High Performing Teams 2016

One of the great things we did when I worked at Nestlé Purina was to create a programme for teams. It was in the early days of running the Purina Inspirational Leadership Programme (ILP) when I was asked if I could create a programme for teams. Participants to ILP were finding the highly supportive environment resulted in excellent openness and honesty and they wanted to create the same ‘atmosphere’ within their own teams. It seemed like a good idea, so I scanned the market to see if any outside training company offered such a programme. It soon became apparent that there wasn’t one, just plenty of team building activities. Cooking a meal, walking up/down a mountain, walking over hot coals are all fun and help to bring people together, but they seldom address the issues that exist within teams. In typical ‘can do’ Purina fashion, what we couldn’t find we created ourselves. We started with the first workshop modeled on Inspirational Leadership and year by year continued to improve the workshop. I left Purina at the end of 2009, by which stage we were up to version 12 of High Performing Teams. In 2010 I set up my coaching business Release the Magic and continued to develop the programme. I started by reflecting on the past 10 years and taking on board all the learning and this generated a new model that I have run very successfully for five years.

Going into 2016 I decided it was the right time to renovate / reinvent HPT and I have just run the first two day workshop with a UK client and it was awesome!!!

This is the new model:-

The key attributes are:-

• Where the leader is engaging and inspiring and willing to share leadership with the team
• The team know each other well and together they use peer to peer coaching to grow one another
• They have a continuous improvement mindset constantly looking for small / big improvements and eliminating waste
• There is a high degree of mutual trust 
• The vision and values they have as a team inspires everyone
• All goals are aligned and roles and responsibilities and priorities are clear
• There is a wonderful team spirit where people feel pride and passion for what they do

The HPT workshop is a very hands on, fun and eye opener to new possibilities even to the most skeptical. There is no hiding as everyone just has to participate and they have to, in a very supportive environment, deal with their issues. I just love running the workshop and know that the enthusiasm and energy that flows from me doing what I love, has an infectious effect on all participants.

I have also designed a couple of additional modules for the team's learning remembering that 'a team that learns together tends to grow together'. ‘Peer2Peer Skills Coaching’ is about transferring skills strengths within the team (plus additional coaching guides that we will provide) to other team members who are struggling and ‘Simpler Smarter Quicker’ (uses the P2P coaching culture) is about reorganising the way people work to manage time better, use email effectively, reduce waste and free up around 25% of each person’s day to create the capacity to do more value added activity. It’s about repurposing wasted time/resources and has the potential to transform team performance.

I am hugely excited about this new programme which is always an early indication that we have a real winner on our hands!!!

H A P P Y   D A Y S!