UNLOCKING TEAMS

How do you unlock your team’s potential to ensure it fully blossoms? In this workshop, teams work together to improve their performance and productivity.

The facilitation process takes the participants swiftly from identifying issues and bottlenecks to generating solutions, and into creating an action plan that can benefit the team immediately.

BENEFITS

This workshop helps improve the performance and productivity of a team by addressing what may be blocking it.

It is designed to address various internal or external issues that may hamper a team, for example, a transition to hybrid or remote work, internal communication issues, inefficient processes and operations, ineffective goal setting or strategy, office environments that need reorganising, and more.

The facilitation technique used in this workshop taps into the collective intelligence of the participating team, helping the group discover what needs to be changed or improved and how to do it in order to unlock the team’s potential.

Importantly, this is achieved without lengthy and tiresome discussions that many dread in the workplace. The process is thorough but swift, counteracting and overcoming common workplace experiences such as unconscious biases, flawed group processes and conformity pressures.

Designed for maximum efficiency, the facilitation technique guarantees that a team moves from problem identification, to solution ideation and into action planning in a relatively short time. This usually has a refreshing and motivating effect on the participants.

Since everyone in the team can equally contribute to the process, the participants also develop a sense of ownership over the action plans – which is one of the workshop’s key objectives.

Improving a team’s performance, rather than letting smaller or larger issues fester and drain enthusiasm and productivity, has a long term positive impact on team members’ well-being.

BACKGROUND

Many teams could improve their overall performance and well-being by reflecting on how they operate and how their members work together. Team members often sense that they could do better if they addressed various aspects of their work that unnecessarily use up time, energy or resources and create issues.

Yet, these types of conversations are difficult to hold in a professional setting, for a number of interrelated reasons:

• attempts too often turn into lengthy and tiresome discussions, but aren’t followed by a concrete action plan, which means there is little or no change;
• the most confident and outspoken members of a team may dominate conversations and push through their points of view;
• people tend to be reluctant to talk honestly about problems in the presence of their managers and colleagues; and so on…

Based on ‘Lighting Decision Jam’ popularised by Jonathan Courtney, this workshop utilises the power of collective intelligence. Whilst each person individually tends to focus on certain aspects of the overall picture, collectively all team members know all the issues and have the capacity to generate effective, innovative solutions. The secret is to get them talking openly and honestly about what they know and see to ensure that everyone has their say.

Creating a level playing field so that each team member contributes equally to the process not only leads to generating optimal solutions, but also creates a sense of ownership of the action plan developed as a result – increasing the chances that it will be followed-up and implemented.

Whether used simply to ‘oil the cogs’ of a team, as a team-building exercise or to resolve a specific challenge or tension, ‘Unlocking Teams’ helps to prevent burn-out and keeps teams energised and motivated.

CONTENT AND FORMATS

During the workshop, the team members are taken through a series of facilitated exercises that comprise a highly effective problem-solving and planning process:

• capturing and prioritising the perceived issues and challenges;
• ideating and prioritising solutions;
• making solutions actionable;
• creating an action plan with assigned tasks.

* in remote facilitation, workshops are usually divided into two parts

Options

The process can take as little as 2h and can go up to two 4h workshops, depending on the severity, depth, size of team and amount of challenges that need tackling.

The ‘Unlocking teams’ workshop can be applied to solving any type of challenge, both external and internal, but some adaptations may be applied depending on the context.

Pathways

Also check out the ‘Solutions Accelerator’ – a workshop that uses the same methodology for generating effective solutions and developing action plans for various projects, events and for developing new approaches to tackle internal and external organisational challenges.