Tools to Foster Teamwork, Collaboration, and Partnerships in Leading Meaningful Change
Tools to Foster Teamwork, Collaboration, and Partnerships in Leading Meaningful Change In this chapter, I will walk you through several key activities, shown in Figure 7, that I use at various times during the LMC Process to develop people, create cohesive teams, and foster collaboration across an organization when leading and managing change. These exercises can be scaled up or down to meet the needs of your organization and used at any stage of the LMC Process. Consider these techniques and tools as a buffet that you can select from to customize your own team development plan. Choose the ones that best fit your needs and that will help you keep your teams moving in a healthy and positive direction.
As you will note, these practices are all grounded in the LMC Framework discussed in chapter 3. Here they are again as a reminder:
As discussed in chapter 4, stage 1 focuses on aligning the change plan with the strategy and priorities of the entire organization. This work starts with forming a design team whose role is to determine the themes, patterns, successes, challenges, and impacts that need to be considered in the program design and next steps. To foster highly functional design and leadership teams, I often conduct a series of checkpoint meetings with leaders and the design team before and after each of the key milestones. In this process, we seek feedback on individual and team development and performance, as well as evaluate their effectiveness in moving the change plan forward. We also conduct more formal working sessions with the leadership team, and depending on the size of the organization, these may extend to inviting the next layer of leadership in the organization to join in. These working sessions are designed to create a shared vision, understanding, and commitment to support the change, and develop what will become the guiding principles and the plans for change. These sessions are also designed to align the leadership teams, clarify their roles and responsibilities, provide them with tools and supports to lead and manage the change, and assess their interpersonal and group dynamics to determine the strategies and next steps for the LMC Process.
One activity that I often recommend to the design team is an exercise called Envisioning Success. This is a creative exercise you can use to build and enhance teamwork and collaboration, especially during the early stages of a team’s formation. The exercise projects people into the future and asks them to look back to the present and say what they did to achieve success. This encourages people to develop a vision of the actual work they need to do to realize their goals. This exercise also tends to bring out the team’s passions, talents, and their shared values.
Figure 7 LMC Tools and Techniques for Building Teamwork, Collaboration, and Partnerships
There are two options to conduct this exercise. One is for those who prefer a module in a workshop, and the other is for those who want something more experiential in the moment. Here is the setup and questions for each approach.
As the facilitator of this exercise, you can set up the team or groups with flip charts and use the following directions:
In this exercise, set up the room so people are sitting in a circle or around the table. Place yourself as the facilitator at one end of the table so you can see the whole team, or sit inside the circle so you can see everyone. Then introduce yourself as if you are an interviewer writing an article for a magazine, newspaper, or awards ceremony that is relevant to the audience. As people speak, take notes on a pad of paper. Don’t use a flip chart to record the answers, as this will become a distraction.
Below are some questions to get you started interviewing your team. Ask these questions as though it is two years from now. For example, if you are doing this exercise on July 10, 2020, and your project implementation date is July 2022, say something like, “I’m excited to meet with you today. It’s July 2022, two years after we first met, when you were just beginning this project. Reflecting back over your last two years…”
Here are some hints to help you conduct this option for the exercise:
The Envisioning Success Exercise can also be customized to develop a team charter for leading meaningful change. Here are the elements that are valuable to include in an LMC team charter:
In stage 2, the focus is on developing customized leadership development interventions, techniques, and tools that are grounded in real work. To foster teamwork throughout this stage, I work with the design team to create and deliver a variety of what I call Change Leadership Essentials modules that can take many forms: customized workshops, team working sessions, online work, self-assessments, and other formats. These modules and activities are designed to provide a foundation for what is needed to lead and manage change.
This work begins with understanding the Use-of-Self as discussed in chapters 1 and 2 and may include exercises on Use-of-Self, leadership and team assessments, and other activities that help leaders see themselves in action and witness the impact that they have on others and vice versa. These modules are a great way to help teams understand their strengths and use their challenges as development opportunities. These modules result in a better understanding of the senior leadership and design team’s change leadership competencies. The modules also provide leaders and team members with new tools and techniques to help themselves and their teams be their best selves as leaders, managers, consultants, service providers, coaches, and mentors throughout the change process.
