If you consider that your organisation’s competitive advantage is hidden and lying dormant within your teams, investing in them to best guarantee performance at or near their peak makes good business sense.
Patrick Lencioni, in the introduction of his 2001 book, The Five Disfunctions of a Team, starts by saying “Not finance. Not strategy. Not technology. It is teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it so powerful and so rare.”
The environment in which senior teams operate is highly competitive so any excessive time spent getting a small ‘group’ of people to unite and become a ‘team’ is time generously handed over to a competitor, for free!
We believe collaborative teamwork is the powerhouse behind team performance and that it’s completely dependent on high levels of trust, purpose and commitment. Teams that focus on these ‘soft’ elements before anything else will start to generate genuine collaboration, will soon be outperforming their competitors and will be ever closer to reaching their peak.
Our Team Coaching Program, based on the Stakeholder Centred Coaching methodology of Marshall Goldsmith, will rapidly bring your team together, allowing it to make the powerful shift from cooperation to collaboration.
If you were to ask each member of your team to individually score the team’s performance between 1-10, you would find the average score is close to 5.8 (based on Marshall Goldsmith data).If you then asked them to score how well they SHOULD be doing, the average would be around 8.7. Our job isto help you close that gap. It's that simple.
The team articulates one collective leadership growth area and each team member identifies one individual growth area related to team focus and purpose. This creates an interdependent team effort with everyone jumping onboard, knowingly and actively working on leadership behaviours simultaneously.
Team members will be in a position to provide expert advice, and an insider view, as it relates to each other's business, people, and team culture challenges. They become de facto coaches to each other!
When team members collaborate as stakeholders in our Team Coaching programs it creates an open culture for leadership and team culture change. Furthermore, team members feel comfortable using feedback and 'feed forward' around the organisation to drive change for themselves and their teams.
Some organisations use coaching as an 'executive intervention' or to 'fix a problem', but we advise against this. Organisational leaders should be skilled coaches helping their teams develop and grow in the same way we expect them to be highly skilled in communication, decision making and empowerment. Team coaching is a great program to instill a coaching culture throughout your organisation.
Since one Waterline coach works with all team members supporting each other in this Team Coaching process, the whole program is very time efficient and reduces coaching fees per team member.
Strengths awareness is as powerful for teams as it is for individuals. It allows each team member, including the leader, to better understand the collective pool of talents and to become more aware of blind spots and limitations. When a team has taken the time to get onboard and develop a deeper understanding of each other, it invariably leads to better collaboration, cohesion and results.
“Will has facilitated several coaching sessions with the team here at our business unit in recent months and the results have been excellent. He’s worked primarily with the senior team and managed to subtly guide us through a maze of blockages before focussing our attention on a behaviours framework. The work is ongoing but we all sense that we’re really getting somewhere.”
"Two years ago in my role as Director of Development and Marketing at TAS, Helen introduced us to CliftonStrengths and the difference it made to the 30 staff who undertook the assessment and de-brief was profound. Teams within the school started to work more collegially and there was a better and deeper understanding of what positive attributes everyone brought to the workplace and how we could all maximise them. It made a profound difference to the operations of the School."
