Six Approaches to Scaling Teamwork: Start at the Top

The way a team plays as a whole determines its success. You may have the greatest bunch of individual stars in the world, but if they don't play together, the club won't be worth a dime.

Babe Ruth

This is the third of seven LinkedIn posts that review what organizations are doing to scale teamwork. CEOs, top Functional Leaders, and Business Unit Leaders usually make up a C-Suite Team. Five to 20+ senior leaders can be found on C-Suite Teams, and they are responsible for strategy formulation, acquisitions and divestitures, annual operating plans and budgets, asset allocation, business models, organizational structure and staffing, company culture, and the overall success or failure of the organizations they lead. Because they play such a critical role organizational success, many major change initiatives start with C-Suite Teams. Scaling effective teamwork is no different.

This professional services company was launched eight years ago and had gone through several successful rounds of funding. The company currently consists of 1,200 employees working in one of the three business units or a shared services function. Because of the company’s rapid growth, siloes began forming and cross-functional collaboration was becoming more difficult. Both the CEO and CHRO felt teamwork was critical to the company’s continued success.

The company started its scaling effective teamwork journey by having the C-Suite Team members complete Team Assessment Surveys and interviews to collect quantitative and qualitative data on team dynamics and performance. It then did a two day offsite to learn what it takes to build high performing teams, review the survey and interview results, see how they compared to other C-Suite Teams, and take action to improve team effectiveness. The event went well, and C-Suite Team members went through a similar process with their functional and business unit leadership teams so they could perform at higher levels. 

Team Assessment Survey Results for Business Unit and Functional Leadership Teams

To support the additional team engagement requests, several HR staff got certified on the Rocket Model approach to building high performing teams. During the certification process they learned how to conduct team member interviews, interpret Team Assessment Survey results, facilitate team improvement activities, and design team engagements. The TAS results for the organization can be found the table. Although none of the leadership teams were high performing (TQ > 76), six of the 18 were above average performers (TQ 51-75). The rest were either not performing as well as other leadership teams (TQ = 26-50) or were low performing teams (TQ<25). The Research and Development, Marketing, Revenue, and Product Development Leadership Teams headed up functions critical to the company’s overall success yet were the lowest performing teams in the mix. Context, Talent, Norms, and Resources were the lowest scoring Rocket Model components across all teams. This information helped the CEO and CHRO to identify the teams needing the most help and the team building activities that would add the most value.

The company was able to identify where team performance was problematic and do something about it. Most don’t. To scale effective teamwork, HR is working with sub-functional teams to complete TASs, review the results, and build action plans to improve team performance.

Curphy Leadership Solutions offers workshops that train internal and external consultants on how to help organizations scale teamwork. Highly interactive, practical, and useful, Rocket Model Certification Workshops provide participants with all the tools they need to market, price, sell, design, and deliver team engagements, leadership development and high-potential programs, on-boarding plans, leadership assessments, and eLearning modules that enable organizations to scale teamwork. Contact Gordy Curphy (curphyconsulting@msn.com) for details about the public workshop taking place in November-December.

Gordon Curphy is an Industrial & Organizational psychologist specializing in C-suite succession planning, executive coaching, top team facilitation, scaling effective teamwork, and leadership development. He has developed several successful commercially published leadership and team assessments; coached 200 C-suite executives; worked with over 600 top teams; collected data on 3,500 teams, trained 20,000 leaders; and sold over 100,000 books, chapters, and articles on leadership and teams. You can find more about Gordon’s leadership books and consulting services at: www.curphyleadershipsolutions.com and www.rocketmodelforteams.com.