Team Development

Achieving high-performing leadership teams is one of the most daunting tasks leaders face. Team members promoted because of their drive and ability to deliver results are now expected to subordinate individual objectives in service of team goals. Once-effective behaviors in functional/operational roles increasingly create tension and conflict on cross-functional management teams. Team leaders and team members join or leave the team, each change effectively creating a new team—with new dynamics and challenges. Additionally, complex environmental and stakeholder forces create further ambiguity and complexity that amplifies the difficulty in achieving a truly high-performing team.

With the rest of the organization watching—and being affected by—every success and misstep of the leadership teams, the benefits of optimizing alignment, collaboration, and trust at senior levels are substantial. The stakes are high, and failure is not an option.

What differentiates KSE’s approach is our experience with facilitating teams and coaching for high-performing team dynamics while the team remains in place and on the job, discussing and doing real work on substantive business issues. Our team effectiveness consultants have undergone intensive and sustained training in interpersonal and group dynamics. We are experts at diagnosing dynamics that are often invisible to the untrained eye, and we have the courage, skill, and agility to take action to transform ineffective team behavior patterns and to guide the team supportively to higher performance.

We work with the CEO, HR head, and the top managers to make step-change improvements in leadership team performance. We interview and survey team members and others in the organization to understand the degree to which team members have embraced the company’s strategy, and we explore the interpersonal dynamics that lead to team breakdowns and disunity.

We facilitate team sessions that shed light on these underlying dynamics and the potential consequences if left unchanged. We get team members to make specific commitments for improvement, and then monitor team dynamics to make sure these commitments happen. Central to our approach is building team member skills in giving and receiving feedback and having the difficult conversations that are necessary to successfully face and achieve disruptive change.