3 Development Ideas to Finish and Start Strong
Sports teams are always building capabilities to perform and win, and the fourth quarter of a game is about bringing out the best in a potentially tired team to beat the competition. Business is similar, but the cycle of building capabilities to perform is even shorter.
As we near year end, here are three things you can do to develop capabilities and get ready to win again next year.
1) Build Muscle: Masterclasses for Growth
Why? As next year’s planning gets underway, now is a great time to deepen connections across organisational borders, build leaders’ capabilities to finish the year strong, and get ready to grow the business next year.
How? Offer short masterclass sessions on leadership capabilities that are critical to your business. Include senior leaders so they can share their insights and ideas. As an example, one financial institution we work with recently ran a mini-series of masterclasses for their senior executives to help them expand their thinking before starting the strategy process in the coming year.
2) Booster Shots: Resilience++
Why? With employees who are exhausted from a tough couple of years and economic bounce back (hopefully) continuing, resilience is more important than ever. Companies have done much around individual mental health and resilience, but job demands continue to be high and resources low. Finding ways to quickly target teams and groups that need additional resilience helps prevent issues before they impact performance.
How? The irony of trying to develop resilience capabilities is that it takes effort, which is in short supply in high pressure situations that require resilience! For best impact, use a data driven approach that measures individual resilience and job demands and resources. For example, one tech company recently used our Resilience Readiness Inventory to map their customer service teams to identify resilience hot spots. They were able to quickly target high burnout risk teams and develop approaches to resolve it. Each team member also received their own personalised data and held a 1:1 resilience focused conversation with their line manager.
3) Health Check: Team Performance and Commitment
Why? A well aligned leadership team can make the difference between strong business growth and plummeting revenue. It’s been a tough and crazy year for many industries, and most teams have not done much to build their own capabilities, alignment, or trust, especially as they often cannot get together in one location. Taking the time to stop, pause, and reflect can lock in the benefits of learnings for next year.
How? Bring the team together for a virtual alignment workshop. We use our Team Alignment Survey to help leadership teams diagnose alignment strengths and opportunities in four areas: Purpose, Process, People and Perspectives of stakeholders. For example, one leadership team we are working with are continuing a big strategic change they started this year. They are getting ahead of the curve by ensuring their LT are fully aligned and ready to deliver in 2022.
This year’s final whistle may be approaching, but the game is not over. Use this time to help your teams use their scarce resources of time, attention, and energy in the best way to get next year off to a strong start.
To find out more about how we can help you succeed, please Contact me
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