Creating team greatness – The new focus for L&D
Strengthscope attended the CIPD Annual Conference and Exhibition 2024 in Manchester. Our Head of Training and Integration, Scott Christie, delivered a talk at the Learning and Skills Insight Stage on creating team greatness, focusing on team development.
Key notes from Scott’s presentation:
The world of work has become a very individualised place. We see the recent trends for individuated skills development to ensure that each employee feels seen and their developmental requirements in their role are optimised for the ever-changing demands of the workplace through a set of blended, self-driven learning. Individuals within teams are required to be agile and focus where the business needs them, so the rise of more matrixed organisations presents a challenge to traditional concepts of teams, teamwork and team development.
These changes to ways of working and learning post-pandemic means that teams are more than ever groups of individuals and are less connected than before.
The classic idea of a team that all have the same functional role and work together in the same location may be becoming a thing of the past, but more than ever we need to find ways to bring humans together to create shared successes that come from being more than the sum of its parts.
Added to this is higher levels of career mobility and organisational change, meaning that the team make-up is rarely consistent for long and it becomes challenging to deepen relationships, build processes and workflows and maintain high levels of performance with colleagues leaving and arriving.
Scott shared Strengthscope’s Peak Performing Team Pathway™ model, a powerful tool to set your teams up for success using strengths.
We define strengths as qualities that energise us and we are great at, or have the potential to become great at. People who know and use their strengths deliver better outcomes for themselves, their teams, and their organisations.
The StrengthscopeTeam™ stages of team development are:
- Aspirations/Clarity
- Awareness/Trust
- Action/Accountability
- Agility/Change readiness
- Achievement/Stretch
To achieve the zone of peak performance, it’s essential to build trust and have clarity of purpose as a team.
Team development is a journey, so it’s important to give your people incremental development experiences.
Finally, Scott shared some simple tips to embed strengths in the flow of work and build team practice, such as:
- Meeting strengths share – Begin meetings with colleagues stating their strengths
- Manager strength check-ins – Integrate strength-related questions in check-ins
- Team strengths support – Utilise a strengths matrix for team support
- Strength collaboration – Strategise strength use for project success
