Six Approaches to Scaling Teamwork: Leadership Development Programs

We don’t need no education. We don’t need no thought control.

Pink Floyd, Another Brick in the Wall

When it comes to teams, some education may prove helpful. As stated in an earlier post, organizations wanting to scale effective teamwork must think beyond facilitated team engagements. Leadership development programs that train leaders how to build teams is one of the six approaches companies are using to scale teamwork.

We know of one a 10,000-person multi-national company where the CEO believed teamwork could be leveraged as a competitive advantage and asked the CHRO to make it happen. The CHRO and Global Head of Talent Management opted to use the Rocket Model and hired us to build a one-day program to train people leaders on how to build high performing teams.

In this interactive program participants learn about the relationships between leadership and teams, the differences between groups and teams, how the Rocket Model framework creates a common language for building teams, receive benchmarking feedback on team dynamics and performance from the Team Assessment Survey (TAS), learn how to facilitate a variety of team improvement activities, and build action plans for improving team performance.

A cadre of internal and external consultants got certified in the Rocket Model approach to building high performing teams, attended one of the leadership development program pilots, participated in a train-the-trainer session, and then started delivering programs across the globe in 2019. Ten to twenty programs have been delivered each year since then, and the table shows the TAS percentile score results from the 1,100 people leaders who have attended the program.

Team member and leader ratings of team dynamics and performance were compared those in the global TAS data base, and percentile scores range from 0 to 100. Those on par with other teams receive scores around 50 on the eight Rocket Model components. Those worse than other teams have scores ranging from 0 to 50 on the components, with low scores being associated with new or dysfunctional teams. Those with scores above 50 are above average, and those above 75 are considered high performing. TQ scores indicate the overall health of a team and are an average of the eight Rocket Model component percentile scores for a team. The results also indicate that most team leaders were managing hybrids (collections of people having characteristics of both groups and teams) and managed teams that were made up of an average of 6-7 people.

Team Assessment Survey Percentile Score Results from 2019-2024

The company has double in size to 20,000 employees since the advent of the leadership development program and is projected to reach 30,000 employees by 2030. Revenues and profitability have also doubled over the past six years. This growth has been organic rather than through mergers and acquisitions. The CEO and CHRO continue to be big advocates of the Rocket Model and have been able to turn teamwork into a competitive advantage for the company.

Curphy Leadership Solutions offers workshops that train internal and external consultants on how to help organizations scale teamwork. Highly interactive, practical, and useful, Rocket Model Certification Workshops provide participants with all the tools they need to market, price, sell, design, and deliver team engagements, leadership development and high-potential programs, on-boarding plans, leadership assessments, and eLearning modules that enable organizations to scale teamwork. Contact Gordy Curphy ([email protected] ) for details about the public workshop taking place in November-December.

Gordon Curphy is an Industrial & Organizational psychologist specializing in C-suite succession planning, executive coaching, top team facilitation, scaling effective teamwork, and leadership development. He has developed several successful commercially published leadership and team assessments; coached 200 C-suite executives; worked with over 600 top teams; collected data on 3,500 teams, trained 20,000 leaders; and sold over 100,000 books, chapters, and articles on leadership and teams. You can find more about Gordon’s leadership books and consulting services at: www.curphyleadershipsolutions.com and www.rocketmodelforteams.com .

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