One of the key exercises I often use in this stage (though it can be used in other stages as well) is the Change Leadership Challenge Exercise. This exercise can be completed by the design team, leadership team, or individual project teams. It is designed to help them reflect on their real work and identify the key areas that they need to work on to be successful. This follows the precept of the LMC Framework to “use work, not make work.”
The Change Leadership Challenge Exercise is started as an initial reflection on the participants’ project, but it then becomes a living document that they work on throughout the change effort and LMC Process. Participants can choose to work on a project as a team or on their own, but it must be supported by their managers, done within their actual flow of work and within their span of control, and aligned with the strategic priorities. They are invited to draw on the support and resources of other participants and their extended teams to help shape and advance their projects.
At key milestones, and especially at the conclusion of the program, participants share their results and reflections on their learning and accomplishments in a presentation and discussion with their senior leadership team and other invited guests. In this way, this project helps break down silos, creates stronger alignment, and facilitates knowledge sharing among team members. It also is effective in helping the teams to coach upward.
This exercise is also a key tool to help the design team better understand each member’s needs for development and obtain a baseline assessment of the themes and patterns that need to be addressed throughout the program. It also helps them focus on the specific tools, techniques, and supports they need to help leaders advance their work.
This is another exercise that I ask team members to do. You will find this activity in the part 2 toolkit. It can be used throughout the change process to assess how well you and your team are doing as you lead and manage change.
As discussed, the LMC Process views team building as an art, a craft, and a science. In part 2, you will find an exercise to help you assess your personal style of managing in terms of this notion of art, craft, and science. This exercise can also be applied to your team and generate rich discussion about your team’s preferences and the impact you are having as you lead and manage change.
This guide is designed for leaders to complete on their own to create their personal leadership development plan. It contains exercises to develop a personal vision and purpose, reflect on their priorities, and identify the actions and supports they need to lead meaningful change.
As you recall, stage 3 focuses on having team members develop a Master Change Plan that aligns their work with other initiatives in the organization. As a key exercise at this stage to support the sense of team and build on the potential for collaboration and partnership, I suggest that design team members and/or individual project teams present their department or unit change plans to each other, seeking feedback and input. This often helps team members discover new synergies and interdependencies they can explore with others, deepening their understanding of how to engage and partner with others and even instigating specific collaborations. This process helps them advance their plans, maximize efficiencies, and make use of other activities and resources in the organization that they may not have previously considered. Themes, patterns, and organizational culture issues often surface, leading to further discussion and negotiation. This exercise also helps team members check their expectations about the pace of change and align their work with other projects and the larger organizational strategic plan and priorities.
As part of this process, participants may also conduct a stakeholder analysis that they then monitor throughout the program. This analysis deepens people’s understanding of stakeholder concerns, issues, and needs. It helps the team develop strategies to engage people and work through resistance. To enhance this process, you can also add the Gallery Walk Exercise and Alignment Observation Tool, both described below.
The Gallery Walk Exercise is based on work that I have done with clients and have written about in an article called “Discovering the Magic of Culture Shifts.”21 This exercise can be used to support the Master Change Plan Exercise, or it can be used independently as a strategic or operational planning exercise. The origin of the exercise relates to the struggles that people often experience in times of change about how much of their plans to disclose to peers and superiors due to political and power conflicts, or their desire to protect their limited resources of people, time, and budget. The Gallery Walk Exercise is designed to facilitate an easy, informal conversation about the plans, share innovative ideas, identify synergies, and identify opportunities to partner, collaborate, or address issues.
To do this exercise, first enlarge each team’s change plan to poster size and hang the plans on the wall like artwork in a gallery. Ask team members to walk around the room in silence, review each plan, and write their feedback, questions, suggestions, and recommendations right on the posters. Then ask each leader to give a brief presentation about their own plan while addressing the feedback written on the posters.
