Creating High Performance Teamwork:    (Full-Day)
Introduction: The challenge of creating effective teams has increased in the 21st century, where there are now “teams” of one (e.g., business partners and consultants) who work with clients, or teams of many distributed across time and location (e.g., virtual work).  No matter what your organization does, it is likely that most of the work and results get done through the collective effort of teams.  Yet as most of us have experienced, ‘high performance teamwork’ does not happen by chance, and too often we may have worked on “teams” that lacked clear goals, effective leadership, supportive trustworthy teammates, a positive work climate, etc.  This highly interactive program briefly presents recent research on high performance teams, and then many practical ideas and tools designed to help any team achieve improved performance and engagement.

Program Description: This full-day session begins with a short reflection on participants’ experiences of their “worst team” and “best team”.  Participants next take part in a fun teamwork simulation where small, mixed ‘teams’ compete on a management planning task and the correct answers are provided at the end.  Reflection and lessons learned from the simulation are then discussed.  The program then shares key findings from recent research on high performance teams and the role of such factors as ‘trust’, ‘psychological safety’, ‘alignment’, ‘shared leadership’, etc.   The session provides a number of practical concepts and ‘tools’, for example, the rules of “dialogue”, ideas for effective meetings, tips on empowerment, The Workplace Covenant, etc. to help teams experience greater alignment, partnership and performance.

Learning Outcomes:
Participants in this workshop on high performance teamwork will:
1.         Reflect on their experiences of best and worst teams
2.         Engage in a powerful and fun simulation on teamwork and discuss lessons learned
3.         Understand new research about how to create high-performing teams, regardless of team      size
4.         Examine how high-performance teamwork can improve employee engagement
5.         Provide practical suggestions to improve collaboration and alignment on teams
6.         Present established and recently developed metrics for measuring teamwork
7.         Understand how to use The Workplace Covenant and other tools to enhance high performance teamwork.