It's not about team building

‘Team building’ is a common answer to an old problem that creates an average result - that's not what we do here.

When people think about consulting work as it relates to teams, there's a tendency to immediately start thinking about "team building" exercises (and for “team”, read anything from two people collaborating, all the way through to the organisation viewed as one entity). The challenge with such exercises is that you're not actually building a team, you're renovating one - the team has already been built. And a key challenge here is that, while there are many exercises that may help renovate a team, they rarely go to the underpinning operational foundation that can have the real, lasting impact.

When CRR delivers a consulting engagement to help harness the full capacity of a team or improve its resilience, our focal point is in working with the levers that are actually influencing the behavior and interactions of the team - not just the surface pieces.

Just a few example areas where we might focus would include:

• identifying and reducing the five team toxins (behaviours that subtly undermine great team performance)

• educating the team on the things that destroy relationships that we aren’t even aware of

• equipping the team to have conflict successfully, not just “make it go away”

• shifting perspectives so that the team can go way past “standing in other people’s shoes” and actually understand what’s happening in the team so that they can address both that need, and their own needs

• reducing the time it takes to make decisions while increasing the quality of those decisions

• designing team contracts that will allow the team to hold itself as resourceful and correct quickly

What’s important to understand is that while every team is absolutely different, the underlying fundamentals of relationship systems are consistent. When we work with those fundamentals, sustainable changes take place: crucial, powerful conversations start to happen, trust increases, productivity goes up, positivity goes up, tough decisions are taken, and teams start to support each other.

If you’re not convinced that your team, workgroup, department, division or organisation is operating at its full potential, then it’s time we had a conversation.

Call one of our partners, we are here to help....

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