Why teambuilding is the last thing you need

For all their individual brilliance, most business teams will never hit their full potential.

Leaders intuitively sense the need for greater connection.

They know it's the basis for the top team to figure out how to work better together.

The problem then becomes an over-supply of "team development" solutions that are woefully inadequate for the scale and nature of the challenge – and the opportunity – that senior teams are facing. Common "misses" include:

Following the latest academic or Strategy House model, instead of tapping into your own genius to find your own answers
Haphazard workshops that seldom bottom out the most important issues, and fail on sustained follow-up
Disjointed use of team psychometrics, or leader development work that fails to deliver lasting performance gains
In-expertly facilitated "Leadership Vulnerability" type workshops (see TRUST for more on this one)
“Work hard play hard” get-togethers (we're amazed how many firms still see this as a mainstay for senior team cohesion), where the lasting memory for some is who racked up the most gruelling hangover

With the resulting limited growth in top team impact, leaders can lose confidence in the prospect of fixing the behaviour and mindset issues the organisation most needs to address.

In our experience, legacy mind-sets and behaviours in organisations are symptoms that rapidly start to resolve, when top teams start doing the work they need to for themselves. Teambuilding becomes a by-product of an intentional process including to:

- build individual and team capacity for self awareness and reflection

- have the impossible conversations you have never been able to properly open or properly resolve

- create personal trust between team members, trust in the strength of the team, and trust in the decisions you take

- align on leader team purpose (NOT the same as your business objectives)

- establish safe-to-fail experiments to push against fears and assumptions, and generate peer-learning loops

This kind of a process is the key to unlocking the massive extra difference only the top team can make. It is the basis for closing the gap between transformation rhetoric, and on-the-ground reality at all levels.

Our clients are seasoned global players. They’ve seen all manner of change challenge before. And they’re reporting our approach as the most time and cost effective way to enhance this utterly business critical metric: the impact and influence of teams at the top of organisations.