It takes a Village.....

As I was driving back from Sunday morning football at the weekend, I passed a charity shop called ‘It takes a village’ – raising funds I presume for the group of villages we travelled through. It’s a phrase I’ve heard often over the past 15 years and my ‘village’ has been essential; the family, friends, teachers, coaches, and sometimes random strangers, who help me to raise my children. Each member of my village plays a different role, supporting the learning and development of my children, and just like in any team, both the differences and the similarities between the members is where its power comes from.

In many of the competency frameworks I get to work with there’ll be something about building highly effective teams. There’s plenty of evidence of their positive impact for both the organisation in terms of productivity and profitability, and the individual in terms of their engagement and wellbeing. But, building and maintaining a highly effective team isn’t always easy and just like my village, it needs to evolve over time as it responds to changing demands or when a member doesn’t play quite the right role.

In the workplace GFB can make things a little easier for organisations to support, and leaders to manage, this process. Our tools enable leaders and managers to understand themselves and how their preferences might influence their approach to leading their team. They also help team members understand their own strengths and risks so that they’re able to contribute in the best way they can. When we bring these two streams of information together, we can help the whole team to explore how they can best work together.

We help teams to identify and celebrate their similarities and differences – empowering them to successfully work together and deliver, whilst having fun, providing support for each other, fostering resilience and a sense of belonging.

How do you know if your team need our help? Here’s some of the sure signs of high performing teams that we think you should be looking for:

• Shared values and sense of purpose
• A willingness to pull together to achieve a common aim
• Provide psychological safety and space to learn, test boundaries and new ideas
• Provide support to each other during the good times and the bad.
• An appreciation of the value in your individual differences

If you’re interested in exploring how we can help you build or maintain your high performing team please get in touch here.

It’s something we’re all passionate about at GFB and our team have a range of different strengths we can use to help you.