This process surfaces, in a very natural way, the important and distinctive work of each team or department and the many synergies, interdependencies, and common challenges across all plans. The sharing often reinforces the need and value for teamwork, collaboration, and partnership.
The Gallery Walk also reveals where people and projects are in the change process. Typically, not everyone is at the same stage of developing or implementing their plans. This process reveals concrete examples, ways to create alignment if it wasn’t there before, as well as ideas to synchronize or adjust the pace or sequencing of the changes, or help people along who may be struggling or putting your own project at risk.
Note: Some teams prefer to send the plans to participants or the design team ahead of the workshop so that they can complete the exercise as part of their preparation and come to the Gallery Walk with a summary of the themes and patterns that may have surfaced in their preliminary review. If you choose this option, I recommend presenting the summary after the workshop participants have done their exercise. This will prevent any bias or leading in one direction or the other.
Table 6 is the grid for another valuable exercise I use to break down silos, identify synergies, align people and plans, make necessary adjustments, and identify new opportunities to collaborate and partner. I often do this exercise as an adjunct to the Gallery Walk. In addition to writing their observations on the posters for public display, each person has a copy of this grid and uses it as their private diary to take notes as they walk through the gallery. These notes can be used as reminders of ideas they’d like to use, or to record feedback to be shared after the Gallery Walk. In addition, the design team can use their notes to conduct a preliminary scan of the plans for their working session.
Table 6 Alignment Observation Tool
| Observations and insights on strategic priorities | Opportunities for alignment, synergies, efficiencies, partnerships, and collaboration | Resources that I need to share or use to build capacity and focus for success | Strategies and actions that intersect, are interdependent, or are dependent on some of our deliverables | Ideas that I will use in my work |
| Sample Filled-Out Alignment Observation Tool | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
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Observations and insights
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Opportunities HR [human resources] has recruitment strategies to plan, organize, process, and administer applications that we can use in our recruitment of new hires |
Resources Our project team, the plan, timelines, and deliverables and the research that we have collected to inform our plan |
Strategies and actions The team needs to meet with HR to fully understand the process, efficiencies, processing time, how to ensure accuracy, and how to maintain the high level of satisfaction that we currently have with the applicants |
Ideas Recruitment strategies, structure, and process in HR and the technology system |
To do this exercise, reproduce the template shown in Table 6. The white space below each heading is where participants will write their notes. The sample filled-out form below Table 6 shows what one participant wrote about a project dealing with service excellence in one of my client organizations.
Participants can use their notes to talk with the other workshop participants about their observations and the strategies, actions, and ideas that may have surfaced during the Gallery Walk. They can also take their notes away and incorporate them in their own planning.
There are a wealth of activities and interventions you can use throughout the course of the change effort between the stage 1 kickoff meetings of the design team and the final phase of the LMC Process. These can be delivered as separate topics in a workshop format, or combined to form a program taking a day or longer depending on your needs, the size of the teams, and the complexity of your organization. For instance, if you are the CEO of a small organization, you may want to do a workshop based on the LMC Framework to reflect on your practice of leading and managing change to understand what you are doing well and where you may want to improve. If you are working with a larger organization, you may want to use the design team to help coordinate and customize this program to meet your needs.
Another highly effective tool I recommend to use between workshops or as a stand-alone process is CoachingOurselves (CO). This unique approach to management and leadership development was created by Henry Mintzberg and Phil LeNir. I have been using CO for many years to build a shared mindset about leading and managing change, specifically to generate meaningful conversations that help people reflect on their own experiences and learn from and coach each other.
The CO approach is designed for small self-directed learning groups of typically six to eight participants who meet for 80 minutes and learn about a leadership or management topic that is relevant to them and that they can apply in their real work. There are over 80 topics to choose from that can be packaged into three to six topics focused on themes like leading change or managing to address the participant and organization’s learning and development needs. The CO approach is scalable, as it can be used in small teams of six to eight participants or with multiple teams in larger workshops. CO can also be a stand-alone program to build support for learning and development as a community of practice, a team of teams, or a network across the organization.
