Drawing on a range of evidence-based team frameworks[1] and our own considerable experience, our 5-Element Team Effectiveness Framework (copyright pending) offers an inventory of  the components that make up a highly effective team.

It can be used to:

➡️    Understand how the team contributes to your business’ value chain.

➡️    Support a team effectiveness audit.

➡️    Create a systems-view of the team by considering the interplay of components, and identifying levers of performance and dysfunction.

➡️    Provide the framework for a team charter and capability development plan.

#1.          Situations

Teams do not exist in a vacuum. Having a common understanding of context, within the business and beyond, and how this may change over time is essential.

Our Building Better Teams programmes explore a range of tools that will help you do this.

#2.          Foundations

Teams exist to deliver on the needs of their principal stakeholder(s), the essence of which is distilled as the team’s Purpose.

Our Building Better Teams programmes will help you get clear on this and what is needed to create a teamenvironment that enables positive challenge and mutual accountability.

#3.          Aspirations

If you aim at nothing, you will hit it! What kind of team do you need to become in order to deliver on your purpose in an ever-changing environment?

Our Building Better Teams programmes explore different team types, goal-setting, and how to plot and commit to your collective improvement journey.

#4.          Operations

Your team delivers true value when colleagues work together and deliver on collective goals. They are interdependent and hold one another accountable.

Our Building Better Teams programmes will help you build an operating environment that promotes and sustains an effective blend of challenge and support and drives collective performance.

#5.          Integrations

Your team is only as effective as its value-adding relationships with other teams in the business! These can be sub-optimal at best and dysfunctional or non-existent at worst.

Our Building Better Teams programmes will lift your gaze beyond the team’s boundaries to better understand the wider value system you are part of, and the skills and systems needed to play your full part.

Download our Building Better Teams brochure here.

[1] Rocket Model (Curphy, G), 5-Disciplines Model (Hawkins, P), PERILL Model (Clutterbuck, D),  Hackman’s Conditions for Team Effectiveness (Hackman J. R.).

As organisations grow, so do the numbers of meetings.  How to keep them purposeful, efficient, and effective? Here are some of our top tips. What might you add?

Commission

Is the purpose of the meeting clear to everyone?

Are the customers of the meeting clear to everyone?

Are there different meetings for different purposes and “modes” of discussion such as downloads, consultation, collaboration i.e. short tactical check-ins, operational coord, creative/innovation workshops, strategy & key capability offsites.

Do Terms of Reference and/or Codes of Conduct exist for each type of meeting to help colleagues keep things efficient and effective?

Cadence

Is there a drumbeat to the various types of meeting?

Are meetings firmly scheduled and prioritised by the required attendees?

Convene

Are agendas, papers, venues, admin etc. collated and shared in good time?

Are agenda items framed as questions that include their purpose i.e. inquiry-based questions? This helps everyone to think more broadly/systemically; helps “introverts” to reflect in advance; and signals to everyone they will be expected to contribute their points of view.

Climate

Has thought been given to the sort of venue that will best support the kind of discussion required by the meeting’s purpose?

Do colleagues feel welcome, safe to contribute, and safe to challenge?

Have colleagues explored any contentious issues with one another prior to the meeting so that misunderstandings and assumptions can be explored and resolved, or at least clarified?

Chair & Conduct

Does the chair check-in with everyone at the start of a meeting to ensure everyone is fully present, and whether anyone has particular needs to enable this?

Phone on/phones off?

Are attendees’ cultural differences/needs understood, appreciated, and accommodated?

Is the chair a fixed or a rotational role? Is a chair required?

Is the chair’s role clear? For example, does the chair sit above the content of a meeting and steer the process? Are they participant? Are they the customer? Perhaps one or more of these?

Does the chair remind attendees of the purpose of the meeting; and steer the process to support this?

Does the chair, and/or colleagues, have the awareness and skills to steer discussion towards debate or dialogue as appropriate?

Do colleagues call out the chair, or other colleagues, when discussions become too narrow, stalled, or otherwise unconstructive?

Have chairs been allocated for absent colleagues, key stakeholders, and the 13^th Fairy (a metaphor for a forgotten or overlooked guest from the fairy tale “Sleeping Beauty”).

