For Teams

Programs for teams

All you need to know about teams

Building a powerful team

Building a powerful team is a process in several steps. From putting the team together to organizing work and get personal processes in sync. As a leader of a team you also need to work with yourself and your style in interacting with people, your personal leadership style, to ensure your positive impact on your team. A powerful team is not the same thing as a team without conflicts. On the contrary a powerful team has worked its’ way through the stages of forming a strong unit and found ways to face and use differences constructively.

When building your powerful team you may have use for an external person to facilitate, challenge and frame you from time to time. That is where team coaching comes into play. Team coaching is in many ways quite similar to coaching, except that in team coaching the group is the “identity” being coached. The team coach works to support the group in forming and following up on goals and to get all aspects of this group persona to work together.

Team development

A powerful team keeps developing as long as it exists. Any team is built of people with different preferences and working styles and as they change and develop, so does the team. With team maturity, the level of independence often increases which may bring new challenges to both members and team leader. When working with teams we often use the scale of independence to visualize and bring food for thought into conversations on challenges experienced by the team. Key to successfully leading your team is being able to balance systemic and individual level and being able to see your team persona and its’ needs. No team stays the same.

Dialogue is often the most powerful tool in developing as a team. Coming together in team building exercises can be an interesting way to bring novelty and shared experiences, dialogue and conversations make the experience part of team development through reflection.

Remote teams

In modern life teams are not always placed together in the same work place. Remote teams often benefit from adapting virtual team tools giving them the opportunity to see and non verbally interact. When working in remote teams it becomes even more essential to ensure team is given time to chat outside a formal agenda. In an ordinary office people meet up at the water cooler or in a Swedish office at the famous “fika-break”, the secret behind many innovative team projects.

Meeting up, exchanging ideas and connecting socially is a glue that holds the team together and a possibility to find that spark where your idea lights up mine. As a remote team leader you are wise to ensure some regularity in information sharing, clear agendas for virtual or phone meetings and to invite room for a few minutes of small talk as well. This can be done by creating a culture of logging in early to web-meetings, closing agenda a few minutes early or simply adding it as a point with an open name such as connecting, visions, “trends and troubles” or whatever suits your organisation as a frame work of casual conversations.

Remote teams often benefit form meeting up live every now and then. For some people it is a lot easier to work with someone you have actually met in real life. To others that makes no bigger difference. We believe that the importance of IRL-meetings will diminish as we get more and more used to working in virtual networks. Just ask the millennials around you - they are often more ready to work fully digital as a team.

Team coaching

In building as well as developing and maintaining teams a team coach is a valuable asset. Team coaching can be done as “one-hit-wonders” to inject the team with energy, shake assumptions around a bit or introduce new models. More effective is to embed team coaching in the daily life of the team. This can be done by regular coaching sessions or by a close co-operation with team coach and team leader where the leader calls in the coach at specific step stones and in between that works aligned with results of team coaching. Team coaching programs are often built as combinations between adding information and models, team building exercises and clear coaching towards specified team goals.

Virtual team coaching is a growing service that time efficiently get the team together. If you are leading a remote team don’t stop yourself from thinking of team coaching as a powerful resource. You don’t have to get everyone together in the actual room to have team coaching, just add a coach to the virtual structure you already have.