Team integration and alignment
Success story: Building a cohesive, effective team
This client is a leader in its sector, with a national remit and international reputation. In response to demand for its services, it recently acquired two teams from other organisations to increase capacity and capability. Despite a strong and nurturing organisational culture overall, the two teams have not integrated well and are not operating effectively. Working styles and values are very different and team members express concern over a lack of wider leadership, control and structure. An ‘us and them’ culture prevails across teams with low levels of cohesion and widespread mistrust. In order to work effectively, the teams need to develop resilience, rekindle team spirit, and forge a joint ethos and vision.
Our approach
Building team cohesion and team integration is crucial to organisational efficiency and performance. A highly productive team can communicate, cooperate and innovate in an atmosphere of mutual trust and respect.
teamGenie® started with the basics. To understand the situation from different stakeholders’ perspectives, we interviewed team members and used our award winning, online team diagnostic profiling tool, teamSalient® to build a complete picture of the complex social interplay between teams. We shared all of our data and results to build trust, taking care to highlight team strengths while never shying away from areas of difficulty. We explored each team’s existing attitude towards the status-quo before working with members to create a shared vision for the future. We then helped the team put together a list of practical steps to implement.
The results
By working together as a whole team, members overcame their sense of isolation. Mixing team members helped break down barriers and help them recognise common ground while holding space for their distinct identity and contributions. A new vision enabled them to move out of silos and to establish common shared vision. Once communications and trust were established, team cohesion and performance improved.
Client testimonial
“This is real Organisational Development”.
CEO, Local Government
