A thriving and high performing team has “momentum”, and is almost impossible to stop. Such teams pursue a shared purpose, feel united, and act with commitment. Here, people flourish individually and as a group.

This is not utopia, but for sure, thriving team cultures do not happen by accident. It’s so much more than just gluing individual values and behaviors together. It is about forming an alliance of diverse people, where individual motivation, values, and behaviors weave together to shape the overall team dynamic.

As team coaches, we enable teams to:

• Convene and contract with each other, to improve psychological safety and team performance.

• Create new choices that members might not even know they have, and instil a constructive conflict code.

• Co-create with a shared purpose and unconditional positive regard for each other.

• Leave the “cozy club”, and nurture a high challenge, high support performance-culture.

• Adopt meaningful assessments, to build team strengths, better communication and to navigate the polarities that can too easily pull teams apart.

TEAM MOMENTUM & HIGH PERFORMANCE enablement.

• Systemic Team Coaching of C-suite, senior leadership and functional teams.

• 7 Bases Team Development framework and assessment.

• Team effectiveness and momentum building.

• Resolving team dysfunction, and build the team’s conflict code.

• Formulation and commitment to a Powerful Team Identity, Purpose and Vision

• Assessment and Building of Team Culture and Strengths.

• Team Strengths Profile and Team Polarity assessments.

7 Bases Team Framework.

THE 7 BASES FRAMEWORK.

The framework connects 7 elements of thriving and high performing teams, in a flexible, yet structured way. It is a structure that creates space for the emotions a team experience, and it fosters the debates that teams must have. With the framework, teams reveal their team’s emotions and “voices” of the system. It gives us something tangible to work with.

The 7 interlinked bases each represent a vital theme that teams must cover. Only then is it possible to fully thrive and high perform. If a base is not covered, the team feels that “something is missing”, and team collaboration and performance stay below its full potential.

We use the 7 Bases Framework in three ways as:

1. A coaching framework.

2. An assessment.

3. A leader and talent development journey framework.

EXAMPLE: WHEN LOW TEAM CONFIDENCE HURTS THE TEAM.

This pharma company’s performance is excellent, but the executive team has a tendency to focus more on their individual areas of responsibility than the overall performance. The CEO wanted the executive team to become Team One, and to be more cohesive and strategic in their work.

When we benchmarked the member’s level of confidence in themselves, with their level of confidence in the executive team, it turned out that there was an unhealthy imbalance that drove the team apart. Several members doubted their team’s ability to get the job done, and consequently demonstrated dysfunctional behaviours that negatively impacted the team and  the entire organization: Micro management and unaligned actions. 

When the team realized this imbalance, we could identify the dysfunctional behaviours and the underlying reasons. We started covering some of the other bases in the framework, that had so-far been left uncovered.

This is a paraphrasing of what emerged:

• Low Clarity: “The vision is great, but we have conflicting goals”.

• Low Connection: “We don’t know each other well, and most of us have never met in person”.

• Low Accountability: “I don’t want to be challenged by someone who doesn’t know my business area”.

When opinions like these surface, it is a critical situation, with risks and opportunities. It was a process that needed to happen, and we only got there because we first uncovered where the team was not in sync: The lack of confidence in the team. Today, the team is on a good path to become a cohesive Team One, instead of being a group of department heads only.