How we can help you

The Cognitas Group can develop the cohesive, productive team you need

Cohesive, productive teams have four features in common. The Cognitas Group can help your leadership team put these in place:

1. Clear direction
2. Productive and efficient team processes and structures
3. Common norms and behaviours (which are real, not simply talked about)
4. Strong trust, supported by shared mindsets.

The Cognitas Group can work with your leadership team to:

• Understand where you stand – where you are strong and weak on each of these four features
• Set goals for improvement
• Develop these four features.

Most of our interactions with teams work on multiple dimensions. For example, we might guide a team at an off-site workshop where they are setting priorities for the year whilst also improving their ability to hold productive discussions and make decisions.

We can assist teams in making sustained improvement when we work with them over six or so months. We usually start with a diagnosis, where we interview team members and run our team effectiveness survey. We cover all the four features. Then, in a first off-site workshop, we work with team members to help them get to a shared view of their starting point using the raw data from the interviews and survey, our expert commentary and their own experiences.

The next step is to get clear on where they want to go and what are the goals for improvement. We often spend time on this in the first off-site workshop. We will also start to build skills to improve productivity.

Over the next few months, we usually hold a couple more team off-site workshops to create space to step up. To ensure the team stays stepped up, we usually work on the team processes (e.g., weekly team meetings). We also support teams to practice new norms and behaviours and provide one-on-one assistance to individuals.

Over time, we encourage team members to build trust and openness in off-site workshops and maintain this back at work. We transfer our facilitation skills over to the team so that, by the time we leave, the team is consistently able to hold robust, productive conversations.

The Cognitas Group helps client teams reach higher in whatever way they need to. Read about how we worked with a financial services leadership team to prepare them for challenging market conditions.