Getting the Team (Physically) Back Together

Your team has weathered a persistent storm, found lifeboats, ensured others were OK, supported, and able to deliver. They have made adjustments to help team members when they needed it most. All, whilst they, and you as their leader, navigated an environment at work and at home that kept demanding more of you individually and collectively.

Your team already:

• Know what consistent high performance looks like and feels like, they know what it takes to show up and be effective. Your role as a leader is to ensure that they are supported to continue to build and utilise the skills, knowledge, and expertise to thrive.?
• Have the ability to be incredibly resourceful, innovative, organised, and disciplined to ensure the work gets done. With continued guidance, support and investment, team members individually and together are able to build and evolve their skills to work through, manage and resolve all challenges as they arise.?
• Have developed new ways of operating, then new ways again, to mitigate the risks to your projects and business due to unexpected, unprecedented disruption and inconceivable change and challenges.
• Know what poor performance and low morale looks like and feels like. No-one jumps out of bed in the morning with the express desire to seek out the most dysfunctional team who are underperforming, and says yes that's the team I want to join. People want to be part of a high performance, high impact team. They want to bring their best. Leaders have a responsibility to create a culture where they can.?
• Understand the impact of burnout. They know what this looks like, feels like and the signs they are heading towards this.

We are moving into a new and long overdue era of understanding and acceptance that maintaining competition level performance 24/7 is neither a realistic, healthy or achievable goal. Ask any Olympian if they can maintain a schedule of optimal competition level peak performance 24/7, and the answer would be a resounding no. This knowledge and understanding does, however, keep them at a consistent high level of fitness. As a result, their resting working pace is at a higher rate than most people’s competition pace.?

Then when a competition looms, they pull extra out of the bag surpassing their and others' beliefs about what is possible. When your team is provided with the right building blocks, they too, will operate at a higher level, consistently outperforming a team that runs a boom or bust cycle. When a deadline looms, they will be match fit.?

The challenge facing organisations as they move back into their physical spaces and to a hybrid working culture is another challenge that your team can work to solve, together.

High performance, high impact teams, never leave performance to chance.?Their Leaders ensure that the team has the support they need to develop the capability, processes and principles so that this challenge, like all challenges are met and resolved.?

When time and effort is invested to develop the critical skills that enable your team to face and solve all challenges combined with the space and time to have focused conversations about how they will achieve this. It’s another challenge met, one that is well within the team's means to work through.

Highly effective teams that stay effective, get the work done,? focus on strengthening core capabilities to maintain engagement and optimism, balanced with key capabilities to ensure productivity. They get stuff done, quickly and effectively and their output is higher than average.?

In these teams, the focus is on the team, as a living, breathing entity in its own right, there is less focus on the individual, a higher focus on the system.?

A regular question asked in these teams is: ‘What does the team need’ as a starting point to understanding what they need to be successful and deliver.?

We have seen incredible results with increased performance, commitment and honesty amongst team members and a desire to ensure that we are a united and high performing team. This was borne out in our recent internal survey where we scored highly on engagement and enablement”.?Paula Benson, Executive General Manager?

“Pollyanna came on board to help our team through a significant transformation journey. Pollyanna through her creative style enabled her to create an environment where trust and engagement from the team resulted, which enabled the team members to have the opportunity to talk openly about issues they faced, this resulted in buy-in, engagement and retention of key team members.”?Neil Morrice, Head of Finance Infrastructure & Information Management.

Make space for the conversations that matter, continue to invest in the skills that will lift engagement and productivity (our process focuses on 14? core capabilities).

What does your team need to move into the next phase of working together effectively?

Getting your team in a room, physically back together is the first step in answering the question of how your team will work and manage a hybrid environment.?

Acknowledge?the challenges, creativity and results achieved over the past 2 years. ? Talking about what this required from you/the team.

Stay curious: Look out for your assumptions that you all want the same thing.? That the way you experienced the pandemic is the same as the experience others had.? Be kind, suspend judgement and create an environment where people feel safe to express themselves and their journey.?

Remember: You are different from when you left full-time onsite working.? The world and its events have changed you and your team.? Bring this difference to the surface, share the wisdom and insights you have gained in service of others and the team.?

Working with teams is a pure joy for me, to help them with the methodology, tools, processes and strategy that sets them up for sustainable success and results.

If you want to know more about the work we are doing to help organisations shift the rusty gender equity dial, get in touch here or email me and we can set up a time to have a conversation.?[email protected]?