team

The Strategic Team Alignment Program

January 23, 2012 By David Leave a Comment

PURPOSE:

This workshop is designed to develop a high-performance leadership team which is the spearhead of an organization. The workshop provides the knowledge, structure, tools, and processes necessary for such a team to provide exceptional leadership and build the collaborative skills necessary to create and sustain a world-class operation.

OBJECTIVES:

This workshop is designed to:

Gain understanding of and ability to manage the high-performance team process
Increase their focus on results
Receive powerful, 360 degree feedback on their leadership effectiveness, style, and skill
Increase their mutual trust, support, and interdependence
Gain clarity on purpose, values, vision, goals, priorities, and expectations
Clarify and develop agreement on their roles and responsibilities
Increase skill in communication, collaboration, giving feedback, management of differences, and managing performance
Improve problem solving and decision making
Increase cross-functional performance and decrease the effect of “silos”
Increase their ability to provide customer satisfaction
Increase their individual ability to self-manage
Increase accountability
Increase their ability to model and promote teamwork throughout the organization

METHODOLOGY:

The workshop is conducted in three stages: Foundations, Skill Building, and Sustainability. A variety of learning techniques are employed, based on recent discoveries in brain-based, adult learning, to maximize the participants’ internalization and application of the program’s content. Among the techniques used are experiential activities; creative, multi-modal processes; feedback; and self-directed learning.

FACILITATOR:

David Lassiter is the director and founder of Leadership Advantage, a coaching and consulting firm dedicated to helping executives, teams, and organizations achieve their objectives. David has over 20 years’ experience as an executive coach and designer and developer of executive, team, and organizational development programs for profit, not-for-profit, and government organizations. He is a pioneer in the use of 360 degree assessment for leadership development and the innovator of the Strategic Team Alignment process for maximizing team members’ growth, development, and performance.

LENGTH:

The workshop is comprised of three (3) workshops, of 2-3 days each, taken 30-45 days apart. Learning is embedded through applied work assignments between workshop sessions, 360 degree feedback face-to-face and through written reports.

The Strategic Leadership Alignment Program

January 23, 2012 By David

PURPOSE:

To transform a leadership team’s ability to think, act, and work individually and collectively to achieve significantly increased performance, results, and satisfaction. The Strategic Leadership Alignment process provides the forum and opportunity to elevate the individual and collective ability of a team to think and work together in ways that liberate energy and optimize effectiveness. It is designed to help the team members understand and manage the internal factors influencing their effectiveness and the impact they have on others. The program will help the team increase the quality and quantity of its results – by working smarter, not harder through increased self-awareness and self-management and will improve the team’s communication, alignment, and mutual support.

OBJECTIVES:

The leadership team will:

Receive an assessment of its leadership and management style and/or skills and learn how they effect the members’ ability to work together with others
Expand its understanding of the key attitudes and behaviors related to high performance and increased satisfaction in the workplace
Enhance its ownership and accountability for issues and results
Create personal development plans to improve the members’ individual effectiveness
Gain a deeper understanding of the dynamics and key factors governing the team’s effectiveness
Significantly increase the levels of openness, trust, and respect among team members and noticeably decrease behaviors that block the ability to work together effectively
Visibly improve communication, cooperation, decision making, and problem solving
Achieve alignment on a set of high-performance operating principles
Develop understanding of core values and principles underlying a high-performance culture
Develop action plans to address key, “burning” issues impacting organizational performance

METHODOLOGY:

The precise content of the workshop is tailored to fit the needs of the specific team. A variety of teaching techniques are employed, based on recent discoveries in brain-based, adult learning, to maximize the participants’ internalization and application of the program’s content. Each participant receives a 360 degree assessment of performance effectiveness, style, and/or skill and one-on-one interpretation and discussion of the data.

FACILITATOR:

LENGTH:

Primary Session – 3-4 days, followed by a one-day session approximately 4-6 weeks after the first session, plus personalized feedback sessions for each participant.

Organization and Team Performance

January 23, 2012 By Ira Chaleff

Our organization development services are tailored to fit the client’s needs. The services can include a combination of any of the following:

Assessment:

Confidential interviews of individual members of management team
Confidential interviews with board directors, customers or members, subordinates and others with an interest in the outcome of the process
Work climate survey instrument development and benchmarking
Observation and analysis of key communications and operational processes
Evaluation of management team cohesiveness and conflict management style
Evaluation of management team problem solving and decision making style
Evaluation of environmental scanning, information distribution and interpretation processes
Identification of distinctive competencies and competitive advantages
Evaluation of robustness of strategic thinking and communication
Written and oral reports on strengths and weaknesses of organization and identification of mission-critical issues

Interventions

Design and implementation of processes to address critical issues
Management team briefings
Team skills building workshops
Organization-wide communication processes
Staff morale programs
Senior team-building retreats:

Visioning ideal futures
Values clarification
Trust development and repair
Work group climate improvement
Strategic conversations facilitation
Creativity enhancement
Action planning

Ongoing team observation, implementation support and coaching

Case History: Team Building for an Organizational Change Effort

December 28, 2011 By Ira Chaleff

ISSUE:

The division is undergoing a mandatory restructuring and decentralization, anticipating personnel growth of ten-fold in the next 12-18 months. The senior team wants to meet the challenge by laying a solid foundation of principles which will guide them in working together during this period of rapid and dramatic changes. The senior executive of the organization wants to self-assess his skill-set for the leadership tasks ahead.

INDUSTRY:

Information Technology, Federal Government

SIZE:

Senior Management Team for Telecommunications Division

CLIENT:

Five Senior Managers and Nine Direct Reports

SOLUTION:

In conjunction with the client, a series of steps were designed to analyze the individual players and their respective roles in the existing and desired organizational structures. The first effort was to guide the leader and the team through a three-day, remote-site exercise that would result in a set of operating principles by which the organization and its people would undertake the change process.

Demographic data along with background information and a questionnaire informed the design of a series of team-building, immediate feedback, and trust-building exercises. The three-day working sessions were built on small group work, and reviewed in a facilitated plenary session. Two coach-facilitators, a woman and a man led separate portions of the group work. After completing a full day of team building exercises, the next two days were filled with intensive “outcome” oriented processes. A healthy set of operating principles resulted from the exercise.

Two week after the off site working sessions, interviews were held with three people whom the senior executive identified as “believer, neutral, and non-believer” regarding the implementation of the change process to be guided by the operating principles developed and unanimously adopted by the senior management team.

RESULTS:

The coaching assistance to the senior executive was fruitful and reassuring in that the skill-set that included leadership, loyalty, vision, communication, and dedication, were self-assessed and group assessed with high marks. The senior management team ended the three-day working sessions with a renewed sense that they “are a team, and we can do this together”. A well conceived and unanimously adopted set of operating principles will serve as a guide to all of the division’s employees as they carry out their responsibilities, whether serving customers, developing internal relationships, or engaging in problem solving. Clearly understood action items were assigned to each member of the senior management team, and a “process-overseer” was identified by the senior executive to hold each member accountable. At the conclusion of the three-month process, the levels of cooperation and optimism had never been higher.