Teams in Lockdown

A custom-designed engagement
​and development process

How do you engage your people when they are apart?
How can you ensure continuous performance and development?
How do you align your team in times of continuous change?

What separates high performing from broken teams in our new Coronavirus reality is the ability of team members to engage and support each other and to co-create their new reality - as opposed to just being victims and retreating into the old ways of doing things.
Team members may need to develop a specific mindset and specific competencies to succeed with this. However, the last thing they need right now is a ‘trainer’ coming in to tell them what to do.
What is the alternative? We believe it is a shared sense-making, visioning and development process that is mostly guided by the team.

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• We are taking a new approach to team development, which is based on the team creating its own competency model (in an easy online-process). 
• The team then can take our top-of-the range assessment, which will allow team members to compare themselves to their own success profile and a global benchmark of 20% top performers.
• Results will be debriefed both with individuals and, in an aggregated way, with the team as a whole. 
• The team will then create its own development action plan and take full responsibility for its development track.
• In addition to working with leading-edge online tools, team members will develop the skills of 'Wisdom Circle" work - accessing the wisdom of the team through authentic, heartfelt dialog.

Sample Development Process
Custom-designed to your needs.​

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Module 1: 
New Vision - Change Leadership

Your team members may have realised that, even when the Lockdown is over, they might not be able to - or not want to - go back to the old 'normal'. What does that do to their morale, their engagement? Do they feel confused and depressed, or inspired and creative? Probably a bit of both.
For team members to stay engaged, it is important that they understand the change they are going through, including their own emotions and assumptions about it. And then create a new share vision and an approach to remain agile in new waves of change. We can facilitate this process in a series of team conferences about team values, vision and future search.

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Module 4:
​Development Action Planning

Assessment Debrief and Action Planning happens both on an individual and collective level: team members will receive their assessment reports and a debrief conversation with a C2C Plus member. This will also help them understand other people's profiles and make them more effective in their interactions with external and internal stakeholders.
The team then discusses the aggregated data, with a special focus on strengths/weaknesses, motivators, diversity level and risk of ‘group-think’.

Module 2: 
Competency Modelling

Once the team knows what might be needed in a new world, they ought to find out what competencies they will need as leaders for their business units on their new path. We can engage your team in a competency-modelling exercise (which can be quickly done online) where they can choose the competencies that are the most important for their leadership.
This will lead to a custom-designed competency model, which the team can use to align their further development discussions. The team will also gain a benchmark profile, which team members can use to make sense of their individual online assessment scores.

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Module 5:
​Individual Development

Based on their individual development action-planning, your team members will engage in their own development process. This can be supported by the C2C Plus coaching team (which combines the business approach of a former chief executive with the competency development approach of a leadership expert).
To make them more independent of external help, we will teach team members peer-coaching skills, which they can use to challenge and support each other and to develop their staff.

Module 3:
Assessment 

Team members will take our leading-edge online assessment, Decision Dynamics, which is highly validated across the globe and statistically linked to bottom-line performance. Case-study driven and close to real-life business situations, it will provide insights about team members' motives, their leadership and decision-making styles, their emotional intelligence, and their ways of dealing with complexity and change. 
Participants will be able to compare their scores with the team success profile and the global benchmark of the 20% top performers at their level. They will receive a development report with many practical tips

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Module 6:
​Team Coaching

We will use existing team meetings to observe and give feedback - and engage the team in facilitated workplace-learning sessions about what worked and did not work in specific project parts or stakeholder interactions.
The link to the shared vision, and the ability to stay agile as a team in yet new waves of change will always be a core theme. The goal is to make the team less dependent on an external coach, so that they can make team learning processes ‘business as usual’.

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------------ Wisdom Circle Dialog ------------>

Every module contains facilitated, authentic dialog, which creates trust, learning and team spirit.

What is Wisdom Circle Dialog?
A skill and habit of High Performing Teams who use their meetings for more than project updates and data exchange.
Aiming at true discovery and innovation, they talk about what truly matters to them, and they develop deep listening skills and an honesty-based team spirit. ​The team follows a process that contains sharing, witnessing, reflecting, pulling shared lessons learned and developing new ideas.

An example of Wisdom Circle Dialog
Instead of asking "how was your week? (a closed question that leads to boring yes/no answers), Wisdom Circle trained teams would ask what specific challenges people had, what they enjoyed and what they had learned. If the theme is company values, they would not just 'list' their values, but engage in story telling of where values were challenged or supported.

Decision Dynamics Assessment for Team Development

How we work with the Assessment

We can use our Decision Dynamics Assessment to assess the members of your leadership team - comparing their scores both to their own team profile (chart C) and the benchmark report of the 20% best performers on their level (Chart B).  Insights about misalignment will drive development discussions. The team will also receive an aggregate report that features the different leadership styles of the team members (chart A). 
Based on these data, the team will be able to engage in dialogue about diversity, group dynamics, possible tensions, strengths and development areas of the team. They will also be able to compare their own style preferences with clients and suppliers, and hence improve their stakeholder management.

Sample Chart A: Team Profile, Leadership Style of four Team members

Observations for the team debrief: What are the strengths and blind spots of this team? 
Based on the Team Profile, team members have very different profiles. Tom and Carl are very action oriented, Anna, Carl and Sintje are strategic. Tom and Anna are highly flexible, they like to work in a trial-and error mode and can adapt to changing situations quickly. Anna also can provide some good strategic thinking. 
These different profiles may cause tensions in the team: Tom may consider Anna and Sintje slow, theoretical and wordy. Carl and Anna may be able to 'bridge' in team conflicts, as they are also rather action oriented or flexible in their approach. 
Team members have different strengths that they can add to the team - Tom will be the crisis manager who can take quick action to react to changed circumstances. He will also be able to manage stakeholders who like quick, powerful action. The others will give his decisions more depth, ask the right questions and plan more long term. They will be respected by stakeholders and clients who look for quality and think long-term. 

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Sample Chart B: Top-performance Benchmark for leaders at a similar level (researched)

Sample Chart C: Success profile the team came up with - can be compared to the 'top performance chart B '.

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Sample Chart D: Different work styles may create team tension and/or innovation

Every team member will have one or two preferred ways of working, and when they compare their data, they will see how close they are in their preferred styles. If they are too much apart, there may be tensions and misunderstandings - which can be dealt with if brought to the open and discussed in constructive ways. If they are too close together, they may lack creative diversity and run the risk of ‘group think’.

Sample Chart E: Another aspect of our Assessment: Team motivators and engagement drivers

Team members are motivated by different career goals and rewards. If they are driven by different motivators, they can react to the same events in very different ways: some may view continuous change as a great opportunity and they thrive on it - to the point where they may even start driving unnecessary change. Others seek more stability and hence may be artificially holding on to old ways of doing things.