Is it assumed the “boss” is the chair? Why? What are the risks that he/she will lose sight of the meeting process and time if they are also immersed in the agenda items?

Commit

Does the climate allow everyone to commit to decisions even if their contributions have been rejected?

Are actions clearly scoped and owned?

Communicate

Is there an effective mechanism in place to communicate actions and decisions in a timely manner to stakeholders?

Have any disclosure issues been considered and agreed?

Do colleagues fully own and promote the key messages from the meeting? (“Cabinet loyalty”).

Collaborate & Complete

Do colleagues collaborate readily over cross-cutting actions, and hold one another accountable for their contributions without requiring escalation to the chair/customer?

Are actions tracked on a shared tool (e.g. using RAG) so that subsequent meetings don’t waste time on verbal reporting, and can focus instead on priority outstanding actions?

Continuous Review

Do colleagues remain creatively critical of the process and contribute suggestions for improvement?

Is there a formalised process of review?

A big, but seemingly invisible, problem many organisations have is suboptimal teamwork.

Sure, there is teamwork going on.

So much more is possible if organisations paid more attention to team leadership, teamship, and cross-silo team of teams working.

(The good news is this changing. Don’t be left behind. We can help).

And here I mean “teams” in the fullest sense of the term. Teams where there is collaborative working in service of joint goals that serve their stakeholders, and where there is collective inquiry and learning that maintains relevance and fitness for the future.

Not only are many teams underperforming in the moment and over the short term, they are failing to spot the faint signals of wider opportunities and risks ahead of them.

Sure, some may be hitting targets.

So much more ambition, innovation and value is possible.

Particularly when this is underpinned by investment in developing team leadership, teamship, and cross-silo team of teams working. I have already said this. It is important!

(For example, we are working with a hungry team that is chasing double EBIT over a sporting timescale, and has recognised this is only possible via a business-wide team of teams approach. Watch out for the case study in due course).

THE HIGH PERFORMANCE DELUSION

An underlying issue is that leaders and teams fail to develop beyond a set of one-to-one relationships.

This is a “habit” which cascades through the organisation and is cemented by an individually-based performance appraisal system. 

The organisation loses out on the power of team leadership and teamship.

What if leaders and teams explored the value that lies in the multiple possible interactions between colleagues. In a team of 8 there are potentially 28 one-to-one interactions and 960 one-to-many interactions.  What value is being ignored or inadvertently suppressed?

What if leaders and teams lifted their gaze beyond the present fire-fight to emerging opportunities and prospects for longer term radical innovation?

What if leaders stopped acting as subject matter experts, offering themselves as the “go to” fixer?  What if they stopped managing inside their own “comfort zones”?

What if leaders could do more than just pull team activities together under a single narrative, and with empowering delegations? Pretty good but not high-performing. The team is still a collection of individuals doing their bits, and the team leader is still the “go to” person for external stakeholders. 

THE OPPORTUNITY

What if leaders could help colleagues connect more fruitfully across the team and externally to discover and resolve issues unaided.

What if leaders led by coaching the connections rather than just the individuals?

What if leaders and teams could be supported to reach for this level of high performance?

NEED HELP?

This is precisely the work that we specialise in.

Let’s explore how we can help you.

Dave Stewart

+44 7776 153428

dave@freshairleadership.com

Yesterday, I attended the 61st anniversary of the mountain rescue team I served in during the 70s.

Yup, the days before Goretex, smart phones, and pretty much anything digital. And photos, the quality of which, only became apparent days later after film was developed at Boots the Chemist.

And well before social media and the rise of one-trick, minimal lived experience experts pushing this or that brand of “leadership”.

LOOK AT THOSE OLD GITS…

“Is this the end-of-life ward?”  I quipped on arrival to peels of laughter (btw many of us are frequent flyers with the NHS!)

Non-pc, but an enduring example of the black humour that helped us deal with the situations we volunteered for.

Old gits, connected by something deep and lasting.

CONTEXT…

We operated in the Southern Cairngorms and the Lochnagar areas of the Highlands.

Difficult, dangerous, remote.