To conduct a CO program in some client organizations, we form teams of people who do not normally work together in their typical day-to-day work. Having a mix of people from various parts of the organization helps them gain a wider understanding of other parts of the business and build relationships as they go through the course materials and discuss the topic. They also learn that their organizational challenges are not usually unique to themselves, but are sometimes experienced by others and are representative of their organizational culture. CO programs, when implemented with cross-company teams, can be very effective in strengthening multidisciplinary, diverse teamwork and cross-industry learning. They have often surfaced natural ways to partner and collaborate.
Throughout a CO program, the learning team or network meets regularly between formal working sessions for further informal discussions. The themes and patterns that emerge during these discussions can be tracked and shared with the larger group during the formal working sessions. This helps the larger community develop a shared understanding of the learning team’s journey and to learn from each other. Their reflections and discoveries also inform the ongoing program design and their work going forward. This has helped people to understand the culture shifts that are required, leading to faster and deeper adoption of the changes.
Evaluations are done throughout the LMC Process, but in this stage, they are vital for measuring, monitoring, and evaluating the team’s learning, development, and impact. Stage 4 evaluations help the team reflect on their accomplishments and the success of culture shifts. The evaluation process at this time can include surveys, self-assessments, face-to-face interviews, online pulse surveys, and many other formats that help assess the team’s effectiveness and performance in leading the change.
An effective evaluation process results in rich and meaningful data to help the team understand how they are leading the changes, what they are doing well, and where they need to change or renew their plans. The evaluation process should also analyze the objectives of the change and the development program, as well as the effectiveness of the strategies, tools, and techniques used for development. These too may need adjustments along the way. The evaluation process should be conducted at key milestones of the LMC Process.
In part 2, you will find a sample of the Evaluating and Sustaining Meaningful Change Exercise, which includes an assessment that the team can do to measure how well they are leading culture shifts at each stage of the LMC Process.
At this stage, you can also do an online self-assessment survey of the change leadership competencies mentioned earlier and the team’s values. The results should be shared with the team at each stage or milestone so they can validate the findings and together decide on their next steps.
Here is an example of how Dr. Cynthia Smith, dean of the School of Health and Human Services (HHS) at Camosun College in Victoria, British Columbia, used CoachingOurselves (CO) as part of her work with the LMC Process to develop a team of leaders and managers in support of a transformational change in HHS.
HHS offers more than 15 programs, including a joint degree, a post-degree diploma, certificates, and university transfer courses. With buildings on two campuses, HHS serves over 1,000 students and employs 100 faculty and staff, mostly in the newly finished Alex & Jo Campbell Centre for Health and Wellness.
These HHS programs fall into six departments, each with a chair who leads faculty development and the financial and program management of the department. Faculty take on the chair role for a three-year term, with the possibility of renewal. Faculty are content experts who teach in their discipline. They usually do not have any specific management training, yet having taken on a department leadership role, they are interested in gaining these skills. The college offers both teaching and leadership training as well as training specific to human resources and financial and business processes, but does not offer training on management skills per se. In addition to meeting the needs of faculty performing the chair role, leadership and management skills were especially relevant at this time, as the college had a new strategic plan with which HHS needed to align. These strategic priorities would result in significant changes that the team of department chairs would have to lead and manage.
In addition, the college was undertaking the greatest change in its history with the construction of a new building to house all HHS programs on another campus. This would entail the movement of HHS faculty, staff, and equipment to the new campus, and the movement of other college departments to fill the space vacated by HHS at the Lansdowne Campus. A plan to support the move to a new location was in progress at the time of the CO program, and the same team of department chairs would also be leading and managing these strategic priorities.
Recognizing the need for management training, Cynthia, along with her HHS leadership team composed of the six chairs and two senior administrative support personnel, participated in a CO program designed to provide them with an opportunity to build their understanding of and skills in leading and managing change. The details of their program were as follows.
