Why does having a great team dynamic not necessarily lead to desired performance outcomes?
Why is it that a company can have a group of great individual leaders, but cannot successfully move the company forward?
Team Leadership Culture (TLC) was formed on the belief and experience that in order to take a company in new directions or to new heights, you must pay attention to and improve:
—Aligning TEAMS with the Strategy
—Developing Leaders to achieve the Strategy
—Shaping the Culture to support the Strategy
Paying attention to and working to improve BOTH the leaders as individuals AND the team dynamic gives the roadmap needed to move forward. In most cases, this also creates a positive corporate culture, which inevitably supports the overall strategy and bottom-line performance of a company.
Team
Change begins when the leaders of an organization begin to look inward first. They learn how they personally affect the organization and determine how their actions and behaviors can lead the way to improved organizational effectiveness.
It is absolutely essential that the leadership team believe in, commit to, and function as a team in order to successfully implement a team orientation across an organization. Without this model at the top, teamwork seldom reaches its full potential within the organization.
Just as with individual leaders, teams have a unique set of preferences, styles, and skill sets. These pieces must be understood before concepts like team dynamics, synergistic problem solving, or conflict management can be used to build a high performance team.
When the leaders have adopted an effective teamwork model, they can carry it through to other levels of an organization through modeling and education.
Leadership
The heart of the process is working with the individual leaders. In doing so, we will paint a detailed picture for each leader to help him/her understand their personal preference set, their style, and their skill set. We do this in a completely confidential environment designed to enhance personal growth and development.
How do we see ourselves? How do others see us? We tend to judge ourselves based on our intent, while we judge others based only on their actions. We walk leaders through a self-assessment and 360° feedback from peers and subordinates so they can understand the messages their actions are sending and how accurately these messages are received.
Preferences:
Each person has preferences for collecting data, thinking through processes and decisions, evaluating data and reaching conclusions, structure of his/her decision making process, and evaluating the impact of feelings and conflict. Understanding these preferences helps you increase personal effectiveness and understand dynamics between yourself and others so that better teamwork can be accomplished.
Style:
Every person has developed a style of management or pattern of behavior that is the cumulative result of lessons learned throughout a lifetime of experiences. If change is to take place in the future, there must be a clear understanding of what has led to the present state.
Skill:
Beyond preferences and style, each person has built a set of skills to accomplish the day-to-day demands of managing both tasks and people. Spending time on the right set of skills is critical to corporate success.
Culture
Research by Dr. Daniel R. Denison, indicates cultures that are strong in the four major areas of Adaptability, Involvement, Mission, and Consistency have an overall return on investment several times larger than companies that lack strength in these areas.
Adaptability:
Adaptability is driven by a strong customer focus, an ability to change, and a willingness to learn.
Involvement:
Involvement reflects decisions being made at the level where the best information resides, a team orientation throughout the company, and a consistent focus on improving the “bench strength” of the organization.
Mission:
Strong organizations have a shared vision, a clear understanding and acceptance of the mission, and ambitious, but realistic goal setting.
Consistency:
Strong organizations seem to have a real sense of core values. The leaders “walk the talk” and every part of the business is coordinated and integrated around this strong culture. The improved individual styles and the high-performance teams must all be focused on improving the organizational culture toward these four major categories.
Underlying Beliefs and Assumptions
As you look under the hood of high performance teams and leaders, you will find the two strong pistons of Humbleness and Strong Will.
Our practice is built on developing these two characteristics that are essential to successful leadership.
Our experience – supported by many years of business research – has identified these two characteristics as the pillars for building a leadership style that people will follow.
Clients and Experience
Over more than two decades, we’ve impacted leaders at various levels of organizations, including CEO’s, Presidents, VP’s, Directors and General Managers. These leaders were charged with leading groups of people from 2 to 200,000 to succeed in their fields.
Our clients’ industries include:
—Automotive
—Computers/High Tech
—Food
—Non-Profit
—Pharmaceutical & Health Care
—Publishing and Marketing
—Services
We’ve even worked for a parade company!
See our full client list.