work stream to ensure that the material was relevant and customized to that locality.

Through our work we were able to deliver on a 24 hour work promise - hand-offs from Asia were able to be completed by Europe and the Americas and vice versa. The sun, literally, never set on the work. A combination of changes both small and large contributed to our success. On the smaller scale we found ways to build relationships remotely that in a national organization would have been built at conferences or the water cooler. On the larger scale we built formal mechanisms to ensure key dependencies were isolated and built into formal incentive systems.

What do we do when a critical team isn’t performing?

A high tech leader came to me when she was given a new special project team that the CEO believed was integral to the success of the company. Unfortunately the team was dispirited, cynical and gaining little traction because special teams in this company had a history of poor delivery, scapegoating, and career-limiting outcomes.

When I met with the team, they acknowledged a need to change both their belief about this ‘special’ team and their delivery. They decided that they wanted to be known as a ‘Kick-Ass Team’ - the high performing engineering team that everyone with talent would want to join.

Like the gazelle in the picture, they embodied their commitment to being a “Kick-Ass Team” Within a matter of months, the team was receiving requests from top-performing engineers to join and, more importantly, was regularly releasing top-notch code and ultimately delivered a great product to market.