Team building might not be the answer

Building an effective and high performing team takes time and effort. It’s not easy but we spend a lot of our time supporting our clients in bringing teams together to improve the way they work together, reduce conflict, enhance communication and build trust. But we often find that team building is not always the answer!

Business owners and leaders who come to us quite often saying they are looking for some team building or are not quite sure what they need, are often surprised about how we start the conversation and what they leave wanting to go for.

We always ask a ton of questions to really get to the bottom of what’s going on in the business and truly understand as much as possible about what all the issues, challenges or problems are. This is all part of the service! We find a consultative approach helps owners and leaders to start to move towards the heart of the matter.  Quite often they talk about symptoms, and we help to get to the root causes. Even at this early stage we massively support our clients thinking.

We will ask potential clients to think through their key priorities and challenges from the perspective of engaging and developing their team to understand more around the challenges that the business is experiencing.

What are their current pain points and challenges?

What is causing the problems /challenges?

What impact is this having on business?  What about them personally?

We provide a safe and confidential environment for sharing and working on challenges and quite often uncover:

• a lack of vision or direction
• poor articulation of strategy or lack of
• lack of communication at various levels
• destructive conflict left unaddressed
• poor or inexperienced leadership
• lack of performance management
• little praise or appreciation
• talent walking out of the door

We will work to find the best solution for each client and each situation. There’s no judgement here, often some of the best people we know are tripped up by some of the issues above.  The most important thing is the will to improve the situation and commitment to the resource needed. Our solutions are always specific and bespoke with a focus on outcomes and the impact of our work on the people and teams involved.

Quite often an employee engagement programme and survey is a good place to start to identify how engaged employees are and identify the steps needed to take to create a more motivated, productive and profitable workforce. We’ll help clients measure, maintain and improve employee attitudes in a way that will work for their business and work with them to create a clear, realistic and manageable action plan that will drive up engagement and transform their business performance and profitability.

We offer a range of leadership programmes, people strategies, organisational development, consultancy, coaching and mentoring, team building and training that will help you retain and attract talent, and engage and develop people, leaders and teams ensuring you always get a return on your investment.  Ultimately, we want to improve engagement, productivity, and profit across the business to ensure that everyone thrives.  Have a look on our website to see the range of areas we can help with.

Where there are real business issues getting in the way of a team’s performance, we will help you to make the most of your team to enable them to be their best and contribute to the success you deserve. You might be surprised though where the conversation ends up and what you walk away with!  But we can promise, whatever it is, we’ll be with you every step of the way.

Just get in touch if any of this has struck a chord!