In a webinar hosted by The HR World and sponsored by Strengthscope, Scott Christie – Head of Training and Integration, Strengthscope; David Edwards – Global Head of Workforce Planning, Ericsson and Anne Guérin-Moens, Group Human Resources Director, SBM Offshore came together to discuss how to ensure your teams were still able to work well together, despite the challenges around them.
Thriving teams: Why change shouldn’t hold your business back was packed with insights and practical examples of making the workplace work better. Following on from this discussion we asked the panelists a few more pertinent questions.
Q1: Can you – do you – recruit staff in order to work in particular teams or is there more of an ‘all-round team player’ type who HR/TA can look out for?
Scott Christie: I think we need to re-define ‘all-rounder’ – this should be a combination of the right skills AND strengths combined, with agility to know how to leverage them differently in different situations. It’s not about ‘being good’ at everything but developing what’s needed in the context you are facing. There is less time than ever for personal development and more about those adaptable to ever changing situations who have greater levels of self-awareness on how they can show up to drive positive outcomes.
David Edwards: It’s a bit of a cop-out answer, but you’re going to be glad to have both. If the team is a technical one, then your recruitment is necessarily targeted. However, we talk at length about the need for people who are poly-skilled, flexible and adaptable to meet the needs of today’s working environment: we need to practice what we preach.
Anne Guérin-Moens: I believe capacity to work well in a team is not necessarily or at least not only a matter of behavioural competence. The cultural compatibility is also of essence. Therefore checking if a candidate aligns with the values that drive the culture of a company is essential.
Q2: Can you train people to be in a team and is it worth specifically training teams to be productive and work together? Can you also train people to be ready to adapt to change and work together despite what’s happening around them?
David Edwards: Absolutely. I think it comes to us much more naturally to work together, especially during crises, than we often think. It follows therefore that I believe effective teamwork training to involve scenarios just like that!
Anne Guérin-Moens: Team building with activities like understanding each others preferred ways of communication and value drivers surely help and leadership development/coaching of the team leader in taking into account the people side of change will certainly be of great help.
Scott Christie: Absolutely, but this has to be focused less on technical skills that will quickly become outdated.
At Strengthscope we talk about helping develop a peak performing team through five steps:
- Having a picture of where the team is going and what it is working towards (aspiration) helps to build clarity for the team
- Building the teams awareness of each others’ strengths and risks helps to build trust and openness within the team
- Understanding how the team deliver and take action, helps to build the team accountability to each other and the business.
- Supporting teams to be agile in changing and challenging situations helps to build change readiness in teams
- Celebrating success and learning from achievements helps to stretch and grow teams.
In our research, the biggest enabler is the clarity piece and the hardest is change readiness and stretch, where there is need for feedback and reflection – not something that many team/organisations give enough time to. In the age of AI, the most valuable qualities will be around human-to-human connection and how to leverage that most effectively. This will show up most clearly in work relationships and decision making – whether that is how leaders show up to empower rather than direct, or teams collaborate rather than compete. It will also be important to ensure that your human capital and resource don’t get spent – the 996/007 working practices are showing signs of becoming more prevalent and this will only lead to burn out and performance issues. This could lead to workers becoming seen as ‘disposable’ that will only develop employee churn and teams having to continually reset. If instead there are opportunities to work at the higher levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs, you will find that teams stay more intact and the sense of safety and belonging will allow them to work at high cognitive levels.
