Practical Actions to Transform Your Team

Last week we spoke about Coaching Leadership and shifting the balance to empower the team to take more responsibility. This week, we’re sharing real-world, practical actions that teams can apply to dial up their performance to the next level.?

In the table below are the top practical actions we’ve observed in the best, most engaged and high performing Teams. Teams that apply these actions have better connection and engagement, deeper trust, stronger relationships, more respectful communication, and consistently operate at higher levels of performance.

These actions are the most common things we’ve seen when we’ve taken teams through our face-to-face, super-practical, ?-day gamified, smart-phone app-based Team Development program.?

More and more teams are getting together to connect or re-connect. Towards the end of 2022, and increasing in 2023, we’ve seen a steady rise in the number of teams wanting to accelerate the effectiveness of their connection, collaboration, and relationship building that has often slipped away in today’s task-driven, meeting-saturated, remote working environment, or has taken a back seat over the past couple of COVID years.

One of the consistent themes we see is that more and more teams want - and need, a bit of a 'reset', and a new foundation to build on. Others simply want to build that connection that has frayed or even disolved over the past couple of COVID-years.?

Teams want to connect more, especially as many transition into a more balanced, hybrid working model with more days back in the office or even migrate back to the office full time. In numerous cases, people have never physically met team members who joined during COVID, and lots of teams simply haven’t had a purposeful connection session for a long time.

In our gamified, smart-phone app-based Team Development program teams have a lot of fun, but the games are also specifically designed to bring out almost every positive & challenging team behaviour & dynamic - in a psychologically safe, non-threatening, fun environment.?

Teams undertake 2 interactive and fun sessions with approx. 8-10 different activities/games in each phase, observed by an expert Team Coach. Games are completed by uploading a video or photo or completing a specified activity.

Each session of games is followed by a post-game debrief led by the facilitator, to assess the team behaviours and learning derived from the exercises, and how that learning is applied back in the workplace.?

The team then go out and practically apply the learning from the first round debrief in the second round of challenges, so the learning is embedded through practice. The difference between sessions 1 and 2 is sometimes like night & day!

In the table below we’ve listed the key differences we’ve observed between session 1 and session 2 of our gamified smart-phone app-based Team Development program. These are the practical behaviours we’ve seen that differentiate high and low performing teams (not an exhaustive list, but a list of the top critical factors):

The practical actions above are the most common things we see in our gamified, smart-phone app-based Team Development program. The left hand-column are the behaviours we often see during the first set of fun, psychologically-safe challenges, which the observing team coach skilfully elicits from the team and gets them to come up with the antidote behaviours – column 2.?

When teams then apply the column-2 learnings in the second set of challenges, they see how much more effective they are as a team, and the increased dopamine and oxytocin their individual brains each receive means the behaviours are more embedded and applied back in the workplace.?

Our Team Development program has always been popular as its’s fun and gets practical outcomes that teams apply back in the workplace. It’s also our favourite program to deliver, we love running it!

We’ve facilitated this program with a huge range of teams spanning national & international C-suite Executives, Boards, etc, through to team leaders and teams of frontline staff.?

We’ve run events with several teams competing against each other as well as single teams from 5 to 38+ people. We’ve also run a simplified version for national conferences of over 150 people.?

We’ve worked with teams, executives & managers in Regional & Metropolitan locations across Australia and internationally, and have deep experience across all levels of Government (Federal, State (NSW, WA, SA, QLD, VIC), and Local Government) as well as the Private Sector and Not-for-Profit organisations.?

If you’d like to find out more about our popular gamified, smart-phone app-based Team Development program, please reach out to us direct on:

?? +61 (0)2 7901 5618

? [email protected]

?? www.southerncrosscoaching.com.au or www.southerncrosscoaching.com.au/get-in-touch