Committed Teams: A Practical Approach to Delivering Results

 by Percipient Partners

Welcome to this complimentary online program from Percipient Partners. This course is organized into 7 modules, where each module contains a video and exercises. Each module should take 15-20 minutes to complete. The recommended reading for this course is Committed Teams: Three Steps to Inspiring Passion and Performance by Mario Moussa, Madeline Boyer, Derek Newberry (Wiley, 2016).

About Madeline Boyer:

Madeline Boyer is a Senior Consultant with Percipient Partners, a Lecturer at the Wharton School and cultural business anthropologist whose work, research, and teaching focuses on new workplace phenomena: particularly shared and collaborative workspaces, and remote workforce management (leading ‘wide teams’). Madeline was born and raised in the Panama Canal Zone, is fluent in Spanish and English, and keenly aware of cross-cultural management issues–having grown up in a multi-cultural/lingual region.

Madeline has worked with a wide range of clients, including leading health and research institutions, non-profits, Fortune 500 companies, and Wharton Executive Education on projects ranging from stakeholder research, change management and strategic planning, to executive development and teamwork coaching. She has lectured internationally on her work on co-working, the global shared workspace movement, and online community dynamics. She is a co-author, along with Mario Moussa and Derek Newberry, of the book: Committed Teams: Three Steps to Inspiring Passion and Performance (Wiley Press).

 

Module 1: Committed Teams

Madeline Boyer, co-author of Committed Teams, explains what it takes to build a high-performing team and what are the differentiators for a committed team.

Exercise: Intro to the Organizational Cultural Assessment:
  • Culture is important. It drives the performance of everyone in your organization, but it can often feel too abstract to identify and shape. Drawing from the extensive training and experience of our team’s Ph.D. social scientists, we have developed an assessment that makes visible the underlying cultural tendencies in your organization.

Module 2: The 3 Foundations of Teamwork

Madeline Boyer talks about how to establish a solid foundation for your team. The origins of goals, roles, and norms, and how to use them effectively.

Exercise: Team Charter Guide
  • The first step of creating a high performing team is to make commitments to each other. Team chartering is a method for discussing and gaining alignment on the Three Foundations of teamwork: goals, roles, and norms. Use the questions in this guide to help structure your chartering discussion.

Module 3: The Culture of Teamwork

Madeline Boyer introduces the culture of teamwork. teams must become flatter, looser, wider, and faster to become high performers.

Exercise: Culture Word Cloud
  • You can use word clouds as a quick diagnostic tool for comparing cultures. You can use this tool for assessing differences between teams, departments, or potentially merging organizations.

Module 4: Optimizing Virtual Teamwork

Madeline Boyer talks about how to manage teamwork as a virtual team, both in and out of the office. Her concrete examples and tips, will help any team function with less stress and more productivity.

Exercise: Meeting Checklist
  • Do you need to hold that meeting? This five-question worksheet, as discussed on Episode 3 of the Culture at Work podcast, will help you decide.

Module 5: Tough Conversations

Madeline Boyer explains talks about how to have the tough conversations that help your team become high performing.

Exercise: Office Network Map
  • Use the Office Network Map to discern the strength of your office relationships.

Module 6: The Observer’s Mindset

Madeline Boyer shares her view as a cultural anthropologist on how observation can be used to identify team misalignments. As Yogi Berra once said, “You can observe a lot just by watching.”

Exercise: Team Temperature Survey
  • Successful teams are ones that are able to quickly identify misalignments and take steps towards realigning team members. The Team Temperature survey is a low-effort way of checking in on team members’ engagement.

Module 7: Making Changes that Last

Madeline Boyer explains the STAR model to close the saying-doing gap. Teams can use the STAR model:

  1. Be Specific
  2. Take Small Steps
  3. Alter the Environment
  4. Be Realistic and Make a Plan to become High Performers.
Exercise: STAR Model
  • Use the STAR model to lay out your plan for how you’ll execute a new or different behaviour at work.