Team Development

Today, organizations of all sizes (including emerging, small and mid-size businesses) are redesigning their structures to be more agile and adaptive. To better respond to today’s competitive and fast-pace business landscape, autonomous, flexible networks of teams are replacing traditional hierarchies.

Teams are formed to meet a need; they are empowered to take action; and they disband when their work is done. Individuals can serve on multiple teams which may be multi-disciplinary, cross-functional, culturally diverse, virtual ..... and increasingly structured through a mix of contingent or freelancing professionals and employees.

Getting the optimal team structure and mix combined with clarity of purpose has never been more important. Leading today's business teams has never been more challenging or critical to achieving business goals. As important for the organization are talented individual contributors who possess the skills to function effectively on the teams to which they belong.

While it can be humbling for a leader to ask for help, the payoffs can be huge in terms of leader, team member and organizational success. Call for a consultation so we might learn more about supporting your team to reach its goals.

“Many of the business issues that we face today within our globalized environment can no longer be solved by a single field of endeavor, let alone a single business leader, manager or employee.” (Gibbs, 2015).

What is Team Development?

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Put simply, Team Development is focused on both reducing the time to create a high-performing team and elevating the team to sustained levels of collective performance that achieve or exceed desired goals. The specifics of a team development enagement will vary, but may involve a number of activities, not limited to:

Clarifying and prioritizing business objectives
Focusing the team on strategic and long-term goals
Assessing the current functioning of the team and establishing a developmental roadmap
Uniting teams on a shared purpose; creating authentic commitment and aligned expectations
Assessing individual and team strengths and challenges
Measuring and providing feedback on team performance, enabling progressive improvement and a greater contribution
Ensuring all team members take responsibility for the team's achievement, ensuring consistency and quality of team outputs
Resolving team differences, managing conflict and teaching the team to self-manage more effectively
Increasing the team’s agility, adaptability and resilience
Coaching the team on managing up and the leader to more effectively coach the team

Our Approach to Team Development

Team Development Overview

AJO’s Team Development approach starts with an exploration of four components that are known to have a significant impact on team performance:

Size and Structure of the Team – Team size and structure are crucial for maximizing productivity. As much as 70% of team effectiveness is related to team structure and design. The ideal team size depends on team purpose, type of work, team structure, composition and capabilities. Many teams are simply too big. We can support both “right sizing” and optimizing your team's structure.
Clarity of Purpose – A clear purpose is a fundamental to a team’s ability to accelerate. There’s a 29% increase in financial return when team members understand their company’s mission and goals. We can help you obtain a clear line of sight to the required team impact, including associated metrics to measure results.
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Capabilities – The real payoff in team performance results from the combination of team member capabilities and contributions. Having the right talent for the type of work; the right mix of talent working optimally together; and keeping that talent engaged is the ever-evolving challenge of teams. We can help assess your team's capabilities, including any gaps.
Leadership and Behavior – The best team will flounder without leadership and team spirit. The leader sets the tone. Accelerating a leader’s performance goes hand in hand with accelerating a team’s performance. Holding team leaders accountable for improvement of the soft factors is imperative for team growth and performance. Friction causes drag in physics and the same is true of teams. We can help you identify drive and drag factors.

AJO has worked with teams in a number of challenging situations. The following scenarios are typical of our work and offer the opportunity for team development /coaching to make a significant impact:

A newly formed team defining its role with a new leader at the helm
An under-performing team aspiring to achieve much more
A leadership team in transformation facing massive market and organizational restructuring
Global, virtual and cross functional teams with interaction challenges/barriers
A team experiencing debilitating conflict with team members refusing to speak to each other
A team who learned they weren’t a team, but a working group

Transformation of a Leadership Team Infographic

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A key step in our Team Development process is to gather feedback at key stages in the process. This includes measuring performance before, during and after an engagement. For more details of our partnership work, we invite you to browse the materials in this section and by following the link below.

Team Development