Leadership Team Effectiveness

Can you clearly see the mandates for your teams, and understand how they intersect and interrelate? Create organizational clarity and commitment through an inclusive, energizing workshop.

Clear team charters serve both the teams and the organization as a whole. We have found that in many companies team charters are either only internal–a tool for the team not widely shared–or only external–defining goals and boundaries but not helping the team come together effectively. Instead, both are needed.

Helping teams align and improve

A clear, effective mandate captured as an explicit team charter makes the team’s mission and goals incredibly clear to everybody on the team, serving very powerfully to increase alignment. When that team then agrees on how they’ll work together, they set the conditions for effective collaboration. This foundation can then trigger relentless improvement within the team, because they have a shared understanding of what they are working to improve.

Aligning priorities across teams

Such charters can then communicate how a given team needs to work with the rest of the organization. When there is tension between teams or a lack of agreement on priorities, very often the disagreement can be traced back to something in each team’s mandate. An explicit charter allows for much more effective discussions and easier resolution through exploring tradeoffs or compromises, or even win-win opportunities.

Helping executives see and change the organization

Mandates make executive leadership’s job significantly easier. Looking across the charters of a number of teams provides executive leadership with a far easier visualization from which to design and redesign the organization as needs change. Each team, based on the mandate its charter represents, can be funded to a given level, allowed to execute with minimal day-to-day instruction, and evaluated continuously based on its results against the goals captured in the charter.

(Re)charter teams and build the organizational map

The engagement has four parts:

Identify scope. What teams (or teams of teams) do we want to include? Which have charters that need updating and for which are we starting from scratch.
Lead team chartering workshops. For each group in scope, lead a workshop with the entire team to build a clear team charter.
Verify charters. Review the team charters with leaders to verify accuracy, boundaries, constraints and implications.
Build organizational map. With senior leaders, build an organizational map based on team mandates, and discuss the implications and what future change initiatives might be considered based on the information.

Ready to clearly see the mandates for your teams, and understand how they intersect and interrelate? Contact Elevate to create organizational clarity and commitment through an inclusive, energizing chartering process.work