In those days – no drones, no high-mobility vehicles, no digital mapping, very few estate roads, and very cold, big snow winters.

Call-outs, or shouts, often involved the sombre recovery of bodies. Hypothermia, avalanches, bloody climbing falls.

I joined a decade after the team’s 1964 formation. Processes and protocols were early stage and local. Now they are nationwide and codified. Equipment is amazing. There are mandatory national training courses. Professionalisation, but still charity-based. And a lot of good as a result.

SO WHAT?

Knowing what I know now, as a result of a 50+ year leadership journey supported by continuous professional development, and reminded by meeting these amazing souls yesterday (some of whom I see regularly, some of whom I have not seen for 50 years!):

• The team leaders we worked with were/are all flawed human beings (aren’t we all).

• They didn’t have names for different leadership strategies or styles.

• Rather they were virtuoso leadership magicians who dynamically understood context, people, and themselves; and knew when to teach, coordinate, delegate, ask questions, listen, reflect, amend, and direct.

• They knew when to grip and when to hug, to throw a steely glare and when to smile.

• They created – indeed we collectively created – a team that also understood context and the ways that getting stuff done needed to happen in service of our partners (the Police, other teams), casualties, and wider stakeholders (benefactors like Order of St John).

• And sometimes the team leader got it badly wrong and pissed off a lot of people. And that was ok.

A CLOSING WORD…

There was and still is a high bar to be welcomed in as a trusted mountain rescue team member.

Nothing to do with the concept of “othering” that some people focus on . This “in-group” is all about a level of trust that is based on competence, consistency, and connection; it’s about contribution and challenge; and it’s about ownership and accountability. And laughing lots!

A non-negotiable high bar that colleagues and casualties alike demand and deserve.

Look at these faces. They say it all.

Dave Stewart

Founder & Chief Executive

Hard pressed team leaders and their HR/L&D colleagues often roll out a psychometric questionnaire in the belief this will open the door to great conversations and enhanced team performance. They might also arrange for colleagues to have one-to-one coaching.

But nothing really shifts. Why?

Teams are highly complex adaptive systems. Performance is the result of aligning multiple interacting factors, in addition to dynamically managing the many relationships in play. Add shifting operational contexts over time, and interactions with other teams across an organisation, and you have a massive challenge on your hands.

Take Gordon Curphy’s and Dianne Nilsen’s Rocket Model for example. This shows the interacting factors that need to be considered in developing and leading a team. We will highlight the Peter Hawkins 5-Disciplines model and the David Clutterbuck PERILL model in other posts. As with all models, they are not reality but they offer a great way into understanding the complexity involved.

No wonder that leading organisations are now rebalancing their investment from one-to-one coaching to team development.

(Source: PwC’ 2025 Coaching Industry Benchmark Study).

High-performing teams are built through honest reflection, tough conversations, collective leadership, and continuous learning—not a one-time personality profile, one-to-one coaching, or an internally facilitated workshop.

This is our core business.

We can help.  Get in touch.

RUDYARD KIPLING’S “ I Keep Six Honest Serving Men”  contrasts how, as adults, we seem to have lost our capacity for wonder and curiosity compared to young children.

The poem laments how we let our “Six Honest Serving Men” (What, Why, When, How, Where, and Who) rest during work and mealtimes. We are too busy.

Too busy for curiosity and imagination. Really?! What a lost opportunity.

Contrast this to children who ask “millions” of questions from the moment they wake, giving flight to their sense of wonder and curiosity, never allowing the Six Honest Serving Men to rest.

—

I KEEP six honest serving-men

(They taught me all I knew);

Their names are What and Why and When

And How and Where and Who.

I send them over land and sea,

I send them east and west;

But after they have worked for me,

I give them all a rest.

I let them rest from nine till five,

For I am busy then,

As well as breakfast, lunch, and tea,

For they are hungry men.

But different folk have different views;

I know a person small—

She keeps ten million serving-men,

Who get no rest at all!

She sends’em abroad on her own affairs,

From the second she opens her eyes—

One million Hows, two million Wheres,

And seven million Whys!

