Traditional teambuilding was clearly going to be an anachronistic irrelevance. What these top-teams needed was to develop an uncompromising level of attention to how they showed up in the business in general and in their work in very specific practice. They needed to work out how they each turned the strategy and culture into an effective way of life for themselves and then their own teams. A model was developed for engaging the teams over a period of 3 to 6-months focussing on the 5 ‘C’s of Clarity, Context, Customer, Collaboration and Culture.

The teams’ leaders, senior executives in their own right, worked one-to-one with a facilitator to get ready for their role in the team’s development and to help the facilitators tailor the Team Effectiveness design in whatever way was necessary. It was essential that the design was rigorously adapted to ensure that it was 100% relevant to the specific day-to-day work of every individual team.

Each team then participated in two team development workshops, both of two-days. Team coaching was delivered between the two workshops and continued beyond the second one. The team leaders were also supported throughout the process.

The design ensured that, whilst every team’s experience was tailored to their needs, across the whole organisation one common palette of processes, language, models and messages were used. The cumulative effect was to bring about an unprecedented level of leadership alignment, both across what had otherwise been silos of the organisation and vertically between different levels of leadership. Most importantly this was an alignment of intent, practice, language and day-to-day leadership practice.