All employees are considered to be an important asset in most companies. Nevertheless, some of them are extra important for the development of a company. The quality of the management teams in an organization is determining the growth and the profitability of the business. That is of course dependent on the impact these teams having on the way of working, drive of decisions, choice of focus, level of supporting the next level, attitudes and behaviors etc.
It seems to be a good idea to consider offering strong assistance to establish a solid, predictable, and quality-assured concept for the management teams’ work in your company. This support should contribute to get a transparency of how the management teams are working and with what questions they are working with, helping top management to check the status of these backbone teams of their organization. It would thereby definitively create a much higher possibility to align and speed up the development of the company.
But how does such a support practically look like?
COD’s suggestion is to create the necessary clarifications and make decisions of how to work in the management team in a 2-day’s workshop, what we call a TeamOne Workshop.
The foundation of the workshop is to discuss and agree on the loyalty priority, decide what is means to be part of that team – TeamOne. The purpose of this is to avoid that the team members see their first loyalty to be with their own department’s targets, trying to optimize own benefits, and fighting against other silos within the management team. The aim is to help all to understand that all managers are part of two teams, one as a team member and one as the leader. The commitment must be with the team in which the manager is a team member, the overall good of that team must be the first priority to get focus on common results. On the other hand, if there is any negative impact of a certain decision for any sub-team, the whole team is responsible to support.
This calls for high trust and respect, so analysis, discussions, and practical exercises to strengthen the Team Spirit is another very important part of a TeamOne workshop ending in e.g., a joint dinner.
The next step in such a workshop should be around developing a strategy and follow up structure for the team’s mid- and long-term work. The focus is on the contribution and gaps for the actual team and not targets nor request for action to people outside the team. The work around the team’s strategy should be characterized by involvement and acceptance, securing common agreements. Finally, to close the section of Strategy, a regular meeting platform for support and follow up is defined for the coming year with fixed dates and time slots.
After the decisions about how to drive the management team’s long-term work, the remaining part is to agree upon how to work with the daily business. There are many more platforms for interaction within the daily operational work than in the strategic work. Weekly meetings, problem-solving workshops, financial reviews, interface seminars, project meetings, etc. are all arenas where a lot of the value creating work happens. It must be very clear that the way these are performed determine the success of all the efforts to reach company targets and the ultimate goal of profitable growth.
The management team’s most important meetings need to be reviewed by the whole team during this part of the TeamOne workshop. The real purpose, desired value, methodology of choice, agenda and much more are agreed upon and even test runs of meeting are conducted to guarantee a clear and joint understanding of the standards the team want to follow.
The result of the TeamOne workshop is a committed management team which has built clarity in how they want to work and with what topics they want to work with. Furthermore, their most important meetings’ new agendas are practically tested, evaluated, and agree upon to quality assure the collaboration. The management team has an increased level of trust and respect and has started to practically tear down the internal silos. Last but not least, all management teams who conducted a TeamOne workshop will work in a harmonized way simplifying best practice, collaboration and alignment between different units in an organization.