Our Clients – About You

Our clients include virtual teams at all stages of evolution, from new development teams, to established management teams. Do any of these scenarios sound familiar?

New development team and ghosts

A distributed team, not of your making, is assigned to you to lead and manage, and the project is a high priority for the CEO who is not part of the team. How do you begin? There is enormous pressure to get this out quickly and well executed.

One team manager knew that everyone needed to get comfortable if they were going to be able to focus for the long hours required to pull this off, and in working together virtually. Each was told to work from home, work, or Starbucks. Whatever location would help them stay present, focused, and energized. Even though the team developed a good working relationship, the stress from not claiming the project for themselves was intense. The CEO was the “ghost” on the phone lines which had an unintended impact on the functioning of the team. Once the leader and team claimed the project for themselves, they soared through the work, finishing ahead of time, and significantly reducing the strain and struggle, and received kudos from the CEO.

Mid-cycle project team and Re-designing Alliances

Your team is in the middle of development, behind in deadlines, tempers are quick, and members are exhausted from many many hours of overtime for the last two months. Some members are beginning to miss time due to illness. The team leader is a non-company consultant hired only for this project, and not connected to any its employees.

One team member who was being coached decided for the benefit of the team, project and company, to address this in a team meeting and challenged the team to re-design their alliance and set realistic timetables for completion, as well as address the potential impacts on the rest of the company and plan damage control. Noone had been telling the consultant was was actually happening. In the re-design team members shifted perspectives concerning the consultant and began “including” him in the “company”. The resulting impact was the project came in ahead of the new deadlines, and the other company divisions joined in the effort, and were prepared for the roll out delay, because they had done damage control.

For “on-going teams where you can finish each other’s sentences, not necessarily in a productive way” and wanting collaboration

“We had created a Management Team which met weekly to discuss “big” issues. This sounded simple in theory, but the execution was not so smooth. We met on a weekly basis and found these meetings often lacked focus and were simply not effective. We also experienced some clashes among group members. We weren’t interested in a canned approach to our situation. Several of us had been individually coached by a collaborativity coach and were impressed with the results, so as a group we decided to work together through them.”

“During our sessions we explored our preferred style of interaction and learned a valuable meeting model. Now our meetings are better planned, executed, and shorter. And the concept of rotating roles on a weekly basis is important in our desire to interact in a collaborative manner. This collaborative approach to problem solving has created a level playing field were we are all equal. We left the initial session knowing we had a lot of work ahead of us, but feeling really good about the Collaborativity provided to facilitate this. And unlike many “courses” we have all taken, we actually implemented (and still use one year later) the methods we discussed. This is a result of the time the Collaborativity staff took to find out what we were like, what style we could work with and gave us tools that we could believe in. Their exploratory approach to discovery and learning really makes sense.” General manager, small manufacturing company

.

[Collaborativity] [Our Clients - About You] [Why Collaborativity] [Solutions] [About Us] [Contact Us]