“Ain't no mountain high enough”

“The speed at which we'll recover will depend on the international cooperation we can achieve” Gordon Brown – Wall Street, March 25th 2009.

Nobody walked out, everybody had something to call a victory and they all got to bathe in President Obama’s spotlight. While debate will continue about exactly what the world leaders achieved at the London G20 summit, one thing is for sure: the work of the faceless diplomats behind the scenes was invaluable. These so called ‘sherpas’ (leading the mountaineers to the summit) have to prepare all the detailed ground work for their heads of government and draft various communiqués before the meeting has even taken place.

The sherpas' work involves numerous face-to-face meetings, conference calls and e-mail exchanges together with an ability to coax, manoeuvre and negotiate with their opposite numbers. The delicacy of this task cannot be understated. It requires forensic analysis of complicated issues, deft diplomatic communication skills and, most crucially, teamwork - one of CHPD’s core behaviours contributing to high performance leadership. The ability to create teams that truly work together is all too rare. In a recent snapshot of results from years of assessment of leaders in the UK, we found that, on average, leaders were under-developed when it came to ‘teamwork’. (see diagram below).



At CHPD we find that many leaders believe they are good at ‘teamwork‘ because the team themselves say “we have a great team spirit”. This is commendable and to be maintained yet it is actually the output of an entire leadership approach rather than the application of one behaviour like expert facilitation of the team and fostering effective team results.

CHPD’s definition of teamwork at a high performance level is as follows:

“The leader facilitates dialogue between two or more team members so they create shared ‘team concepts’, that are more powerful than any of the individual ideas that were contributed at first”.
This means that the team is constantly working together not only to complete group tasks but also to harness disparate ideas into team strategies and solutions. In essence it is the work of the perfect ‘sherpa’.

CHPD both assesses leaders against 12 behaviours and helps them achieve a higher level of performance through training and coaching. To find out how your leaders stack up against the key benchmarks, email info@chpd.com. In the meantime, try the following tips to boost teamwork in your business:

· Encourage teams to pool knowledge and develop a shared sense of purpose through regular update and progress meetings

· Promote participative decision making rather than imposition of decisions from above

· Promote the cross-fertilisation of ideas by bringing people from your own and other teams together to improve co-operation

· Task teams to talk things through to develop shared thinking and to integrate different perspectives where appropriate

· Build bridges between the ideas of team members by asking them to build on the linkages of their ideas to create broader team concepts

· Stimulate a wide-ranging debate amongst all your employees on the decisions that affect them; encourage team members to understand their colleagues

Having reflected on the use of teamwork you may start to question who had the real leadership behaviours at the G20 meeting – the mountaineers or the sherpas?