Launching teamSalient^®

Tried and tested – developed with teams, for teams

All of our work is with teams: coaching them; developing them; helping design them and supporting them when they get stuck. We have worked in, led teams, and coached and consulted with, and to, them. We have experienced teams first-hand. We know teams.

teamSalient® developed with teams, for teams.

The science behind effective teams

We found we were receiving increasing numbers of what we call ‘distress’ purchase calls from either leaders of teams or from others on their behalf. Most of these calls described symptoms of issues teams were grappling with. Many of these indicators were behavioural and between team members – John talks over Baljt; Nancy is disengaged and refuses to speak up; Sarah and Ryan just won’t co-operate, and so on. Team leaders or others tasked with supporting teams, such as HR professionals, were finding it difficult to pinpoint precisely the nature of what they were describing. We knew from experience that these so-called ‘presenting’ issues were often manifestations of something else going on within the team. In other words, what you see is not what you get. These signs were generally not the causes of problems within a team, yet teams still wanted to be able to identify them and make clearer sense of what was going on. Teams were finding it difficult to do this on their own and wanted to find a more accurate way of achieving this – and faster.

Measuring team effectiveness and performance

If you are finding it tricky to identify issues within your team, you are not alone. This is commonplace. Issues facing teams are often opaque and slippery. Teams call us in the hope that they can get more clarity on what they are grappling with whether these are issues to be resolved or opportunities for the team to become even better. We saw that teams were finding it really difficult to self-assess accurately and decide just how effective they were with any degree of certainty and confidence. Harder still was when opinions about this varied across the team leading to disagreements on where the team needed to focus to develop and improve.

Being clearer on causal factors in the team was important but so was getting buy in and agreement from across the whole team. Without this shared understanding, teams met with little real enthusiasm or commitment to the changes they were trying to introduce.

Connect, communicate, and collaborate

Teams are busy. All of this improvement stuff is on top of the day job of tacking tasks and targets. It is easy for commitments made to improve team effectiveness  to slip down the agenda and momentum wane. Teams were asking for an easy way to keep their development agenda more front of mind and alive. While this is as much a mindset challenge for a team, teams were looking for something practical to help them with this.

Team dynamics – insights and analysis

Teams operate in the hope that if they are able to articulate the challenges they are facing they can find a solution. However, in our experience, the obvious or immediate responses are not always the best ones. We find many teams absorb a lot of time, effort and resource focussing on the wrong things: on ‘nice to have’ rather than the most critical elements.

Under pressure to improve their operations and performance, some teams typically charge into action, making quick decisions and then acting upon them. Other teams, confused by what to do next, do nothing. Both are problematic. On top of busy operational workloads, teams were looking for clear direction on where to act to improve and what actions would make the biggest difference for them.

teamSalient^® – a powerful assessment tool that transforms teams

Bringing these strands together, we identified what teams were looking for and set out to create a tool to meet these needs:

• An accurate, quick and easy way of determining team effectiveness currently.
• A clear profile that gained buy in from the team and created a collective agenda for change and improvement.
• To know what actions they could take to improve and which ones would make the biggest different – a targeted set of prioritised actions so teams could focus their development effort.

We created teamSalient® to help teams discover how effective they really are with a high degree of accuracy and then to guide then them on the actions they can take to improve this. Let us give you further insight into teamSalient^®.

Improving team performance

teamSalient® is based upon our model of team effectiveness, which includes structural, enabling and other elements – ‘Fundamentals’, ‘Facilitators’ and ‘Fire Ups’ respectively. These three areas are divided into sixteen ‘drivers’ factors of team effectiveness – drivers because they either help or inhibit a team’s effectiveness. The ‘Fundamentals’ and ‘Facilitators’ focus on the whole team whereas ‘Fire Ups’ are focussed on individual team members allowing more targeted. We arrived at these sixteen drivers over 4 years of research and quantitative science. We tested and refined both the drivers and the questions that measure them with teams along the way so that we created something that genuinely measured the things that mattered most to teams.

A team’s effectiveness is a dynamic construct and how effective a team is can vary depending on a team’s stage of development. What makes a newly formed team effective is different from a mature team that has been working together for some time. We therefore created a three-dimensional model of team effectiveness that integrated these stages of team development with the sixteen drivers. This allows teams to take a more nuanced approach to its development as its maturity and effectiveness changes over time.

Design, build and develop your teams

Using an on-line link, team members rate their responses to a number of questions, which are gathered together into a team effectiveness profile. This profile is de-briefed with a team coach to help the team make meaning from it and agree the actions they will take.

These actions are captured in a team action plan built into teamSalient® that allows everyone in the team to see who is working on what. A team can see what it is working on together as well as what individual team members are developing to benefit the team.

For organisations using teamSalient® with multiple teams at the same time, perhaps as part of an organisational change or transformation programme, the in-built dashboard view allows senior executives or sponsors of this work to gauge team take-up, activity and progress in real time.

How can teamSalient^® help your teams?

We’re really excited by teamSalient® and its potential to transform teams – and so are the teams and organisations that have used it. Get in touch to discover how teamSalient® can help your teams on their journey.