A change of leader within Danone’s Health & Hydration team provided an opportunity for team development with a focus on building collaboration across three sub teams and performing as a cohesive, highly effective group of people.
Leading Edge was asked to design a Highly Effective Teams (H.E.T.) journey for the whole team, consisting of three senior leaders and 15 team members. H.E.T. is a flexible framework in support of team development, wherever they are on their journey.
Designing an H.E.T. journey begins with gaining a true understanding of where the team members are in terms of the current situation and the future desired situation. When teams need to come together under a new leader, it’s crucial that any team journey enables everyone’s strengths to be realised and valued collectively.
Lumina Spark profiling is a valuable start point. It helps team members to both explore their own personal strengths and better understand themselves and others. We included this self-awareness profiling in the journey to provide a common language for team discussion around strengths and open up opportunities to positively discuss differences and tensions, to understand why they occur, and to have better insight to help them positively move forward.
We facilitated three energising team-based sessions for the Health & Hydration team with activities linked to our Point of View on Teams. Some activities involved the whole team, some focussed on the senior leadership team (SLT) and some were designed for their team members only.
The whole team kicked off their H.E.T. journey by getting into the detail of where they were as a team – this is such a useful start point on a journey to bring about stronger collaboration. To create a visual output and reference, the team created a timeline to share their collective history and give clarity on where they wanted to go in the future.
In one activity designed to bring learning to life, Leading Edge Team Coach Caroline Hampson facilitated an engaging session to create “strengths t-shirts.”
Caroline said: “This modern approach to sharing feedback is all about highlighting – and valuing – how the strengths of each individual combine for high team performance. Everyone was given a plain t-shirt and asked to draw or write something on everyone else’s t-shirt to describe and recognise the value they bring to them or the team.
This activity was so well received. The team loved the creativity around sharing feedback with their colleagues and I enjoyed seeing how their energy and commitment helped them to connect and progress as a team.”
Another great activity focussed on visualising and realising strengths and capability across a team is the Skill/Will Matrix. This proved to be very positive and motivational for the team, as it provided a foundation for one-to-one conversations between team members and senior leaders that helped to move development forward.
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