PURPOSEFUL TEAMS™

For organisations wishing to achieve strategic goals through the use of teams, Purposeful Teams™ is a quick and powerful intervention that awakens effective team performance. Unlike other team development programmes, the Purposeful Teams™ intervention places the team within the organisational context, leveraging organisational mandates into team purpose and creating the space for the team to contextualise its reason for existence. Team members engage at the levels of the organisation, the team and the individual in order to make sense of the task and the relationship issues inherent in teamwork and to translate the team’s purpose into excellent execution.

 Purposeful Teams™ begins with a powerful and participative two-day intervention in which the team’s challenges, dynamics and dysfunctions are contextually addressed and strategy, actions and roles are clarified, effectively activating and energising team members towards the fulfilment of their purpose. Two half-day sessions follow at monthly intervals to ensure sustainability and empower the team to self-correct and stay on track. Teams report a fundamental shift in engagement, clarity and communication as well as renewed commitment and cohesion. The Purposeful Teams™ interventions fuses organisational development and traditional training in a workshop format. It delivers team effectiveness by supporting the team in anchoring its purpose, identifying milestones as well as integrating task, relationship and process in a conversation-based process that creates strong, committed teams and team members.

A Unique Intervention

Purposeful Teams™ is rooted in the belief that clarity of purpose combined with a personal (individual) and shared (team) commitment to that purpose is the most powerful catalyst for effective team performance. Unlike team development programmes that focus too heavily on task or specific behavioural aspects of team development, the Purposeful Teams™ intervention anchors the team solidly within its organisational context and mandate, ensuring that the skills and experience of every team member can be brought to life. Individuals need to understand the context within which they are being asked to function and they need to be able to do so on three levels of purpose:

• Organisational (Why should we come together as a team for the organisation?);
• Team (Why should we come together as a team for our group?);
• Individual (What is my purpose in this team?)

The Purposeful Teams™ intervention works with the team’s reality in the realms of Head (knowing), Heart (being) and Hands (doing). Contemporary team members are smart, educated, independent and capable of making a contribution to organisational success – that is why they were hired in the first place. They are quite capable of achieving brilliant results if they have enough clarity on what they need to achieve together and what they can expect from each other along the way. The intervention assumes that the organisation has hired the right people for the work and sets out to align team members behind a clear sense of team purpose. In this way, teamwork becomes a desirable form of work for individuals in the organisation. Team actions are made more appropriate, relationship issues are dealt with more intelligently and team results are delivered more rapidly than what they might have been achieved with any other programme.

Intervention Focus and Methodology

Sponsor activation

To support alignment and clarity, an organisational sponsor engages with the team around its organisational mandate and the links to purpose, vision and values.

Connecting

Team members connect powerfully to the organisational mandate, as validated by the sponsor and locate their team in the broader stakeholder context. Individuals connect personally with the work of the team.

Challenging

Team members challenge themselves and their current state as a team. Team behaviours are identified that are helping or hindering the achievement of the team mandates, individual styles are explored and their impact and form powerful commitments to new ways of working.

Visioning

Individuals commit to the team’s purpose in practical terms creating a vision for the future and articulating the team’s strategic anchors.

Committing

Building on vision and strategy, team members commit to milestones and actions required. Individual contributions are valued and individual development commitments are clarified. The team returns to the workplace to implement these commitments.

Learning

After a period of implementation, the team returns to review progress against strategy and commitments and reflect on team learning. Team members recognise changes that need to be made and they re-energise and refocus around the team purpose.

Sustaining

In the second follow-up day, the focus is on sustainability of purpose and performance. Team members reflect on team development, celebrate successes and identify their next frontier as a team. They plan to sustain their effectiveness and engagement into the future.

Organisational Benefits

The introduction of the Purposeful Teams™ intervention to an organisation offers benefits that impact the individual, teams and the organisation. Business benefits of the Purposeful Teams™ intervention:

• Being a member of a team becomes a desirable work-form in the organisation.
• Members of purposeful teams are high-performing and effective and they deliver rapid results for the organisation.
• Members of purposeful teams implement appropriate execution strategies and action plans to deliver strategic objectives
• The Purposeful Teams™ intervention addresses potentially derailing team processes and relationship issues.

Learning Outcomes

• Team members embrace alignment to purpose as a driver of performance (alignment with vision, values and strategic intent).
• Team members renew their focus on important organisational objectives and achieve clarity of purpose.
• Team members identify and work towards key milestones to achieve their purpose.
• Team members integrate task, relationship and process for high performance.
• Team members engage in meaningful conversations and create action plans to accelerate their effectiveness.
• Individual and team commitments are formed and put into action.

Key Integration Elements

Creative dialogue: For full engagement of all participants, we ensure that all voices are heard. The facilitation process assists individuals to be heard in teams, groups to build a common point of view and become teams, and teams to pursue common goals. Diversity is celebrated and built on as teams learn to listen carefully, synthesise multiple viewpoints, build on the thinking of others and to move away from the often-instinctive practice of ‘the loudest voice wins’.

The Purposeful Teams™ intervention provides the space for team members to grow themselves and to grow their team. This growth is achieved through consistent documentation of the work required and regular review of personal and team commitment plans to ensure that team members are leading themselves to growth in order to lead the team towards its purpose. Individual styles assessment: The Purposeful Teams™ intervention utilizes self-assessment of individual styles and their impact on teams to support individuals in understanding how they contribute to team success and manage their impact to give the greatest possible benefit to their team.

Theory and assignments: Participants engage with useful global wisdom on team effectiveness and engage in reflective and action assignments in the workplace. Action assignments are based on the steps required to accelerate the team’s performance and progress is self-assessed by the team. This process allows the team members to:

• Learn from each other and from the challenges of taking action.
• Reflect on their ability to diagnose and work to resolve team challenges.
• Celebrate their progress and determine next steps.

Targeting Specific Team Needs

Certain common team scenarios face unique dynamics and have specific developmental needs. Through robust research and real case studies, these team types can now be supported powerfully through a targeted Purposeful Teams™ intervention. Examples of different team types are:

• Natural Teams
• Project Teams
• Virtual Teams
• Executive Teams
• Matrix Teams
• Newly-formed Teams

Purposeful Teams™ is accredited through the Services SETA on a NQF Level 5 with 6 credits.

 Fullray is an accredited provider of Worldsview Academy training and development programs within Sub-Saharan Africa.