Building Great Teams

I had the privilege the other day of working with a team who were ‘a little stuck’ – the core bits were in place… lots of potential, clarity of direction, sound relationships etc., but they just were not performing at their full capability (a common story, I know).

My solution ….. A team Away Day with the aim of “supporting the team to work even better together” … I used a pre-event online Team Survey to generate a Team Working Report that we used as a ‘developmental conversation starter’ and ‘improvement ideas generator’ enabling the team to engage in focused conversations about what great team working is, and those aspects that are currently hindering them from performing at the top of their game.

If you have a situation that involves building a new team, developing an existing team or supporting an established capable team to raise their game even further, you may find the following resources of interest:

• Team survey overview – What it is and how it works
• The team survey questionnaire – Do a self analysis of a team for free
• Team Away Day tutor plan – An outline Team Day that really does work

Bye for now

David

Learning from Experience

I had an interesting conversation with one of our clients the other day about their 360 Degree Feedback project that didn’t go as well as hoped because of the unexpected effort needed to encourage people to complete feedback questionnaires.

On reflection, my client (Head of HR and Development) identified the following three lessons learnt for future 360 projects:

• Appetite Building – generating genuine excitement and motivation for 360 Degree Feedback early on by ‘selling the benefits’ to all involved

• Top Down – using the Top Team to pilot the process and supporting them to use their feedback reports to “make a real difference”  – The aim being to build a powerful ‘reinforcing/ driving 360 voice’

• Diary Management – Managing the flow of participants through the process, so line managers and colleagues don’t get bombarded with multiple feedback invitations all at once

Bye for now

David
davidcooper@lumus.co.uk

Squeezing the most out of a tight Training Budget

Having chatted to many of our existing clients over the last couple of weeks – it is obvious that the ever increasing world of economic uncertainty has resulted in ‘starved training budgets’ for all, regardless of sector, service or product range.

I know I’m talking to the converted, when I say that supporting leaders to be their best and to get the best out of those they lead, is money well spent and even more important in harder more competitive times. But that doesn’t answer the question of how to make the most out of a training budget that has been a major casualty of cutbacks?

The priority must be to get leaders and managers at all levels focused on the ‘really important stuff’ whether that is - Increasing organisational agility; Getting the best out of ‘A’ team’ stars and reducing the number of lower division players; Looking at old problems in new ways; Reducing waste; Pushing forward – getting in front of customers to find new opportunities; Being courageous and making the tough calls etc, etc…

An excellent way of getting the most out of a limited budget, is to use it to focus managers onto what is needed in these unprecedented times - One (cost effective) way of achieving this is to facilitate senior leaders in a conversation about what ‘leading in hard times’ means to the organisation and use those outcomes to develop a set of management expectations/ behaviours. My sales pitch (sorry)… Having gained clarity about what is needed, build a 360 DegreeFeedback Survey on those behaviours and deploy it, helping managers to know how to get it right and enabling them to quickly re-focus their actions and style, to ensure tomorrows success.

A limited budget could also be used to support the top team gain the customer/ key stakeholder feedback needed to make informed directional decisions.

Bye for now

David
davidcooper@lumus.co.uk

Forward Planning – Now’s the time

Traditionally August is a quiet(er) month, as many take their summer breaks. Not wanting to sound like a time management nagger, but this is also the ideal time to put in place the foundations for closing off this year’s performance management/ people development cycle and for gathering the information needed to develop 2012’s People Development Strategy.

Four important (soon to be urgent) actions worth considering are:

1. Encouraging managers to start gaining feedback on their performance this year, in order to demonstrate their development progress and enable them to start considering next years challenges

2. Identifying the ‘real’ management development needs for 2012 to ensure next years limited budget is spent wisely – Possibly through the use of a 360 degree feedback Group Summary Report or a manager Training Needs Analysis (TNA) survey?

3. Putting in place a simple TNA process for identifying the full breadth of training gaps and prioritising development needs for next year?

4. Identifying a cost effective way of supporting teams across the organisation to raise their game even further

Bye for now

David
davidcooper@lumus.co.uk

Lumus 360 Degree Feedback …. Our great news and how you can help

Today is the launch of our new website …

It has a totally fresh look and includes these exciting new bits:

• What customers are saying about us today - Leading the way… we now ask everyone who completes a 360 degree feedback survey to provide us with feedback about the process and then automatically publish it for the world to see (!). Whilst this demonstrates our customer service confidence and openness, it also enables us to identify and address minor niggles and use our customers voice to make things even better

• Training Needs Analysis (TNA) - Using our newly improved survey engine we can now build b

espoke TNA tools that provide a comprehensive overview of learning and development needs at organisation, team and individual level… The best bit is, it is only £250 (subject to organisations size)

• Free Trial - Confident that organisations will ‘buy it’ if they have tried it - we now give everyone the opportunity to test drive the whole process for free

So how can you help? ... Any help in forwarding the site (and this blog) onto people who may be able to use one of our surveys would also be much appreciated.

Bye for now

David