As Amanda & I thought about forming Teams Thrive, we had to ask ourselves is there something unique about our approach that we think the industry needs? There are a lot of fantastic executive coaches out there. What we came away with is that coaches are often focused on the leader of a team with a strong emphasis on the person in context of leadership & communication principles. We believe the fuller context of success is how do their teams function as a team (the Who), with a purpose (the What), with just enough process (the How) and still produce a great product (the What). 

Over and over we have seen that the right people with the right purpose working with the right processes create the best products. And leaders are only as good as the teams they produce. And teams are only as good as how they work together to solve real customer problems. We use these four dimensions as a “forensics” tool to evaluate where a team is. By looking at all four aspects we get a fuller picture of what needs to be done to move the team to a high functioning and thriving level.

Continue reading “The Who, Why, How, and What of Thriving Teams”

Over my time as a senior leader, I inherited a lot of teams. These teams came in various states of health. It was important for me to do some forensics and determine a path to either keep teams thriving or find a way to get them there. I needed a framework for evaluating teams.

In reality, this framework started coming together in a much more mundane way. Every year we had to outline a set of goals for our teams. The goals fell into categories that were always passed down from the top. Being a reductionist, I started seeing patterns in the categories that got handed down from year to year. They had different names of course. And different wording. But I began to see that there were only so many dimensions that a team can organize goals around and on the flip side only so many ways a team can be evaluated on their progress toward those goals.

Continue reading “How We Evaluate Teams”