Building the Top Team

Challenge

This executive team in the beer industry was a bunch of rock stars but not quite a band. Fantastic functional contributors, totally committed to their functional management teams, but not quite coming together as a top team. 

Solution

Getting to know each other as humans was the starting point. Using Insights Discovery we then helped them to get to know themselves… their drivers, stress points, strengths, blind spots. We had some frank discussions about how each contributes to the team and, crucially, how they detract. That landing is made softer when it’s positioned not as ‘this is what bugs me about you’ but as ‘these are examples of where I observe you really bringing value to the team, and these are examples of where you don’t’. Not always an easy discussion but always value add, helped in this case by a leader who is courageous enough to confront his own blind spots. Sharing specific examples to support peoples’ experience of each other really helps messages to land. Each person committed to personal actions to take forward, enabling follow up discussion, coaching, and accountability.

Once individuals made progress we then regrouped to work on the team. Using the Insights Team Effectiveness model, the team assessed its own strengths and opportunities in the context of their collective aim. Shifting the focus from what they achieve to how they go about it gave rise to new insights and actions to take them further as a top team.