Helping a newly formed leadership team accelerate clarity, alignment and trust.
Help an executive leadership team with a highly ambitious growth agenda get off to a strong start.
The leadership team were accelerated to high performance by creating mutual clarity and alignment, and deepening interpersonal trust.
Context
When the Founding Partners of a large UK-based technology firm left their business after it was acquired, a new leadership team was put in place to lead the charge as the company entered into its next chapter. With a highly ambitious growth strategy and plenty of work to be done, it was critical that the team got off to a very strong start.
Our Approach
We needed to make progress very quickly so we focused in on a few key areas:
Clarity: Creating space for the team to surface and share: assumptions about their purpose, their main priorities, ways they could work together more effectively, and how they would measure their impact. Airing the teams diverse thoughts and opinions enabled us to surface and address any conflicting points of view.
Alignment: After making the implicit, explicit (by getting it all out in the open), we then went about writing it down. Summarising key things like: Purpose, Mission, Strategies, Roles, Accountabilities, Domain and Working Agreements.
Trust: It was important that the team really got to know each other, and to set expectations for-and-of-each other, so that they had a safe space to open up to have these critical conversations.
Head of EngineeringKindred were able to expertly facilitate the session, to help us overcome many of the obstacles teams normally face during the forming stages. It’s been critical in helping this new leadership team have the best start possible.
What did we do?
To begin with we met with the Managing Director for 3 short sessions to help us dive in to the organisation and design a session that was shaped for them. Throughout those session we also co-created a draft of the team’s Team Charter, capturing their Vision, Mission, Goals and Roles.
We then designed and facilitated a half day workshop. The team spent the first third of the session getting to know each other better. Through a series of short exercises we created moments for the team to open up to each other and get a deeper understanding of their motivations, influencers and working styles.
After a short break, we used the rest of the session to build out their Team Charter, and through a series of exercises and constructive conversations, clarified the team’s Purpose, Vision, Goals, Roles & Accountabilities, Domain, Strategies, Meeting Rhythm and Working Agreements.
The outcome
The team quickly gained the trust, clarity and alignment they needed to get off to a strong start and subsequently have gone on to deliver real impact as a Leadership Team.