Winning Work Teams

When was the last time you read a great article or book related to teamwork or team development? Most managers and leaders we talk with cannot think of a book they would recommend on this topic. That’s because teamwork and team effectiveness involve a wide range of human interaction, goal setting, problem solving, leadership, and project or work specific factors that must be addressed in a dynamic environment.

Extraordinary Teams (ETs) Win more often than others and they achieve ground breaking results. How? There are 4 major factors:

Purpose- Extraordinary teams have a clear sense of purpose that goes beyond productivity and includes customer satisfaction or social impact objectives.
Goals- ETs also have clearly defined goals that are measured on a weekly and monthly basis to prevent slippage in pace to year-end goals.
Roles – Next ETs clearly define individual team member roles and responsibilities to drive accountability and the opportunity to celebrate individual contributions.
Process Innovation – ET’s also innovate process to improve effectiveness and they achieve this through open dialogue and a culture of communication that encourages and creates engagement. Sound complicated? It can be. Getting here or maintaining the highest levels of teamwork is an on-going effort and this requires investment in teamwork.

Think about it, professional work teams are the only competitive teams that do not take time to practice. Sports and military teams spend more time practicing and preparing than they do executing the game or the mission. Individually and when the stakes are high, most of us practice and prepare in a 2:1 or 3:1 ratio. We do this when we are going to give an important presentation; we take 2 to 3 hours or more to prepare a 1 hour presentation.

As a former coach and Army Veteran, I know the importance of practice. That’s why my partners and I developed the Empower Leadership process. We develop highly effective teams through a proven system of team assessment. This process assesses current levels of teamwork in a number of critical areas.

Next we design and put teams through real-time simulations and challenges that test a teams current ability and also highlight areas for improvement.

Then we equip teams with tools, models, and skills that transform ordinary teams into Extraordinary Teams by:

Building commitment to team culture.
Introducing outcome-driven approaches for communication and feedback
We use our canopy tour and zip lines, and other exciting team challenges to help teams discover that they can have fun achieving seemingly impossible objectives.