Sharing a little more about my Team Effectiveness journey..

I had been focusing on individual leadership development at this point for over a decade, and seen it as the main approach to culture and team performance. At first, the approach was to send leaders on leadership development interventions, which resulted in nice positive impacts. However, it was hit and miss whether real and sustained transformation would follow: in other words, whether their team would become more than the sum of its parts.

Applying this insight in our leadership team coaching at Brave Insights, we saw incredible progress from sustained team interventions. We found we could transform the top team to become much more than the sum of its parts, and it would positively impact the culture, engagement scores and business results. This work at BI continues today.

However, the sheer time commitment and budget limitations often meant that impacts couldn't get deeper into the organization, and there were critical micro-cultures impacting organisational performance going completely unaddressed.

So two things occured to me. Firstly, we had to find a more scalable and sustainable way to intervene across all team layers, and secondly we need cold, hard data to help organisations and leaders make better decisions.

We started with an in-organization pilot research project at an Australian financial services company, which ran alongside a large org-wide culture intervention we did there. We measured behaviour change and capability over time. We were lucky to be partnering with a radically open-minded P&C director Trevor Evans, who empowered us and supported us to get the executive and board aligned on a more holistic approach to culture change.

What we found was that while all interventions used (leadership workshops, peer coaching, team coaching and individual coaching) were effective in creating a shift over time in both behaviours and capability, it was the team coaching that had by far the largest impact in long term behaviour change of both individuals and teams.

It was so clear that sustained team interventions were so effective, giving us motivation to tackle the challenge of how to scale this to more teams.

One thing we'd noticed was that the greatest progress occured once a team had gotten to their core issue: the heart of what change was needed. Once they'd confronted reality and had the insight, facilitating the change seemed to happen at a much greater pace. This led me wonder if teams armed with the right information about their reality could have their key insights and self develop or make change, with less external intervention necessary per team, enabling the organisation to scale impact more deeply.