With this in mind, perhaps we can help rekindle your imagination and curiosity. It is core to the experiential inquiry work we do with leaders and teams.

📸 Joe Yates, Instagram: josephyates_

Why sweating the small stuff is super-important!

Your team, your business, is a system, and sits within a wider system of systems.  A complex arrangement of actors that has been interacting towards the present moment.

In complexity theory, there is a concept called Self Organised Criticality that describes how large, dramatic, and unpredictable events can occur through the collective impact of small, interdependent changes.

Nothing new really. You have heard the phrase, “the straw that broke the camel’s back”. Or “the tipping point”. And how avalanches can be triggered by a final snowflake. 

THE LEADERSHIP TEAM FELL APART…

One of our client teams on a short walk and talk. A colleague tripped and grazed a knee. On the face of it, a minor incident.

Months of resentment has been building up to this moment. One half of the team sought to “rescue” their colleague. The other half encouraged the colleague to “just get on with it.” 

Voices were raised. Accusations were made. Months of “stuff” came spilling out.

It was pretty unpleasant!

And yet this presented an opportunity for the team’s new leader with our support to do the work the team and previous team leader had been avoiding. 

All those previous moments of friction had made the team increasingly unstable. Moments unnoticed by some colleagues. Wrapped in resentment by others. Feelings that were dismissed.  Swept under the carpet. “Small stuff.”

SO WHAT?

Your team needs to look after itself. It needs care and maintenance. It needs the small stuff attending to. Not necessarily in a big song and dance way. But there needs to be recognition and some way of dealing with emerging issues early.  It is everyone’s job!

NOW WHAT?

We can help you live the behaviours and develop the ways of working needed to keep you all operating at your collective best.

Let’s get to work on the small stuff before it becomes an avoidable drama.

Get in touch now.

PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY…

Hmmm…

Is it time to widen attention onto “workplace charters”…

…Agreements that highlight that stuff needs to get done, that there is mutual accountability for delivering on promises made to one another in service of customers and other stakeholders.

…That the workplace is not some sort of privileged, indulgent sanctuary from tough conversations and growth?

For sure, creating an environment where everyone feels welcome, is safe to learn, safe to contribute, and safe to challenge (after Timothy R Clark) is super-important.

But let’s not lose sight of the deal which involves us being accountable to our team, organisations, and partnerships for delivering what clients are paying for.

And the opportunity for personal and collective growth that is possible.

Thoughts?

Read our case study here.

Chief executives…

9 THINGS TO DO. NOW.

To be clear on definitions, the SMG is not the same as a Senior Leadership (SLT) or Executive Team (ET).

The SLT or ET, typically comprised of 4 – 8 senior execs, create the conditions for the long-term success of the business by setting direction, promoting the desired culture, architecting the development of new capabilities, and providing collective oversight of operations. They may do so in discussion with and/or at the behest of the board, if one has been established.

At one stage of your company’s growth, you probably knew everyone…

For sure you were setting direction etc.. but you also had your sleeves rolled up and were right in amongst the detail of operations, product development, and client conversations. You were fire-fighting. And rather enjoying it!

You successfully scaled and established a leadership team around you…

The distance between you and your staff was still pretty short, and you hadn’t quite managed to escape the gravitational pull of operations and putting fires out.

THE COMPANY IS NOW A GOOD BIT BIGGER…

You are going to have to let go and trust others to manage the business, to make things happen. Your key responsibility, and that of your senior execs, is strategic leadership and capability building.

Now is the time to bring your senior managers together into a HIGH VALUE forum. Your ET’s first reports and other key people perhaps.

They will provide a sense-making, interpretation, and alignment bridge between the Exec Team and the staff delivering value to your clients.

They will make sure that the business is delivered. They will trouble-shoot and collaborate across the business to make this so.

They will help inform strategy with the experiences and intelligence gathered from front line staff and clients.  And once the strategy is updated and business plans made, they’ll run with the explicit tasks as well as the work that is implicit in these.

And they’ll get to learn how the ET and Board works. For some this will build their confidence and ignite their passion for a future executive leadership role themselves. You will be growing fabulous talent.

