Professional Services

Enabling Breakthrough Performance

Project Scope
A multinational organization with a professional team in a climate of business transition in need of performance improvement and skills in dealing with difficult situations.

The client is a fully integrated business organized in a matrix reporting environment. In this climate with forthcoming change to consolidate product and service deliverables, the organization’s leadership requires a more empowered leadership team within this professional services group whose focus is to manage and operate the business and deliver expected results. There are as many as nine new members of the team including new heads on the business side and operating side in this manufacturing location.

In addition to the organization changes, there are people issues. The consulting initiative for this team is expected to address cross-functional team interface in such areas as project management, contracts administration, sales, contracting, engineering, and operations.

This management group has struggled to achieve consistent results in customer satisfaction, including on-time delivery, quality issues, addressing customer needs, and working effectively as a team to meet the day to day business challenges. This has resulted in a cause for concern for the long-term health of the business, maintaining, winning and delivering on new and extended contracts.

Senior management’s desire is to provide this senior team with an initial team building experience to establish, enhance and promote more effective partnerships among senior team members; create a climate for sharing ideas, building trust and maintaining good relationships within the team, and enhancing leadership skills for the team, to work more effectively with one another and with their constituents while exceeding customer expectation and continuing to meet operating goals for the business.

The first phase of the project centered on a pre-work step of self, and team assessment of team members, including collecting team member’s anonymous perceptions across the group, and determine: overall team function, current climate, culture, team strengths weaknesses, perceived obstacles, role clarity, how conflict is handled, perceptions of senior leader’s style, and individual expectations for the offsite experience, and how this leadership team works together – and with their constituencies – across key dimensions.

Though this pre-work we established individual and team development opportunities, analyzed information about specific issues that may negatively impact a team's work performance, and set the stage to prioritize those areas that negatively affect organizational performance, overall. Through a customized team building initiative, we established how the team members would learn how best to meet the challenges facing the team, how to build on the existing team strengths and establish actionable plans to commit the team to improve its performance.

Assessments revealed development opportunities for dealing with difficult situations, equipping team members with advanced communication skills and new competencies to deal with individual and team centered conflict (using the ISkillsZone model and the Conflict Dynamics Profile). A clear need was for the team to become a real team – centered on mutual goals with clear norms and come to a better understanding of the stages of dysfunctional teams and working together to: build trust, manage fear of conflict, accept accountability, securing commitment, and delivering results. Additionally, measuring three key areas of team effectiveness, team conditions (safety, openness), team processes (how work gets done), and team outcomes (results the team achieves) revealed specific and measureable areas for improvement.

The next phase of this intervention centered on presenting the rollup results of the pre-work to team members, and a roadmap for team development to establish immediate focus on the work to be done by the team.

Our objective was to guide participants to invest their skill and passion in a collective manner for the greater good of the organization, build trust in one another, and develop team working relationships toward delivering breakthrough performance. Global leadership team established these goals:

• Demonstrate commitment to team success by delivering results despite external pressures and work responsibilities.
• Share responsibility for effective group dynamics, trust building and conflict resolution.
• Meet the changing - and often complex - needs of a co-located, virtual, cross functional, or dispersed teams.
• Influence others within the organization, so that the team can achieve greater results.

Project Summary
A series of facilitated team off sites positioned the team learning over several months. Outcomes and metrics indicated significant improvement in team effectiveness, greater collaboration, a higher degree of trust, and greater collaboration in naming and delivering a radical process to achieve breakthrough performance.

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