Communication & Collaboration Coaching Services
Foster High Performance Teamwork
Our HET culture change system has helped hundreds of teams communicate and collaborate more effectively.
Research shows that organizations that need creativity and innovation to achieve their missions benefit from increasing trust and emotional vulnerability. To support a culture of trust, we need to build the supporting skills and behaviors of candor, courage, self-awareness, and taking responsibility. What we communicate, and how we do it, matters. We need to support shifts in mindsets such as seeing conflict as an opportunity to resolve problems, improve relationships, and grow personally and professionally. How authentically we each ‘show up’ in teamwork makes true collaboration successful.
Communicate to Engage
We need to communicate clearly and engage constructively instead of avoiding conflict and settling for artificial harmony. Highly Effective Teams® provide constructive feedback and manage performance better, more transparently, and directly instead of sweeping performance problems under the rug by moving boxes and lines on organizational charts. When we increase our own self-awareness, we reduce our biases. We need to be more curious and less sure we are right. We gain a better understanding of one another when we ask and listen more, and assert less.
In our HET training and coaching sessions, we are asked a lot of questions that start with “What should I do if…” No matter what the question, we almost always say “It sounds like you need to go have a conversation.”
The purpose of the entire HET system is to support you in having crucial and often difficult teamwork conversations, armed with good information about what agreements you made, and what has happened since that has caused chaos, conflict, or confusion. HET gives you a number of tools to improve communication and collaboration, including:
- Issue Clearing: A process and script for constructively discussing something that has been bothering you and hurting your relationship with someone.
- Working Agreements: A template to record how the team expects to work together that, when things go wrong, give your team a reference point and a shared language for identifying what norms have been violated how to improve dynamics.
- Group Feedback: A meaningful process for increasing trust and emotional vulnerability by giving and receiving feedback in a group setting.
- Enneagram Personality Typing System: A potentially transformative tool for learning about oneself and others and improving team dynamics
Collaborate for Better Results
The entire Highly Effective Teams system is designed to help you engage in high performance teamwork. At every stage of the HET Framework, people are collaborating with one another. With HET, there are two ways in which we help you do that — through processes and tools that help you focus on the right work at the right time and through building productive relationships.
HET for Project Teams and HET for All give you methods, practices, and tools for doing both. The Agree on deliverables, Break-down the work, and Clarify roles curricula help you organize your project and structure your team so that team members are clear about their responsibilities and work commitments are met.
The HET Drive accountability, Engage constructively and Facilitate great meetings curricula provide methods and tools for helping your team work efficiently and productively. And, they help your team develop skills for how to work well together. When your team members actively work on building productive relationships, they are better at collaborating with one another. Building productive relationships enables trust. When we trust one another, we’re more likely to engage constructively, especially in difficult situations. Happy people produce better results.