From good team to great

Who It's For

Team leaders and managers in councils, the voluntary sector, health and housing

Overview

Raising performance without burning people out is a craft. The first half of the Immerse Raising the team's game begins with what not to do, through Robert Sutton's tests for toxic behaviour, and with performance management as a system, using Adobe's Check-In. It turns to Stanley McChrystal's Team of Teams, where efficient is not the same as adaptable and shared consciousness depends on trust across boundaries. Trust and psychological safety with Amy Edmondson follow, then collective intelligence, from the hidden profile problem to a ten-minute huddle. It closes with groupthink and dissent, from the Bay of Pigs to the Cuban Missile Crisis, and with conflict in teams.

Aims

This half day exists to help leaders raise the bar while keeping people with them: acting early on toxic behaviour, replacing the annual review with check-ins that matter, building adaptability and trust across boundaries, and creating a team that can disagree well and decide better as a result.

In summary, you will be able to:

1. 1Identify toxic behaviour using Sutton's tests and act early, before its cost to the team outweighs any individual contribution.
2. 2Apply Team of Teams principles and psychological safety to build trust and shared awareness across team boundaries.
3. 3Design dissent into team decisions, drawing on the contrast between the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

What you'll develop

Across this Explore, you will develop the ability to:

1. 1Apply Sutton's aftermath, target and pattern tests to distinguish toxic behaviour from honest challenge or an occasional bad day.
2. 2Explain the four flaws of the traditional annual review and forced ranking: timing, memory, the curve and cost.
3. 3Explain why an efficient hierarchy struggles when speed and complexity rise, and distinguish efficiency from adaptability.
4. 4Explain Edmondson's definition of psychological safety and use the standards and safety matrix to place your team.
5. 5Explain the hidden profile problem and why groups tend to lose information that only one member holds.
6. 6Identify Janis's symptoms of groupthink and explain why intelligence offers no protection against it.
7. 7Distinguish task, relationship and process conflict and explain what the meta-analyses say about each.
8. 8Explain why talent and damage are separate ledgers, and identify the hidden costs of toxic behaviour and the reasons it is tolerated.