High Performance Team Journeys

Achieving high performance is a never ending journey. We partner with enterprise leaders and their teams at all levels to plan, lead, and calibrate High Performance Team journeys. Our methodology is called the Seven Crucial Conversations (7CCs®).

This approach centers on enabling leaders and teams to have focused conversations, with the right people, at the right times, that propel them towards the right results. Performance is always an intentional journey. It has a shared language. It requires shared ways of working. Organizations, leaders, and teams engaging and operating with a shared performance language will navigate more simply and effectively.

The Conversations include:

1. Activating Purpose – Great teams are animated by purpose. This first conversation involves such critical questions as: What is the shared purpose of the team? Are the needs of customers and stakeholders whom we serve clear?

2. Driving Focus – Teams must gain clarity around priorities, visualizing the team’s work together, and energizing around shared goals. Are team members focused on a shared transformational journey?

3. Shifting Mindset – Teams must learn to embrace their diversity of perspectives and transform them into an asset. This means agreeing to support one another, be accountable, and be coachable. Are team members accountable and coachable, giving and receiving feedback?

4. Specifying Capabilities and Roles – Individuals and teams have specific roles to play in moving the organization forward. Everyone needs to know who is accountable for what and what perspectives they represent. Are the roles and responsibilities clear?

5. Streamlining Interdependencies – Teams exist in the larger organizational social system, and must optimize cross-functional business processes and pay attention to how they interact with multiple functions, teams, and sometimes even multiple businesses. What other teams do you need to align with? Are shared processes and handoffs efficient?

6. Aligning Strategies – Change initiatives often start with strategy, but prior to strategy, the issues dealt with in the first five conversations must be hammered out. It is then time to focus on questions such as:
Is there a strategy and a strategic planning process in place? Is the path towards competitive advantage clear?

7. Implementing Initiatives – Achieving laser focus on the quality and impact of the team’s initiatives is critical. Do team members plan and manage programs and projects effectively? Are there sufficient dashboards for measuring and tracking performance?