Developing Top Teams: using the TopTeaming Assessment

“Team Building” is often seen as a very soft word – nice to do, but often not considered either pragmatic or impactful enough to warrant the time and investment to do, especially in this economy.  Recently the GSA was brought under scrutiny for a “team building” event in Las Vegas that reportedly featured a mind reader and bicycle building.  Not only were the optics for this wrong, but there was no apparent value-add stated for an organization whose purpose is “building more responsible, effective, and sustainable government.”

So two questions:

 

• If you think about a leadership/operating team in your organization that you are part of or whose work impacts you, what would be the value – the real value to you and your company if they could raise the bar of their effectiveness together?
• Do you have process that ensures that every mission-critical team will improve? Do you have a way of measuring progress?

 

Our focus is on building and improving leadership teams – even already good ones.  Our purpose is to take both existing and evolving teams and help them become Top Teams that are more effective against current demands, evolving strategy and critical priorities (what we call the Now, the New, and the Next.)  Doing this work well requires that we demonstrate significant impact, real value and true relevancy to those mission-critical leaders whose major commodity is time, and necessitates our bringing the best tools to this important job.

We utilize the new TopTeaming Assessment^tm  that provides teams with powerful data about how they are currently functioning across a critical range of dimensions.  This on-line tool is taken by team members with the results debriefed with the team over a period of 1-2 days.  This creates very important dialogue about very important stuff.

In our experience, team members openly talk about those items most critical to them: They define what they are FOR as a team.  And they define the team they need to be to make that happen. They talk about candidly about the business and how to improve it.  They talk about what they must do to raise their level of interdependence and work better across their critical intersections.

And they are doing so in a highly data-driven and pragmatic environment – important to leaders who value metrics and relevancy.  The TT Assessment also serves as a baseline to measure progress and increased alignment in key areas so a team knows where they have improved and what to focus on next.  This is about real improvement about really important things.

Think about the value you would receive if you knew how well your leadership team performed and was aligned around the following areas:

1. Context & Strategic Focus:  What our team is FOR and clarity/impact of strategy
2. Current Reality:  Awareness of critical internal and external forces that influence our business
3. Aligning the Stars:  Defining the type of team we need, alignment around critical priorities, and whether we have the right mix of people, experience, and knowledge to accomplish our strategic priorities
4. Openness & Candor: Revealing the measure of trust, directness and candor within this team
5. Decision Making:  Measuring effectiveness, speed, clarity, and engagement of decision-making
6. Navigational Skills: Understanding how well we work at and across the critical intersections
7. Execution Excellence: Knowing how well we execute, implement, learn, and take accountability around our priorities
8. Agility & Change:  Acknowledging our flexibility, agility, communication & responsiveness to change (the nature of which continues to evolve)
9. Developing People: How well we develop talent and teams
10. Team and Individual Learning: How well we raise our game as leaders and as a team.

We also provide an “Energy Audit” about how this team currently allocates our time against what we see as the most impactful use of time (our rarest commodity.)  And we use the rich verbatim comments to explore how well we utilize and harness the “collective intelligence” of this team of smart and committed people.  This is dialogue at its finest that consistently receives great reviews for its value and relevancy.

This TopTeaming Assessment^tm   has produced, in our long experience, the most powerful and lasting results for developing leadership teams 1-3 levels down, as they operate in an ever more complex and challenging world.

Interested in learning more about this?  Please check our website at www.TopTeaming.com to get some more details, or call us at +1 404 377-9408 to sample the assessment.