Human-Centric Leadership Teams
Is your leadership team aligned in its purpose and decisive in its actions? Does the way you work as a team inspire confidence in the wider organisation?
Have difficult conversations from a foundation of trust
Identify differing perceptions and conflicting goals
Courageously expose reality as a team
Envision a compelling future as a team
Confront challenges as a team
These services are targeted to address common challenges within leadership teams. For more bespoke engagements we also offer Human-Centric Engineering Consultancy.
Leadership teams tend to operate as a group of senior people, rather than as a cohesive unit ...
… often they are misaligned, dysfunctional, and burdened by hidden agendas and unspoken tensions.
“Great teams do not hold back with one another. They are unafraid to air their dirty laundry. They admit their mistakes, their weaknesses, and their concerns without fear of reprisal.”
- Patrick Lencioni, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
Leading as a Team
A rhythm of recurring team facilitation modules for leadership cohesion
The leadership sets the tone for team behaviours across the organisation, but what if the leadership team itself is struggling to work as a team? The Leading as a Team modules encourage a rhythm of contemplative calibration and alignment around a clear purpose for team-first leadership.
Each module includes the following deliverables:
A facilitated session (e.g. a morning or afternoon) with the designated engineering leaders
A report summarising the team insights, along with key observations and actionable recommendations
Optional follow-up 1:1s to reflect on the session and to integrate the learnings that arise
The Modules:
The following modules are available as part of an ongoing leadership enablement programme or as one-off workshops. They are designed for leadership teams within the engineering ecosystem comprising CTOs, and senior product and technical managers, especially those with line-management responsibilities who will be learning approaches to developing their own teams. These modules can also be adapted to both executive-level teams and product/engineering teams.
Rather than overloading participants with new tools and techniques, the modules will encourage people to express themselves and to get more in touch with their shared human experiences as a team.
Encouraging Psychological Safety
Participants will explore any discomfort in exposing reality within the leadership team and their fears over bringing bad news, asking ‘stupid’ questions, and making mistakes in front of their peers. Through sharing experiences and struggles with conflict, we will learn the value of psychological safety in effective teamwork along with techniques and approaches for its development.
What is Cohesion?
In this module, participants will be exploring the idea of team cohesion, and what it means to be oriented and aligned towards a common purpose. We will explore differences in individual perceptions, goals, and scope that lead to misalignment and fragmentation. We often talk about teamwork, alignment, and cohesion, but why is it so difficult to achieve? In this module, participants will learn about the complexities of teamwork and uncover ways of improving alignment.
Remote Leadership
Leadership teams are still struggling to adapt to the new reality of many engineering teams embracing fully remote or some form of hybrid working. This module provides participants with the opportunity to explore and discuss the challenges they face in remote leadership and to develop new strategies and new ways of thinking to best support their teams.
Intent Based Leadership
This module is grounded in the fundamental ideas raised in the book ‘Turn the Ship Around’ which empowers teams to make localised decisions according to the goals and priorities of the organisation. Participants will explore the idea that leadership is not confined to senior roles but is an attitude that can be nurtured throughout the organisation enabling teams to take ownership of their work.
Product and Engineering Alignment
Instead of working as a cohesive unit, product and engineering teams are often treated as entirely separate teams with competing interests. By working together, deciding which problems to solve and how to build solutions, product and engineering teams are empowered to truly own their work. It all starts with being aligned at the senior management level, to inspire a feeling that the product vision and the engineering strategy are in alignment.
Contemplative Wild Cards
These are special modules that catalyse deeper, more human conversations - ditching the formalities of management meetings, away from the busyness of corporate life. We create time for more intimate insights. The sessions are unconventional with loose agendas, aimed at creating emotional connection by provoking our vulnerabilities.
Team Dysfunctions
This module applies the ideas from the book ‘The Five Dysfunctions of a Team’, working through the absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability and inattention to results. Walking through this framework as a leadership team will help to build alignment and will provide participants with an approach they may apply within their own teams.
Exploring Dependencies
Unknown dependencies are one of the top 5 time thieves identified by Dominica DeGrandis in her book Making Work Visible. Time spent waiting for the expertise or actions of others is one of the leading causes of expensive delays. In this hands-on workshop, surface the dependencies which are combining to create an outsized negative impact on the speed of your team.
Managing the Invisible
Many aspects of software engineering are not immediately visible to participants and observers. In traditional engineering, it is easy to see ongoing work in progress along with the bottlenecks, queues, and waste. Developing software happens in the minds of engineers and through the collaboration of teams. This module explores the inherent challenges of managing the visible and explores ways to make activities more transparent.
Human-Centric Leadership
How can engineering teams be led in a more human-centric way? Optimising the human experience of work while also optimising for business priorities are not necessarily competing goals as the developer experience correlates closely with engineering productivity. In this module, we will explore an understanding of human-centric thinking and delve into ways that work be made more human.
Discuss the best option for you
We’d love to discuss the best option for you and your team. Just send us a quick message about your current challenges or goals to get the conversation started.
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