Focus Areas to Build Team Effectiveness
What Skills and Proficiencies Does Your Team Need to Develop?
The team’s goals and business challenges create new skills areas and competencies for even the most experienced team.
Team effectiveness coaching is tailored to meet the needs of each team. Is this a new or existing team? Global in scope? Impacting organizational direction? Is there likely to be significant change management issues? Is this more of tactical team addressing operations, logistics, process to improve efficiencies? Is this a crisis team brought together to address an emergency or as a response to a competitive threat? What is the prior experience of the members in working as a team?
Needs are identified in:
- the initial discovery when scoping the work
- in team effectiveness workshops
- during ongoing coaching in day to day work sessions.
Needs reveal themselves as the team executes it’s work.
We worked with Versicon on a company-wide business transformation program. The leadership team’s goal was to focus on sales growth and profits. We realized that the account managers needed coaching for skills development to change the way we do business through improved skills and team effectiveness.
We started out coaching the Account Management Team. This quickly extended to include Solution Architects and Executive Sales Management. Gary’s work in team coaching enabled us to grow as a company and culture on multiple levels. Versicon’s versatility, dedication and focus supports us in improving sales and profitability.
Ted D. | CEO and Co-Founder | Information Technology Services Firm, Sales and Business Team Coaching
Focus Areas for Your Team
During our work with the sponsor, team lead and the team, we evaluate the areas below. This helps ensure the team has the skills and current competencies needed to reach their goals. Versicon leverages skills and experience in team coaching, individual coaching, training, consulting and facilitating to provide support in the special focus areas. The mix of services we provide is based on each team’s individual needs.
Teams often identify this as an areas to improve. Focus is on ‘sound decision making’, engaging needed parties and using a structured process to make timely decisions and to avoid delays.
Most teams will have some member turnover. An effective method to integrate new members is critical. This minimizes the impact of team member changes. Done correctly, negative impacts are minimal and new members embrace team mission, spirit and norms.
Some teams have complex issues and risks to manage. Techniques are taught to identify, surface, manage and mitigate risks and issues. Strategies are identified for escalating and driving timely resolution of risks and issues to avoid delays.
The work of teams often involves or results in change. Focus is on assessing degree of change, impacted parties, cultural issues, potential resistance and managing change for success.
In spite of a successful project or team initiative, failure can occur in the implementation phase. Focus is on creating a framework, communication, readiness, support and monitoring in the ‘operate’ phase.
Focus is on cultural differences and commonalities. Practical recommendations show how to optimize efforts on global projects. Training crosses all phases of a team’s work from initiation, building trust through to completion.
Virtual teams create new challenges and opportunities to directly engage members across geographies. Learn skills to engage all members and make sure the project includes people with a physical ‘seat at the table’ as well as virtual team members. Examine the use of tools like Zoom for video-based meetings.
The Agile framework was created to support streamlined software development. Work is done on a more collaborative basis by self-organizing and cross-functional teams and their customer(s)/end user(s) to drive the process. Today it is used for software development and many other areas. Explore how Agile and Scrum may suit your needs.
An ‘Agile Mindset’ is about adaptive planning, iterative development, nimble thinking, continual improvement and planning. It encourages rapid and flexible response to change and uses a different approach to the way teams organize and work. Learn how and where an Agile Mindset can be of help to you.
Quality, service reliability, and ensuring operational readiness is an important area for some projects. Focus is on planning and managing quality & readiness.
This is one of the most important and difficult areas for teams to talk about. Explore ways to build trust, to align on expectations, and explore the strong interrelationships between trust, accountability, transparency and commitment. We help teams succeed in addressing this critical need.
Teams also identify this as a major area for improvement. Change the way meetings are run to be more effective. Focus is on collective team engagement, process AND behavior changes to increase effectiveness.
All teams have goals, plans and tasks. Finding an effective, low-overhead way to manage them is key. We will show you efficient, modern tools that make it easier and timely to manage work and create accountability. Strategies to support team effective communication are reviewed. This need varies by type of team, goals and tools in place.
An area that can greatly strengthen your team and save time is having the right tools and processes. Today powerful, inexpensive tools support the work of teams. We guide teams in identifying and selecting ‘best fit’ tools to support the team. Having the ‘right’ toolkit makes a world of difference.
Teams may be formed with individuals with no prior associations. Some teams have to respond rapidly to crisis or pressing issues and need to accelerate development. Our coaches will help you with a plan to accelerate the formation, growth and coalescing of the team.
Almost every organization has broken or weak relationships between departments and functions that negatively impact team performance. We help teams with a highly effective framework to address this impediment. Learn a structured approach to reinvent relationships and steadily improve collaboration.
The Team Leader can have a major impact on teams and the team may require a strong leader to provide direction. Experience of Team Leaders varies greatly. We can assist with one-on-one training of team leaders. Training may include guidance on organizational engagement and socializing team results to build adoption.
Ensuring alignment and good communication with stakeholders is key to team success. Assessing, building and managing stakeholders and developing an effective communication plan is examined.
For large scale changes or team projects, a steady cumulative communication effort is needed to maintain visibility, support and to socialize change readiness. Existing communication channels are evaluated and tuned to reach stakeholders. Cultivating management support for team communication is reviewed.
In today’s business world, many services are purchased, and building an effective vendor partnership and Service Level Agreement (SLA) is critical for quality results. Learn strategies for negotiating, onboarding, developing a vendor partnership and holding vendors accountable.
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Would you like to discuss your needs and goals? If you’re interested in finding out more or would like to work with me, please reach out and say hello.