Team Effectiveness has grabbed me so tightly that I want to share more about the journey that brought me here.

I'd been working in or with leadership teams for over a decade, some of those inside very highly-regarded cultures, and often seeing that the team was barely the sum of its parts. High-potential, talented individuals working alongside each other rarely magically created a better team. Strong leaders with good people skills helped, but still rarely got a team to the point where they were more than the sum of their parts.

I remember watching this one team who I'd had little to do with, I can't even remember why I was in that room, but I do remember entering thinking the leader was not the 'stereotypical leader' the organisation put in charge. I myself thought 'she's too timid, i can't imagine she's a good leader'. Well I left that room astounded and humbled. I was kinda right, but mostly wrong. She wasn't the stereotypical leader but wow did that team hum like none other I'd seen in that organisation. I remember thinking "where is the leadership in the room?", and later realising it was EVERYWHERE, from EVERYONE!

This experience sparked me with a whole new mission in my work leading Brave Insights. I went on a learning quest to make sense of this and experiment with new and better ways to create the conditions I'd seen in this team for more teams. Further influenced by the work of Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky in Adaptive Leadership that I'd studied in a program at Harvard Kennedy School Executive Education, and Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey's adult development theories and Immunity to Change, along with Professor Peter Hawkins' systemic leadership team coaching.

Soon, my learnings from this quest would influence my practice with leaders and teams, and the creation of TeamHive.