MT development programme

Our vision on and approach to Management Team development. We believe that successful organisations are made up of teams of strong professionals. These are strong people who know themselves, dare to be both strong and vulnerable, leave an impact wherever they go and make optimal use of each person’s talents and qualities together. In other words, managers who know where they want to go and work together to achieve results.

In our approach, we integrate, among other things, systemic work, team effectiveness with Insights Discovery, Tuckman’s team development phases and Lencioni’s five frustrations of teamwork. These models and instruments provide insight into personal, team and leadership effectiveness, patterns and development phases and offer guidelines to grow into an effective, robust and successful Management Team that assumes joint ownership of the organisation’s ongoing development.

During an MT programme, we go through the following phases together with the MT:

Step 1: Discovering together
During this step, the focus is on the shared course and the commitment. Together, we create an answer to the question of “This is what we do!” We gain insight into the management team members’ individual attitudes, behaviour, communication and drives and into the collective patterns, group dynamic and the field of influence and the context within which the team operates. Why do we do things this way? What is our preferred behaviour? How do we act under pressure? What are our convictions and inhibitions? Furthermore, we discover our mutual trust in each other, the team phases and how everyone displays their personal leadership.

Step 2: Breaking through together
During this phase, we consider the questions of “What do I need from the other person?”, “How can we break through our personal and collective patterns in order to take the next step?” and “How can you use your Personal Leadership to contribute to the improved collaboration within the team and the organisation and assume joint ownership as a Management Team for the task and objectives at hand?” During this phase, we mostly work together. Instead of developing skills, we use a varied programme to help the management team’s members break through patterns, reflect on their behaviour, give each other feedback and dare to ask for help. This phase always concludes with a personal commitment to the group, which we call “showing your colour.”

Step 3: Developing together
The practical impact reveals what aspects need to be developed further.  Through facultative themed sessions, we propose to link quality time to a theme that is appropriate for the MT, e.g. “performing under stress” or developing a strategic agenda together.

Step 4: Anchoring together
Finally, we conclude the MT Development programme by safeguarding the new behaviour through concrete agreements with e.g. a buddy system, intervision or organising a group activity.

How has the team put what they’ve learned into practice? What do other colleagues and parties involved see and experience? Give each other feedback and learn what they see. What is going well? What could go better? What do you still need as an individual and as a team? What agreements do we make as a team?

Because we believe in co-creation, we include evaluation moments after every step of the process to e.g. tie into ongoing issues in the workplace.

The result of such a Management Team programme is:

• The team members regain their focus on their shared positive energy
• Team members know what they must do and employ their leadership skills to do so
• The team has acquired insight into and awareness of individual and team patterns
• The team has gained insight into (complementary) qualities and pitfalls
• Three-dimensional connections: work, team and personal drive
• The team members have more understanding and respect for and trust in each other
• The team has Insights guidelines in order to make optimal use of each other’s qualities, provide feedback, communicate effectively and perform well under stress
• The team has gained insight into its own team dynamic and learned how to make better use of it within the MT and the organisation as a whole