The objectives for the HHS CO program were to
Table 7 shows an overview of what we referred to as the HHS Leadership Group Development Program, which was based on the LMC Framework and Process, along with several of the LMC activities discussed in this chapter and three CO courses.
This program was designed to develop the HHS leadership team in real time, improving their competencies as they went through it. The program took place over a nine-month period and was led by a design team who provided oversight and coordination of the needs assessment, the three CO sessions, the evaluation process, a train-the-trainer module for CO, and other activities. The design team was composed of Cynthia, the dean, the associate dean, a program manager, and me as an external consultant and coach.
First, as shown at the top of this chart, the design group began with strategic and operational alignment work. This was led and managed by Cynthia and the chairs. Given the academic culture, we also needed to ensure the CO program development process was collaborative, was built on wise practices, and, as much as possible, used evidence-based research.
Table 7 Overview of HHS Leadership Group Development Program
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Alignment Process Vision: Inspiring life-changing learning, conducting a strategic planning session, aligning the nursing department, planning for the move to a new building, and delivering the HHS programs. |
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CO Launch Envisioning Success Exercise Leadership team needs assessment |
CO Topic 1 Managing on the Planes of Information, People, and Action by Henry Mintzberg |
CO Topic 2 Strategic Blindspots by Estelle Métayer |
CO Topic 3 Probing into Culture by Edgar Schein |
ExperienceChange Workshop HHS leadership group and program leaders |
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Learning in Action Simply Managing by Henry Mintzberg, coaching, readings, tools, and resources to advance personal, team, and program development Management Happenings |
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CoachingOurselves Evaluation Process Monthly design team meetings to reflect on CO process, impact, and topic selection CoachingOurselves online evaluation, train-the-trainer development |
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In the next phase, we launched the CO program with an overview of CO, the LMC Envisioning Success Exercise (discussed earlier in the chapter), and a needs assessment to ensure the program elements and topics were relevant for the chairs and would meet the needs of the group. Following their approval, we provided a list of CO topics, and the group selected three they found to be most relevant given their work as the leadership group. Change management was especially important at this time, so they selected the topics shown in Table 7 to gain an understanding of managing, culture change, and learning skills to work with faculty.
The leadership group then met every two months to complete each CO topic, followed by a full-day workshop called ExperienceChange (explained in chapter 4) that was custom-designed for this leadership group and their program leaders.
In the next phase, Learning in Action, which took place between CO sessions, the chairs read the book Simply Managing by Henry Mintzberg and discussed the concepts at the start of each CO session. Additional coaching and resources were provided so people could advance their individual learning and development. Some of the chairs also used these supports with their respective teams and reported on this during the Management Happenings (debriefing) portion of the CO session.
Finally, a critical element of the program was evaluating the process. The evaluation focused on alignment, leadership, actions, and impact (Figure 8).
Figure 8 Evaluation Framework for Leading, Managing, and Inspiring Healthy Community
The evaluations consisted of several elements. In addition to the content from the Management Happenings and feedback received at the end of each CO session, we administered an online survey at the end of the third CO session. The survey was designed to assess the participants’ satisfaction with the CO topics and process, and the growth of the team’s change leadership competencies and progress toward the program objectives. We also asked open-ended questions to assess their top three takeaways and recommendations for improvement. The results were used to inform the team’s next steps.
As the figure represents, the leadership group’s goal was to develop a shared vision and meaning of what it is to lead, manage, and inspire a healthy community in HHS. The results revealed that, in terms of leadership, the participants were very grateful for the learning experience and approach. The process, tools, and resources were relevant for their work (alignment) and a good investment for them as individual leaders, as the HHS leadership group, and for their teams.
In regards to impact, in terms of developing their change leadership competencies, team members said that they were still developing skills and would like more clarity on the direction for their department going forward. They agreed they wanted to continue developing as a leadership group. At the same time, they felt that they were equipped with effective practices, tools, and supports for their own learning and development. They wanted more support in developing strategies to lead and manage change in their department and within the school, given the move to the new campus.
