Impromptu Teaming
Collaboration at its Best
Teams go beyond the staff that report to you. You need them across functional boundaries, locations and settings to accomplish what can only be done by a network of individuals. Teams across all settings need the skills to form as a team, get the expected results and leverage diverse ideas to succeed.
Infinity symbols represent boundarylessness. When you treat teaming as a dynamic infinite loop, rather than a static entity, such as a group, you embed teaming skills, behaviors and norms in your culture. This leads to a level of collaboration that can only be achieved when people know how to produce as a team when they are called to do so. Impromptu teaming is the ability to form and produce as a team quickly, on the fly, and especially when there is little time to create a formal team structure.
I help you build the capacity in your organization for everyone to form teams as needed and ramp up their effectiveness quickly.
The basic process is to:
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Aim high - set goals around the soul purpose of the team and engage the heart
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Frame the situation - focus the lens, like a photographer, on the view of the situation that helps the team make sense out of their relevant tasks and make meaningful contributions
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Get excited - this is co-creating the design of the team and its structure and roles to suit the purpose and aspirations of the team and organization
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Coordinate action- this step engages 7 speech acts that clarify how teams make requests and promises, keep their commitments and generate the actions that produce results
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Experiment and learn - this step engages the work to be done through the lens of creativity, innovation, dreaming and discovery, so that team members learn the skills (while doing them) to embed experimentation into the broader organization
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Coach for success - team members learn valuable skills to coach each other to breakthroughs, reframing failure and learning so that their processes can be replicated
Finally, the skill that crosses both the setting the stage and acting components of the framework is creating the sacred space for teams, a skill that supports all teams across an organization. This is continuously making it safe for team members to speak up, address issues, resolve conflict, move from breakdowns to breakthroughs, and keep the team on track when it derails, or "goes off the rails."