Working With Teams
Effective teams have a common goal, understand their strengths and weaknesses
individually and collectively and can handle the inevitable tension associated
with prioritisation and decision making. Today it is rare to find a team outside
of the sports environment with the luxury of a single common goal and a stable
set of working relationships. The norm has become membership of multiple
interlocking teams, dynamic relationships and changing priorities and continuous
challenges to reduce costs.
What it takes to be effective in this world is shared context, a sufficient
understanding beyond our immediate activity to be alert to opportunities and
threats at the intersections of our activity. Effectiveness means taking into
account the whole picture when making decisions, looking for single actions that
can achieve multiple objectives rather than many separate actions competing to
move forward a single objective. Investment in shared context produces
effectiveness, doing the right things rather than efficiency, doing things
right.
There is little time out these days to hang out and reflect together;
however, time out listening and thinking can make the doing much more impactful.
We are not talking about playing games and socialising, although those can have
their place; we are talking about purposeful sharing, identification of
opportunities and getting into action.
Face to face time is too precious to spend on PowerPoint presentations, time
together should be spent experiencing the passion, frustration, energy or
excitement of each other as we communicate our stories and look for themes and
patterns. Our personal effectiveness can be more enhanced by really listening to
and understanding someone else than by getting our message across. We design
time together to enable meaningful dialogue and learning from each other.
The world is changing around us, in big ways and in small ways, each change
can call for something new from us individually and collectively. What worked in
the past will work in the future in some circumstances however when real change
is happening we find more and more circumstances where we need to find new
responses. Being able to talk about what worked before, be proud of that and
also ask the question what do we now need to learn now creates an atmosphere for
learning rather than defensiveness. Having these discussions openly improves
team effectiveness.
In times of change leadership often call for people to be positive, some
people are, some people know how to pretend and many despair of ever being able
to express what they really think and feel. We believe that people’s energy is
good and if it shows up as negative that is still good. The ability to use
‘negative’ energy to move things forward enables more grounded and real
conversations.
These are some of the ways we think about teams and making headway in
challenging times, they have worked for us in a wide range of circumstances and
we continue to develop our thinking with each engagement we accept.
Things to do
Travel Diaries
The Boathouse as a Venue
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Weather at The Boathouse
What's In The Forth?
Client Logins
Files for Downloading
- Boathouse Introduction
- ForthRoad Brand Story