Developing High Delivery Teams: A Practical Handbook for Leaders

© 2013 by Rebecca Watson. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 12/18/2012

ISBN: 978-1-4772-5027-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4772-5028-0 (e)

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Contents

Introduction

Finding The Time

Chapter 1—Team Bus

Chapter 2—The Vision

Chapter 3—SMART Goals

Chapter 4—The Strategy and Plan

Chapter 5—Roles

Chapter 6—Elephant in The Bus

Chapter 7—Team Meetings—How Teams Communicate

Chapter 8—Team Relationships

Chapter 9—External Barriers

Chapter 10—The Leader

Chapter 11—Managing Energy

Chapter 12—Celebrating Success

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Hello—I am Rebecca Watson owner of Brompton Associates.

My passion for helping people really enjoy their work came when I was a young commercial lawyer. I constantly felt as if someone was going to find me out! I was bored, yet anxious about the work and as it was really not the right career path for me, I was often unhappy, getting completely drunk on a Friday night, only to spend all of Sunday dreading Monday morning.

I realized that leadership and working in good teams could mean that people not only delivered a lot more collectively, but also really enjoyed coming to work. Luckily I went onto find my niche as a specialist Corporate Coach and now feel that it is my path to help guide leaders of people to gain results and become the popular leader that everyone wants to work with.

Since starting to coach Executives in 2001, I have worked with 100s of leaders around the world. I have experienced many forms of ‘Team Coaching’ that include teams playing games together and team coaches psychoanalyzing all the team members and reporting back.

What I didn’t see much of is HOW you get a team to improve performance.

Managing to get a team of people to deliver for an organisation, whether that be a small business or a large global corporate is a tricky thing to do! The science behind group dynamics and collaborative entrepreneurship is continuously being evolved. The ability to Coach a Team whether that be the England football team, or a project management team within a bank is being studied in more depth. The successful strategies are becoming clearer.

In this book I have set out simple diagrams to help explain a topic that is complex and can become highly theoretical and academic.

This book is the product of many years experience and research in Executive and Team Coaching. It is not a one size fits all guide, but a programme of exercises that can be carried out with a team over time that have been tried and tested in reality. It’s these exercises that I’m going to share with you so that you can run them with your own team and see the results immediately.

Finding The Time

Do you feel as if you are working really hard and long hours but not really achieving results as quickly as you expected? Are there more strategic things that your team ‘should’ do but never have time because you are doing the ‘day to day’ stuff?

This is normally the first problem that the leaders I coach face—they know they need to do something different but they don’t have time to do it, or even think about it.

SO

•   stop being the hamster on a wheel

•   get off for a few minutes—the world won’t end, the company won’t collapse

•   breathe and allow your head to settle

•   start to think strategically and you’ll go to the next level of leadership

I used to send leaders my 6 month Team Coaching Programme which entailed me working with the team for 6 days (one day a month over 6 months). The leader would be really keen to start with and book a day or two, then the third day would get moved, I would need to chase for commitment and the leader and team would say ‘I really want to work with you, the team found it so valuable and I can see changes already but… .’ They would allow all the ‘urgent’ day-to-day stuff to crowd in. (They couldn’t stay off the hamster wheel long enough to completely get rid of it and become their own masters).

Look after your time (it’s the most valuable commodity), if you’re going to really change the way you and your team work then commit the time and keep that protected for your team. The highest business priority is enabling your team to produce more.

Benefits from Team Coaching

•   Increased Team delivery

•   Board Level Teams—increase company revenue, saleability and reputation as a good employer in the market

•   Increased Team Morale—everyone should feel happier and more excited about their work contribution

•   Embedded Learning—new ways of working gets modeled down into all other teams below this team in the organizational structure

•   Cultural Change—the effects of a team implementing these strategies will extend far beyond just that one team, the ripple effect outwards and downwards will make the work practices of all those that interact with this team more effective

•   Leadership in the team will improve providing a much better model for others to aspire to

•   By reading, understanding and trying out the exercises in this book, you are training yourself