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As a leader, you and your team work IN your business each and every day; how often do you work ON your business?
By that I mean, how often do you, and your team, reflect on and seek feedback on whether you are adding value to all of your stakeholders? And doing so in a way which equally engages your team members so that there is nowhere else they’d rather be than in your team?
Recently, I’ve been approached by two senior leaders of large extended teams to support their team development. Interestingly, they had initially compartmentalised this as about improving how the team works together and building capability; they had kept their purpose, strategy, objectives, processes etc. separate. I’ve found from experience that it is better to start from the outside in to understand what your stakeholders need from you, and hence what your purpose is, and then really enable your team to perform AND develop your team in line with this – below I share more about why, and what this means.
The 5 Disciplines of Value Creating Teams
In 2020 I studied team coaching with the global team coaching institute set up by industry thought leaders Peter Hawkins and David Clutterbuck. They shared a model that enables a leader and their team to ensure that they are high performing – the 5 disciplines of value creating teams.
Reviewing each of the 5 disciplines as a team ensures that the team focuses both inwardly on what the team needs as well as and outwardly on what your stakeholders need.
And here’s the thing … Focusing outwards first on your critical stakeholders enables you and the team to understand if you are meeting stakeholder needs and if not, why not. It provides data for what you as a whole team may need to focus on to develop in service of great performance (with performance measured by stakeholders, not by the team itself).
Why do this?
You’re a busy leader, right? You have enough on your plate just getting the day job done. And yet what if what you are doing isn’t actually adding the value it could be? What if those stakeholders that ultimately decide on your performance and potential for promotion or career advancement aren’t happy? What if your team members aren’t clear on the purpose of the team, and don’t feel they can make a difference, to the point that they decide to go elsewhere? It’s better to know all of this sooner rather than later and to be proactive in setting it right.
How do you do this?
- Start with the ‘Connecting’ discipline.
Consider with your team, what data do we need to know to understand if we are adding value to our stakeholders? And what data do we need to know to understand if we, as a team, are performing to the best of our ability, being co-accountable and future-fit?
For example, for stakeholders, ask:- What purpose does our team serve, and how could we increase the impact of the team from your perspective?
- How does your role and function currently get value from the team?
- How could your role and function get greater value from the team?
For team members using questions that explore team effectiveness and dynamics such as Lencioni can be helpful.
- Once you have a clear, shared picture from stakeholders and from within the team, move to ‘Commissioning’ – it can be helpful here to define the Purpose of the team in a way which resonates with stakeholders but also inspires the team and ensures alignment. A purpose statement is powerful and can still be succinct when it includes:
- What your work as a team is in service of
- The role you play as a team in delivering the ‘what’
- How you will be, or behave together to deliver the ‘what’
- Once you have a purpose, it is easier to spend time on ‘Clarifying’ so that the team is clear on objectives, roles etc. that enable the purpose.
- Next comes ‘Co-creating’ which focuses on looking inwardly using the data you collected on the team and together developing to enable productive team dynamics and interactions.
- Finally, ‘Core-learning’ is about ensuring continuous reflection and improvement. Checking in against the team standards you have set and using a simple framework like ‘what’s working, what’s not working yet, what’s missing, what’s possible’ is a great conversation starter.
If you’ve not ‘sharpened the saw’ like this with your team yet, what might your first step be? And, if you’d like some help to define the process and facilitate the key conversations, feel free to get in touch to explore what’s possible.
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