05 Aug The link between high team performance and having a (team) coach
In this week’s newsletter I want to share an excerpt of a blog published by David Wilkinson, who has appeared on two of our #ODTalks in the past year, and is the founder of the Oxford Review. Here it is:
“One of the areas of research I have been involved in, in the last couple of years has been focussed on high performing teams and in particular how members of high performing teams regulate their own and others emotions. Our ability to recognise our own and others emotional state (emotional intelligence) and regulate our own emotions (emotional resilience) have been shown in a growing number of studies to be at the heart of an individuals ability to:
- make consistently good decisions and judgements,
- operate well with others and particularly in a team,
- get over emotional ‘hits’,
- deal positively with feedback and criticism,
- cope and even prosper in situations of uncertainty and ambiguity and
- cope and bounce back quickly with failure and mistakes for example.
The same is true of teams.
Something that I often wonder about is, why businesses and organisations don’t make more use of team coaches. I am often asked to talk about high performing teams and emotion regulation in organisations but getting many organisations to commit to having or at least trying a good team coach appears outside of their vision. Those that do however almost always reap the rewards. Instead for some reason they appear to limit themselves to ’team building’ which usually means reducing interpersonal conflict within the team, which in turn often means conflict suppression. This hardly ever, if ever, works. Suppressed conflict almost always bubble out.
Getting a team to be truly cohesive and resilient so they can bounce back quickly, (very quickly) is crucial. The measurement of resilience is the speed at which we bounce back after taking an emotional hit or suffering a failure.”
It made me so happy to read this because I agree 100% with Dave! Teams are where the work of the organisation is getting done, yet most development work is being done on an individual level. We have said this before and because we see the most amazing results in the teams that we work with, we will say it again: Invest in your teams, develop your teams, get your teams a team coach! The rewards will be almost instantaneous, and it really is a whole lot of return on a relatively small investment.
We can help with anything from simple short 2.5 hour workshops that help team members to get to know each other and how to work together better to more specifically targeted workshops like the popular ‘Energy and Resilience’ team coaching workshops. Send me an e-mail if you would like to chat about this and hear more about how we work with teams.
Upcoming public workshops
Employee Engagement and Experience Certification: for those with the responsibility for creating, and maintaining, a superb work experience for existing and future employees, 5 days online over 5 weeks, starting on the 17th of August (a few seats left!)
Fundamentals of Organisation Development and Change Management: we make it practical and enable our students to use change frameworks in different levels of complexity, 5 x 6-hour online sessions over 3 weeks, starting on the 22nd of September
Leadershift: Making the shift from team member to team leader, 6 x half days over 3 weeks, starting on the 21st of September.
Change Champions Workshop: understand the basics of change, how to navigate it and how to work with resistance, 4-hours online, 9 September.
OD Talk with Allon Shevat
You don’t want to miss this one!
Don’t miss our next OD Talk on 18 August 2021, we have invited our friend, master OD practitioner and provocateur Allon Shevat, (all the way from Israel) to share his insight with us.
Sign up and come for an hour and a half of no-nonsense straight talk about OD and leadership in impossible times. Join the discussion on Wednesday 18 August from 09h00 – 10h30.
If you would like to receive our weekly OD Talk Newsletters on email please SUBSCRIBE to our Newsletter here.