A service organization was laden with strong individual contributors who were struggling to be effective as a group. The President of the organization had a management style that was directly contributing to the ineffectiveness of her management team. She had good relationships with each member of the executive team, but dealt with conflict by talking to each member individually, not by bringing the whole team, or even the invested members, together. She also delegated work and communicated strategy in the same way. This ineffective communication style often led to executives having conflicting goals that subsequently led to constant squabbling among team members.
Camden was brought in to work with the six team members and the President to:
Set common goals as a team and to share their individual and departmental goals
Give each other information about what they needed from each other to reach their goals
Build a sense of teamwork and camaraderie that instilled the credo "we succeed only when we all succeed"
Engage in conflict resolution training in order to be able to resolve disagreements without unnecessarily involving the President
Understand different working styles to "reframe" difficulties and see how to leverage differences
Additional coaching with the President prepared her to effectively introduce each meeting, to emphasize the need for them all to work as a team rather than a collection of individuals, and to push conflicts down to be worked out by the involved parties.
Camden's work with teams is done with a keen sense of how to best utilize the strengths of the team so that the organization is better positioned to meet its strategic objectives.
