Senior Team Development - Gramercy Consulting

The Challenge

A leader’s success is commensurate with the results of his or her team. When teams are not operating at their highest levels, one or more of the following issues are typically at play:

Leaders have not mastered the art of empowering others. They think they have all the answers and don’t trust that their people can do the job as well or even better than they can.
Leaders are living with “B” talent to avoid conflict and/or the loss of institutional knowledge.

Roles and accountabilities are unclear.
Leaders are allowing behaviors that impede collaboration and trust.
The team has been poorly managed in the past.
A mix of old and new team members is causing conflict.

The Solution

Gramercy Consulting works with leaders and their teams to address these and other challenges. We accelerate results through a team-coaching process that gets issues out on the table, creates new “Rules of Engagement” and gains team and leader buy-in to a new way of working. High performance is developed through ongoing coaching and team check-ins. Ultimately, our greatest reward comes the day we walk away, knowing the highly functioning team no longer needs our support.

Our team coaching process includes three key components:

Needs Assessment

One-on-one interviews and on-line team assessment tools are used to uncover underlying causes of limited performance. We gather each team member’s unique perspective with respect to the organization’s strategies and priorities, the team’s most significant internal and external challenges, elements of the culture that are making or breaking success, and ways the leadership team is working well and what it can be doing to become even more effective. Additionally, we administer am online team assessment based on Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team.

Customized Off-Sites

We design and facilitate highly customized off-sites that focus on the areas of opportunity highlighted in interviews and the online Team Assessment. Off-sites are typically one to two days. During these sessions, we take the team through a series of discussion and exercises that focus on areas such as building trust, understanding stylistic differences, exploring conflict, creating “Rules of Engagement” or “Team Agreements”, developing a team scorecard used to track the team’s effectiveness going forward. We put the team’s “elephants” on the table and work with the team to work through them.

Team Coaching

In our experience, one-and-done off-sites are highly ineffective. Creating a highly effective team takes time and focus. We stay engaged with the team in a variety of ways, from attending weekly team meetings to meeting with the team monthly, semi-monthly or quarterly to ensure the team is taking a step back from daily operations to reflect on their progress as a team. During this time, we are coaching the leader in areas that will help him or her drive greater team engagement and performance.

This process is highly customized depending on the situation.