Teams and Growth

There can be no doubt that successful teams contribute hugely to organisational performance and conversely poor performing teams create significant risks to an organisation’s growth and success.

Surfacing Performance in Teams

Our method enables the immediate (re)alignment of the performance contribution of individuals (&teams), now, for the current growth cycle; it is about what people can do for change, not what change can do for people (the time window for personal development is wider than the window of opportunity business needs to respond to, because of this ‘development plans’ serve the needs of the next, not current, growth cycle).

A key challenge for organisations is how to compose teams whose abilities match their goals and reduce the risk of failure in high impact projects? For the prospective team member, the equal challenge is how can they be sure that the role of the team and its strategic context will contribute to their own growth?

Key performance challenges about teams, faced by organisations and individuals alike, include:

ensuring that teams have the strategic diversity to deliver performance goals
improving / de-risking intact teams which are not performing
dynamically configuring teams for organisational performance and individual growth and well-being; accepting the growth curve means accepting the ever changing task
diagnosing of key issues for leadership teams and the taking of well-timed, and well-connected, steps along the growth curve to be made

Human Insight methodologies provide accessible and immediately actionable insights that greatly enhance the likelihood of realising high performance teams that also provide growth opportunities for their members.

Pro-fitting Teams for Performance

Complementarity / Diversity

Our method enables the immediate (re) alignment of the performance contribution of teams, now, for the current growth cycle;it is about what people can do for change, not aboutwhat change can do for people (the time window for team development is wider than the window of opportunity business needs to respond to, because of this ‘development plans’ serve the needs of the next growth cycle, not the current one).

Team success depends on having the right mix of skills and not the right personalities. Skills are often categorised into the areas of:

technical and functional knowledge
problem solving and decision making, and
interpersonal

Our method, using AEM-cube® and S-curve methodologies, focuses on the second of these areas - on how individual team members:

approach change and performance
identify problems and opportunities
evaluate the options and risks for moving forward, and
make judgments on the necessary trade-offs and decisions as to how to proceed

Natural Contribution and the Growth Curve

Everyone has the talent to contribute to change and growth but no individual can, nor should expect to, contribute to everything optimally; everybody can be creative, some people can be exploratory, but nobody can do innovation on their own – the growth process will see to it that people will ‘run out’ of their competencies.

Modelling the growth process using the S-curve helps explain what can go wrong with team performance.

Each stage of the S-curve has different performance requirements. Developing ideas is different from achieving profit from those ideas. So the more strategically diverse the team, the more likely it is to be able to meet the challenges at each of the stages of the growth process. For example:-

the early stages of the growth process needs performance with an exploratory, inventive, focus and an intuitive style of working to deal with the uncertainty present at the early stage of the growth cycle; e.g. a research and development team
the middle stages of an S-curve requires performance that is focused more on the short term, building scale and extracting value from that created earlier; e.g. a production team
the later stages of growth, as an organisation moves from an investment driven stage to the optimal point focused on margin, requires performance that is focused on control; maximizing the return on investment, being profit driven and fully exploiting the value created earlier in the growth process; e.g. a finance team

Teams that do not have the appropriate balance of talent / performance contribution cannot deliver performance across a growth process – even though they may be functionally representative and have a healthy interpersonal dynamic; the growth process itself will see to it that the team will ‘run out’ of its competency.

Illustrating each team member’s performance talent in one 3D picture, our method simultaneously enables both the evaluation and design of the team’s performance diversity - how the contribution of each individual team member’s performance complements that of others in pursuit of the strategy and how it develops over time.

Use

Use our method to:

see at a glance the strategic diversity the team possesses to deliver itscurrent performance goals
enable the immediate (re)alignment of the performance contribution of teams, now, for the current growth cycle; it is about what people can do for change, not what change can do for people (the time window for team development is wider than the window of opportunity business needs to respond to, because of this ‘development plans’ serve the needs of the next, not current, growth cycle).
guide the necessary composition change of a team as the challenge shifts through invention and entrepreneurship, to the need for operational excellence and then to the support and control needed to achieve the return on investment; always change a winning team
shift investment from ‘development’ to strategy and timing
provide insight into the talent - natural,recurring and enduringpatterns of performance - that people have for contributing to growth, or change
allow teams to evaluate what, and in what way, each individual can best contribute to the goals of the team in terms of performance, rather than personality or behaviour
enable the team to tap into individuals’ qualities appreciatively, rather than trying to get them to work against their natural instincts
illuminate the basis for behaviour - the tendency, or style that influences an individual’s contribution to team performance; not the behaviour itself
align roles to talent
help leadership teams to provide the consistent leadership style in their organisation which creates the sense of belonging and trust necessary to encourage performance, change and new ideas

Applications

Application areas include:

executive teams
management teams
project teams
change teams
teams as a vehicle for individual growth
dynamic team configuration

Benefits

Benefits enabled by our methodology include:

the alignment of individual and team success
achieving both organisational performance and individual learning and development
the building of mutual trust
the provision of a dialogue which can be used to resolve conflicts, and builds effective team working
the provision of deeper and more actionable insights than profiling behaviours and competencies
performance benefits