On that basis, for actions, the leadership team decided to add the Experiencing Change Workshop, which included the ExperienceChange simulation described earlier, an overview of wise practices, and a toolkit to lead and manage change. They included program leaders from all HHS programs in this workshop. The leadership team also expressed a desire to expand CO courses to their program leaders and continue the process as a leadership group. They were fully engaged in the change process.
By the end of the program, and based on the results, the leadership group began working on the next phase, which would focus on cascading the CO process to the program leaders. They also designed a train-the-trainer process to assist them in leading and managing this process in their respective programs.
This case study shows how a CO program strongly reinforces the elements of the LMC Framework and Process. The CO courses helped the leadership group reflect on their shared experiences, strengthened their ability to work together as a senior leadership team, and gave them concepts and tools that helped them create a shared mindset and advance their leadership and management practices so they could lead meaningful change for HHS.
The principles and practices of the LMC Process can also be self-taught and used to build teams in small organizations and on short-term projects. To illustrate this, I would like to share a case study dealing with a not-for-profit theater group. While this example takes place in a non-corporate business environment, it serves as an example of how not-for-profit organizations can equally use the concepts and tools of this book in their work.
The case begins with an actor, Steve Walters, who had a germ of an idea for a play based on the musical Camelot, but told in pantomime—thus he called it Camelot the Panto. Steve did not originally consider himself a director, but he knew he needed a team effort to make the play happen. He began by approaching two experienced directors to talk about his idea, only to discover that they had no interest in the play. Disappointed, he hesitated. Something held him back. For many years he had acted in the community theater, but he had no experience directing.
But then one day, by chance, he was in the theater and saw the executive director walking toward him. He had chills as he told the executive director his idea. There was a lull in the conversation, but then they both said “pantomime,” and they automatically connected. Steve said it was electrifying; he had found an enthusiastic executive director who shared his vision and supported him to direct it.
Steve quickly committed to the project despite knowing that it would be a huge undertaking. At one point, however, he was overwhelmed with budgets and working with designers, technical staff, and community partners. While putting together a proposal for the production, he asked himself, “What have I done?” It was new territory for him, and more than he had expected. But he dug deep and believed so strongly in the project, and in the theater team, that he persevered.
He soon found that his enthusiasm was contagious. People who originally hadn’t committed to his idea rallied behind him, as did many new supporters. They became a core base of the cast, and as a bonus, it turned out that many had the pantomime skills the play would need.
He then put his vision into practice. He secured approvals and funding for the production and developed a set of guiding principles that would shape how he would lead a meaningful change in the way his play would be produced at this not-for-profit theater company. His changes were as follows:
He then wrote the play according to his vision and did not accommodate any individual or tenured performers from the theater company. When he got to the audition process, he faced many challenges. The play needed 76 people to form two casts because they were doing 22 performances—11 for each cast. Although this was a volunteer organization, 100 people came out and auditioned for Steve during 12 audition sessions. Steve wanted the process to be fair and respectful and to ensure an equal opportunity for everyone. Each person, regardless of age, experience, tenure, or political connections, had to audition. This included the old well-knowns who thought they were shoo-ins for a role, as well as Steve’s supporters who thought their personal connection to him would guarantee them a role. But not everyone made it. Some people had to be cut, which was hard to do. Even in this phase, Steve approached the work as a learning opportunity for himself and for those who participated.
For final casting, Steve called the people who did not get a role in the play. He didn’t have to do this, but he wanted to acknowledge their effort and contribution. There were tears, shock, and silences. He met with each person individually and gave them feedback. He acknowledged the hard work they did to prepare for and participate in the audition process. He also wanted them to know that although this play did not have a role for them, there could be other opportunities down the road that might be more suitable for them. He did not want to negatively affect their love of theater or discourage them from auditioning for other plays in the future.
