Team Performance Is More Than the Sum of Individual Performance
High-performance teams share three common characteristics: a unified direction and shared responsibility for driving business results, an effective operating system for managing work, and collaborative behaviors that drive team cohesion. Our science-backed team effectiveness model accelerates team performance by helping teams advance on three critical dimensions:
Focus
Creating a compelling shared vision and purpose, aligning on goals, clarifying roles and accountabilities, and driving individual and shared accountability for results.
Mechanics
Establishing processes for managing work, systems for making and executing critical decisions, and measures of progress against objectives.
Dynamics
Developing trust, fostering collaboration, and encouraging constructive conflict to generate better ideas and execute faster.
Deficiencies in any of these dimensions can limit performance. Executive teams often attribute performance issues to team dynamics because these challenges are the most visible. However, our experiences shows that unclear focus and poor mechanics are often the underlying culprit behind unproductive dynamics. We work with teams and their members to address these essential elements of team performance.
Data and Science-Backed Assessment
Lotis Blue’s team effectiveness model is a proven methodology that combines both science-backed tools with experiential group learning. Through this approach, we diagnose performance impediments and address critical gaps in team focus, ways of working, and dynamics, helping teams accelerate their progress toward business objectives and priorities.
Our modular program balances targeted team development with problem-solving for real business needs through a series of immersive team workshops. Inter-session activities expedite the pace of execution, support individual leadership development, and measure team progress against business goals. The first step in becoming a high-performance team is an assessment that leverages tools from behavioral and data science to identify the team’s most pressing gaps. Key elements of the assessment include:
This survey reveals areas of alignment, disagreement, and opportunity across the key elements of the team effectiveness model, providing a foundation for focusing and realigning the team’s efforts.
We utilize a personality assessment to understand individual and collective strengths, preferred ways of working, cultural anchors, and dysfunctional behaviors affecting team performance.
Given that teams and organizations are built on relationships, collaboration analytics identify communication and collaboration patterns across teams using network science and passive data from everyday communication tools.
We evaluate the team’s reputation and its impact on key organizational outcomes to inform development areas.
Lotis Blue clients who find the greatest success utilize the team effectiveness model to gain valuable insight into how work actually gets done in their organization, identifying execution bottlenecks and communication gaps between teams.
Building Execution Excellence on Executive Teams
Just as energy tends towards more disorder, so do teams—rearranging executive team members into an “ordered” state requires compelling direction and an injection of external energy.
Systems that focus energy on priorities are critical to team effectiveness. Our approach leverages the OKR framework (objectives and key results), a methodology that helps organizations define, align, and drive business results at market speed. This framework protects against common organizational pitfalls that derail pursuits, including:
-
- Diffuse energy – too many things
- Competing priorities – moving in different directions
- Power and org dynamics – navigating stakeholder needs
- Boredom – chasing new and different
We believe that goals must create radical clarity about where to focus energy and resources. Additionally, systems should counteract maladaptive tendencies, consistently realigning focus, and resources to create value and achieve outcomes.
“The increase of disorder or entropy distinguishes the past from the future, giving a direction to time.”
- Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
Make Bold Moves
Thank you for your interest in Lotis Blue. Please fill out the form to let us
know how we can help. We’ll be in touch soon.