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CHEERS FOR PEERS

by | Mar 2, 2022 | Articles, Features, Team coaching | 0 comments

How can we cultivate resiliency through disruption with team coaching? Michelle Chambers reports

 

Here is a story of hope, inspiration and resiliency. What individual, team, organisation or community could not use a boost of those right now in
such challenging and transformational times?

This team coaching case study captures a leadership team working within the non-profit sector, with critical services to support individuals with developmental disabilities. The team’s mission is to enable these individuals to lead full lives and to be effectively, safely and inclusively supported within their communities.

 

Background

Imagine an organisation that has had several changes in senior leadership within three years: a mass exodus of board members; loss of funding; loss of trust within the community; and a ‘toxic’ culture with little psychological safety.

The new executive director (ED), Lisa McNee-Baker of Community Living Ajax, Pickering and Whitby (CLAPW) reached out to me for leadership support for the nine-strong senior leadership team. CLAPW has 150 employees across eight physical locations and has been in existence for 60 years. Lisa and I had previously worked together and I knew she was the type of leader who was empathetic, supportive and really cared about the people and the organisation. Evident to both of us was that we needed to choose an approach that would provide long-term sustainable change in behaviour and support for the team.

 

Team coaching

There are several reasons why team coaching was chosen as the appropriate intervention.

First, team coaching can enhance a leadership team’s capacity and capability in order to drive behaviour and culture change. Second, it can help develop a collaborative working team whose members support one another to achieve client objectives. Finally, it works with the interaction of the team as a whole, rather than focusing on individual performance. It’s about creating sustainable change in behaviour over time so that the leadership team holds itself accountable to one another.

To start the process, the team worked on developing its ‘team purpose’ to ensure alignment and commitment on why it was there and why members needed to work as one leadership team.

The team defined its purpose as: “We are here as leaders to support one another and inspire staff so that people we support can live their best lives possible”. What a shift this created, enabling each of them to connect their own personal ‘why’ to that of the team and organisation.

The members all believed in the organisation’s mission (many were long-term staff members), but now they were connected to working together to improve things in the overall interests of the organisation.

The team members then reviewed the team’s most critical business priorities, including defining their role as a leadership team to support one another, build capacity and develop a positive working culture. The latter was about rebuilding trust and brand reputation with clients, community, funders and other stakeholders and continuing to meet the need for expanding services and programmes for clients.

Notice that the first business goal was to address leadership and develop capacity at the top – the ED felt this was important in order to move forward and address the other business priorities.

The team members then engaged in envisioning their ‘best team’ to create a desired future state. As part of that process, they created ‘team norms’ or ‘operating agreements’ on how they would treat one another. This was critical to increase trust within the team and to enable them to call out behaviours when they occurred that weren’t supportive of the team.

The challenge for this team, like all teams, was to make this a living practice that they constantly referred to and assessed for effectiveness. It was built into their agendas – team members were praised for using them. Several norms were game changers, including: “being invested – working towards the common good – all in” and “actively listening and asking questions to understand”.

The team also completed the Team Diagnostic Assessment (TDA) from Team Coaching International in order to assess their current strengths and opportunities for development.

This assessment is based on research on teams, Emotional Intelligence and Appreciative Inquiry. Essentially, it consists of 80 questions grouped around seven positivity and seven productivity factors based on team effectiveness. The team’s strengths included team leadership; respect (not trust) and alignment.

The opportunities for development included team performance indicators such as: communication, constructive interaction; accountability; resources being proactive and optimistic.

The team developed an action plan identifying priorities and coaching was held monthly. Team coaching interventions included: positivity commitments; a decision-making matrix and decision-making model; practice giving one another positive and constructive feedback (also a norm); appreciation; conflict assessment and development of a conflict protocol.

Through team coaching observation and feedback, the team slowly addressed behaviours and considerable progress was made. In fact, the staff were noticing the changes and partners also noticed a change in work culture. The team had expended considerable effort and the results were showing.

 

Resiliency

Then the day came the organisation received ransomware. All of its data was being held hostage for a ransom payment. The team was devastated. It was also a critical time as financials were due for year-end, budgets were to be reproduced, key data and forms and processes were lost, and so on. Morale was very low. The ED credits the team coaching process as a key success factor in enabling the team to address this latest hurdle.

We shifted gears and made ‘resiliency’ the topic of our team coaching session. Resiliency was defined and accepted by the team as “the ability to persevere in dealing with challenges while also adapting, growing and learning”. In preparation, team members were asked to complete a resilience assessment from the Centre for Creative Leadership to better understand their own individual strengths and weaknesses.

I then asked them to share stories of resiliency from their past and to identify what enabled them as a team to overcome those challenges. We also reviewed a Resiliency Capabilities model from Roffey Park. Generative dialogue was then held to discuss, in light of the ransomware, how this team could best support one another to address the current situation.

Team members expressed their need for help and others shifted their priorities to accommodate them; job roles were redefined on the spot. Accountability partners were set up to check in with one another and provide individual support. Requests were made from partners, funders and other similar agencies to get older data, processes and forms so as not to recreate everything from scratch. Preventative measures were put in place by IT to ensure this wouldn’t happen again. People who were experts took the lead in moving forward the revisited priorities, and so on.

Team norms of ‘being empathetic and patient with one another’ were added and a focus was placed on ‘the greater good’.

What a way to end the year.

The team took time to celebrate and acknowledge their accomplishments and to look forward to the year ahead.

 

COVID-19

Not even two months later, the pandemic hit. Imagine an organisation where your goal is to ensure people are fully supported and included within their community and now everyone is in lockdown. Not only did this team have the stress of addressing issues related to COVID, including how to support staff working from home, how to support staff who had to remain onsite, getting PPE supplies, switching programming to virtual, but they also had to address the biggest challenge possible – one that attacked their very mission: supporting people with developmental disabilities and ensuring they lead full and inclusive lives within their communities.

With everything the leadership team had been through in the last nine months, it would be easy for members to be exhausted and throw their hands up. Instead, they dug deep, confident in their ability to work together, committed to the mission and committed to one another to
move forward.

Of course, the leader of the team, the ED, is one of the most caring, empathetic and optimistic leaders I know. Her leadership style was a significant factor and was assessed as a team strength at the beginning of the process, and continued to be throughout this time period. As everything was so chaotic and the team had a lot on their plate, a decision was made to pause team coaching. The team was also concerned as to how effective it would be as we had been doing sessions face-to-face and due to lockdown we’d have to do them virtually.

Within a couple of months we resumed the final two team coaching sessions virtually. It would be remiss not to mention the power of appreciation that enabled this team to address resiliency not only within itself, CLAPW, but also within its community. At one point, the team adopted a concept they defined as Culture Club, based on 80s music. They developed “cheers for peers” and even developed an incredible and colourful appreciation card to send out internally, with motivating sayings such as: “you are incredible”; “you matter”, and an opportunity to jot a note to a peer.

It was so successful they ordered four times as many the next year. They even dedicated a day to support partners and community members to share the recognition cards with them. Talk about a systemic approach to changing and appreciating one another within a community!

The team redeployed the team diagnostic assessment and saw significant improvements in team performance indicators that they had identified to work on as well as other measures of improving team effectiveness.

Based on this team’s experience, I think other teams can be inspired and optimistic that if they too focus on improving their overall effectiveness in similar ways they will not only address resiliency but become higher performing as well.

 

About the author
Michelle Chambers is chief people, strategy & culture officer at Chambers & Associates, based in Canada. www.chambersandassociates.ca

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