Gazelles is a systematic curriculum for developing high-performance business teams. The program consists of an interlocking set of training and consulting sessions designed to develop understanding and skills for high performance teaming. It is based on a systematic approach to providing both teams and their management with the concepts, skills and methodologies needed at each key stage of development. As teams move through the program, they jell; learn to respect, trust and contract with each other; discuss business issues at more sophisticated levels; and develop shared commitment to business objectives and new ways of working.
Team Facilitation: Tools and Techniques
True Teams Lab
Almost all the significant business breakthroughs in quality, service and productivity come, not from individual efforts, but rather from ad hoc, functional or cross-functional teams. Collections of individual contributors do not naturally jell into a team. They have to be built into a team.
The True Teams Lab was designed specifically to work both the business and team process "fronts" simultaneously. The team comes together to address the business challenges and priorities of their particular team with coaching and guidance from the instructors. The content agenda is developed in collaboration with the team’s leadership. So, in addition to accomplishing key selected business objectives as they might at a facilitated off-site, the team gets the opportunity to diagnose, overhaul and tune the dynamics of the group at the same time. This approach enables them to create and leverage team synergies to improve the financial and environmental health of their business unit.
Business Process Improvement
Once a team begins to achieve a sense of confidence in how they work as a team, they have the capacity to make significant improvements in how the business is conducted.
It has been estimated that up to 85 percent of possible productivity improvement comes from removing redundancies, wasted motion, blockages and rework from mainstream business processes. It is also known that business change is almost always better accepted, implemented and integrated if it is designed by the employees/teams who actually do the work on a daily basis. This workshop teaches the critical steps, tools and techniques of process improvement while the team works on relevant and problematic processes of its own. It is an action, results-oriented program that produces usable products and a plan of action while continuing to refine levels of teamwork.
Coaching High Performance Teams
Most organizations today face six great challenges: how to improve product quality, shorten product cycle time, streamline business processes, increase customer satisfaction and retain the best employees. And, lastly, how to do all of these with fewer people in less time.
It has become increasingly clear that today’s organizations are unable to solve these productivity challenges with yesterday’s managerial styles. Coaching High-Performance Teams is designed to provide managers with the key diagnostic and coaching skills required to enable their organizations to make use of the initiative and creativity of intact and cross-functional ad-hoc teams.
Coaching teams is different than managing and coaching individual contributors or a group of individual contributors. It requires a different managerial skill set. Managers must know how to charter, launch, guide, monitor and coach teams so that they become productive more quickly and grow in their capacity to accomplish more complex tasks with less direct supervision.
Follow-on Consulting Sessions
As teams move along the path to high performance, whether they be managerial teams, intact teams or cross-functional project teams, it is helpful for them to have on-going access to an outside coach. VGI therefore builds in regular half-day or full-day sessions with teams in the Gazelles team development program. We also offer on-line consulting and coaching to both teams and managers.