Steve didn’t like this part of the job, but it was necessary. He believed that the way he managed this process was just as important as the outcome. He also believed he needed to be accountable for his decisions and not cave in or shirk his responsibilities, which he said was a humbling experience. He knew he had his own personal development challenges while at the same time needed to coach and teach the cast and other people he had to work with. He recalled a time when he wasn’t getting through to a young 11-year-old actor who had two left feet and was struggling onstage. He paired the 11-year-old with a 50-year-old to work together, which worked amazingly well. The child grew and then he flew! In this example, Steve used the community to teach each other. It was a perfect demonstration of the value of a mentoring partnership.
Steve viewed the theater as a family, and as such, he had to manage the group dynamics. During crunch time, there was a lot of conflict. To deal with it, he put in place a question-to-question process during the dry runs that required every actor, lighting person, and crew member to attend. This process cut through the interpersonal conflicts and helped everyone appreciate each other’s talents and challenges. As a team, they learned to resolve sticky issues so they could “get on with the show.”
Steve had to manage many volunteers. As he put it, they all had different needs, so he had to deal with each person differently to keep them motivated and engaged to keep volunteering. He could not afford to lose anyone. He also coached people who wanted coaching, and worked with others who needed coaching but may not have wanted it.
Steve even wrote a theme song that created a great team spirit. He also did little things like bringing drinks and treats to the rehearsals. These symbolic gestures meant a lot to the volunteer cast and crew members and helped them build relationships and ultimately strong bonds within their team.
As soon as the team bought into the vision, the play took on a life of its own. It was funded by the government and through some external donations from the public. The production went on to sell $70,000 in tickets and became the biggest-selling show for that community theater. Over 3,000 people of all ages attended. The play exceeded past attendance records at some of the more commercial shows. It was electrifying and generated buzz, and it was a big moment for the cast, theater, and community.
When asked about his reflections on his Use-of-Self as the director, Steve said he believed strongly in the power of teamwork. Without it, they would not have achieved the results that they achieved working together. Though he was only partly familiar with the LMC Framework and Process, he felt that he had applied them in this endeavor.
Steve believes the mandatory team meetings kept the vision alive. Everyone came away from team meetings feeling informed, involved, and educated about their own and each other’s roles, contributions, challenges, interdependencies, and impact on the success of the play. Steve feels the way he led and managed the team using the guiding principles also helped them reach a quality of performance and a level of business success that they never would have previously imagined. He believes the facilitated discussions, direction, and way he helped with troubleshooting and problem solving made a significant impact. People trusted him, embraced the plan, were engaged, and had fun. If you recall, these are some of the characteristics of a cohesive team.
Throughout the journey, Steve had to be mindful of his intentions and the choices he made in his Use-of-Self. He asked himself, “Why am I making these choices? What are my preconceived notions about being a director? What impact do my preconceived notions have on my thinking and actions? What is helping me notice that I do have choices? Do I recognize that I do have choices, and that the choices I make can be transformative?”
Over the five months of working together on this production, Steve formed a theater family that grew together and made a huge impact in the lives of the performers, their families, and ultimately the entire community.
The LMC Framework and Process and the teamwork tool and techniques can be customized and applied to any size or type of organization. As you can see through the content and examples in this chapter, developing teams to lead meaningful change is not achieved in the short term with a magic wand. It is an iterative process that continues throughout the lifecycle of the team and requires strong commitment and vision on the part of leaders, along with many activities and interventions that attend to the health and well-being of the team, the needs of each team member, and their interpersonal and group dynamics as people work together.
Large-scale transformational change work is complex. Often, the more complex the change, the greater the need for an expert design team to design, facilitate, coach, support, and evaluate the individual and team development process. If you work in a smaller organization, your leadership team may take on this role, or possibly include other internal or external people who have expertise and supports that you don’t have within your organization.
Ultimately, creating cohesive teams and maximizing their power is an art, a craft, and a science. Teams are the glue that bonds people together for a shared purpose and engages their hearts, minds, and souls. With effective teamwork, collaboration, and partnerships, we can create workplaces where people thrive, find purpose, and achieve meaningful results that exceed expectations.