Avanti Strategic Team Behaviours
Twelve threads, one strong cloth: how your leadership team holds together.
The Weave
Your team is a cloth of twelve threads: its strength comes from how they cross and hold each other, not from any single thread.
- Signature strength
- Established
- Growing edge
- Each thread runs as far as the team's average for that behaviour, out of 10, in four bands of three
Drawn with made-up sample data.
The figures in this picture
| Behaviour | Band of the weave | Team average | Band |
|---|---|---|---|
| One Voice | Standing Together | 6.4 | Established |
| Trusted Colleague | Standing Together | 4.9 | Growing edge |
| Common Purpose | Standing Together | 7.0 | Established |
| Horizon Watcher | Thinking Together | 4.7 | Growing edge |
| Brave Challenger | Thinking Together | 5.8 | Established |
| Straight Talker | Thinking Together | 5.0 | Established |
| Decision Keeper | Deciding Together | 5.4 | Established |
| Accountability Champion | Deciding Together | 7.5 | Signature strength |
| Systems Integrator | Deciding Together | 4.1 | Growing edge |
| Community Partner | Working With Others | 5.3 | Established |
| Culture Carrier | Working With Others | 4.6 | Growing edge |
| Adaptive Navigator | Working With Others | 5.5 | Established |
What It Explores
A strengths-based team profile that shows how the twelve threads of a senior team's behaviour weave together, as seen by the people inside it.
Most leadership development focuses on individuals. Yet in public services the decisions that shape people's lives are usually made by teams: executive teams, boards working with their executives, and partnership groups that bring councils, health, housing, policing, the voluntary sector and communities together. How those teams behave together, especially under pressure, matters as much as the capability of any single leader within them.
Avanti Strategic Team Behaviours is a structured development tool built around the image of a weave. Twelve behaviours form twelve threads, woven in four bands: Standing Together, Thinking Together, Deciding Together and Working With Others. Like a Welsh carthen, the team's cloth takes its strength and its pattern from how the threads cross and hold each other, not from any single thread. Each member rates how the team actually behaves now, and each receives a report setting their view of the cloth alongside the team's combined view. Differences are welcomed as contributions, because every member feels the cloth from a different place, and together those views show what the team could become.
Why It Matters
- Senior teams are judged on individual capability, yet the most important decisions are made together.
- Under pressure, teams slip into silos, guarded conversations and decisions that do not hold.
- Communities are often brought in late, after directions are effectively settled.
- Few teams have a safe, structured way to talk honestly about how they really behave.
What You Receive
- A 48-item team profile completed confidentially by every member.
- An individual report for each member, setting their view against the team's combined view.
- A combined team profile across twelve behaviours and four groups.
- An option to repeat the profile to see what has changed.
Feedback. A facilitated session to work through the results together is arranged with you. Talk to us
What People Take Away
- 1Name the twelve strategic team behaviours and the four groups they sit in.
- 2Recognise how your own view of the team compares with the combined view.
- 3Identify the team's clearest strengths and the behaviours it most needs to develop.
- 4Explain how team behaviour affects outcomes for people and communities.
- 5Apply practical tools for challenge, decision-making and peer accountability.
- 6Assess how far the team shares power with communities and values lived experience.
- 7Agree two or three shared team commitments and how progress will be noticed.
Who It Is For
- Executive and senior leadership teams
- Boards working with their executive teams
- Political and executive leadership groups
- Partnership and system leadership groups
- Leadership teams in the voluntary and community sector
- Programme boards leading significant service change
When to Use It
A new or changing leadership team
When a team forms, gains new members or takes on new responsibilities, the profile helps it agree early how it wants to work together.
Leading significant service change
Before or during major redesign of services, the instrument checks whether the team is ready to lead change that staff and communities can trust.
Building a partnership leadership group
Where several organisations share leadership of an outcome, such as homelessness prevention or mental health, the behaviours give the group a common language for working as one system.
After a difficult period
Following an inspection, a public challenge or a period of strain, it provides a structured, safe way to reflect honestly and reset.
Boards and executive teams together
When trustees, non-executives or elected members and senior officers want to strengthen how they work together, the profile can be completed across both groups.
Our Approach in This Instrument
The Weave describes how a team holds together without judging it: every thread counts, a looser thread is a place to grow, and different views of the cloth are treated as contributions. It keeps integrity, social outcomes and the communities the team serves at the centre of the pattern.
Proper Use
This is a development instrument. It is not a clinical assessment and it is not designed or validated for selection, recruitment, promotion or performance management decisions. Scores describe perceptions at a point in time and are a starting point for conversation, not a verdict.