high performing teams

Client Challenge

An organization was tasked with inventing or innovating a new idea that could be leveraged to position itself even more so in the marketplace.  To do so, they were aware they needed some creative and innovative thinking to collaborate with their tried and true engineers who possessed strong knowledge and expertise of their organization’s IP.  A collaborative team of 20 individuals (1/2 from the organization; the other ½ from two other firms) were created with the task of 3 months to work in sprints and innovate, fail and learn.

The ask of TPS Consulting was to get this hybrid team up and running as a high performing team quickly.

Approach 

• Level setting and alignment with the steering group initially prior to conducting any sessions with the newly formed team.
• Ongoing coaching was made available to the innovation coach to support his role in fostering their positive team dynamics and navigating through the changes.

Solution

• Education with the steering committee to:
  • Understand their part as executive sponsors to ensure that the team members felt psychologically safe to contribute crazy ideas.
  • Understand their role in reducing resistance amongst their own organization’s team members who may perceive these newcomers as a threat.
• Co-designed weeklong sprint design sprint to ensure interactivity and contribution of all. Given the virtual nature of the sessions, the teambuilding focus was covered into two half days – with a focus on how to build high performing teams and establishing their team norms and what it means to make it fail.
• While the desire was for sprint teams to work collaboratively for 2 weeks, debrief their learnings, disband, and then work in new teams, the emergence of ‘team leads’ was identified earlier.

Results

• In a debrief with the client five months after the project was initiated, feedback was that the reviews from the work TPS Consulting provided was overwhelmingly positive. The project has continued to progress and they plan to use this serve as the template design for their business model for years to come.