Businesses benefit from teams that work effectively and enjoyably together. Characteristics of healthy high performing teams are those with clear goals, distinct roles, good relationships with other teams, agreed processes and good relationships with each other.

Clients find it especially valuable to invest in developing a healthy team dynamic when a new top team, management team or project team is in the process of forming, as this then enables the team to attend to its business especially effectively, which is critical when time together can be both rare and expensive. Additionally, it is common for teams that have been together for a while to become stuck in a certain pattern, often generating dysfunction that spreads to other parts of the organisation in a way that becomes draining for others and costly to the organisation as a whole.

We have many years' experience supporting top teams and management teams, both in their start-up phase as they aspire to become high performing, and later in their development. We have developed a particular specialism in addressing 'stuck' or 'difficult' issues with unusual levels of insight and skill.

Our ‘minimal intervention’ approach at Integral Change involves quickly getting to the heart of the issues to be faced, and staying with the team’s core business objectives – rather than delivering ‘standard’ diagnostics and development exercises removed from any organisational context.

Typically, our work may involve the following elements:

• high-quality 1:1 confidential interviews - building insights and trust
  
  
• workshops varying from 2 days, to a series of half-days over several months, combining attention to business task and team relationships
  
  
• supporting teams on their journey through the stages of 'forming', 'storming', 'norming' to 'performing'
  
  
• providing 1:1 coaching for team leaders and/or selected team members, as appropriate.

For more insights into our approach, read Esther Cameron's article in the Guardian newspaper (Dec, 2007) about top team dysfunction within the public sector Led Astray, and Jon R. Katzenbach's article (1998) Making Teams Work at the Top.