And they’ll take the operational and fire-fighting pressure off you and the ET, and give you the space to be the strategic and capability building chief executive your Board expects and your company deserves.

SO WHAT?

#1.   Let go. You cannot manage operations on your own, or even through an ET anymore.

#2.   If you haven’t formed an SMG, give it some thought. Now.

#3.   Establish Terms of Reference or a SMG Charter to provide clarity of purpose, alignment, and value. Make this the goal of the first gathering.

#4.   Consider making this a forum enabled and supported by your Chief Operating Officer. Or one of your senior managers on rotation.

#5.   Bring them into the ET’s thinking and planning.

#6.   Meet regularly, maybe monthly; and maybe quarterly or biannually with the ET. Maybe offsite. In fact, ideally offsite for the big, performance improvement and innovation conversations.

#7.   Consider the cross-cutting projects they could put their heads, hearts, and souls around. Consider whether they could become something of an innovation hub.

#8.   Don’t communicate AT them. Don’t debate your well prepared positions. Engage in dialogue. Create new understanding and winning ways together.

#9.   The SMG is not a leadership barrier between you and your staff. Keep getting out and about, talking and listening, and inspiring and being inspired by everyone.

NOW WHAT?

You might not need help to get the ball rolling but we can certainly help facilitate and coach the conversations you are all going to need.

We can help you inquire into really significant questions and issues; help you really listen to one another; help you discover new insights; help you shape and deliver the value to your clients and wider stakeholders.

Get in touch now to find out more.

I was recently asked about how to improve accountability across a business.

Let’s look at this through a series of questions about the BUSINESS environment, you as the LEADER, and the INDIVIDUAL charged with delivering a task.

Notice in what follows how much rests on there being an enabling environment and effective leadership. If you are a chief executive or senior leader, much of this falls on you!

It is rarely a simple case of blaming a single individual for stuff that doesn’t get done!

THE BUSINESS

First, consider whether the accountability challenge you are experiencing is an isolated individual case or something more systemic and widespread.

Do the conditions exist to enable safe communications up and down and across the team and wider business? Is the business a psychological safe place to work, where everyone feels included, safe to learn, and safe to contribute and challenge?

How do you know this?

Consider some form of confidential team survey, ideally by a trusted third party, to explore this.  This can usefully be widened to look at team effectiveness as a whole. Read our thoughts on this here.

Next, run one or more workshops to identify the development actions needed, and then nail these in priority order. Keep these under review. Create a development roadmap. We can help here too. Check out our case studies.

THE LEADER

What is the nature of the relationships between leaders and team members? Is it one of surveillance or coaching? The former can switch people off; the latter can promote  discretionary effort and capability growth.

How often do leaders engage and review priorities and resourcing with colleagues? This is a key leadership function.

Or do leaders just pile on more and more tasks? And when less and less is achieved, do leaders get more and more frustrated and blame others?

A surveillance culture will lose you goodwill, people, and money. A coaching culture will generate goodwill, growth, and added value.

How has the task been set up?  Has it been clearly scoped in terms of outputs, inputs, resources, and processes? Are reporting requirements clear and understood?

Is it a routine, transactional task where best practice can be deployed with a high degree of confidence in satisfactory completion? Or is it more of a discovery exercise in a complex setting requiring cycles of develop, test, fail, repeat?

Are delivery expectations appropriate to these different types of task?

Have constraints and freedoms of action been clearly identified?

What are the linkages and dependencies with other work being done by others? Are they playing their part in delivering collective success?

Has there been a stakeholder review of risks, ownership, and active management?

THE INDIVIDUAL

Has the task owner reached out to stakeholders to establish effective working relationships?

Has the task owner identified risks and taken steps to mitigate them in accordance with the business’ risk management process? Is it clear what should be escalated, and do stakeholder relationships enable or hinder this?

Does the task owner have the capability and capacity to do what has been asked of them?

If not, what will you as the leader do? (Yes, here we are back at the role of the Leader!). Provide coaching and training? Reprioritise other tasks? Task  someone else who has the capability and capacity?

Finally, are there clearly understood consequences that comply with employment law and best practice for repeated underperformance?

Featured image courtesy of GranzCreative via Canva