Driving competitive advantage by getting your most important capital (people) working together whilst remaining focused on common goals and outcomes can be one of the biggest challenges facing organisations today. Personal agendas, positioning, politics, opinions and differing views and viewpoints can all detract valuable time, effort and financial resources away from delivering the results that really matter.
Developing the skill and capability to effectively facilitate cohesive working relationships with individuals, teams or even entire businesses to enable and optimise their thinking, performance and results is not only a highly desirable skill to learn personally it’s also one that’s in high demand in just about every organisation on the planet.
Whilst shifting mindsets, culture and attitudes can take considerable time and effort it’s still possible to start pragmatically moving that needle by applying some simple practices and principles at the team level. Here is a simple actionable framework to help you get started with facilitating and developing effective performant teams.
The key aim of the 4C framework is to not only get teams thinking, performing and working together to produce business benefit, It also servers to flatten hierarchies removes titles, statuses and politics whilst driving efforts to focus on meeting objectives, achieving outcomes and delivering desired results. The principle behind developing high performing teams using the 4C framework can be summed up as follows.
Develop a simple consultative approach that creates collaboration, expects contribution and enables the open and transparent co-creation of measurable value.
1 Consultation: Identifying pertinent audiences and instigating open and free flowing communication that encourages environmental development where inclusiveness and a focus on discovery, investigation and learning are the priority. Clearly understanding the challenges, problems and constraints before action is taken is essential to the delivery of mutually beneficial outcomes.
2. Collaboration: Collectively working as a team is far more effective that trying to blaze the trail on your own. When collaboration is done well it means that everyone gains from the collaborative efforts. Developing a collaborative approach is important because it not only identifies and recognises individual team members knowledge, experience and expertise it leverages and extrapolates it far in beyond that of individual efforts. In true collaborative environments every member is worth far more than the sum of its parts.
3 Contribution: Many teams outwardly promote and encourage contribution but it’s often optional. The 4C framework expects team members to contribute, it’s fundamental to progression. Limited contribution limits possibilities and capability. Active contribution not only develops great relationships and confidence but instills trust, inclusion, standards and values, all of which are essential to outstanding team performance.
4. Co Creation: When teams work collectively towards a common goal they naturally form performant cohesive entities that quickly accelerate Co creation, development and delivery. Co creating requires responsibility, ownership and accountability all of which work to remove many of the ego based biases within teams but more importantly keeps all of their efforts focused on the end goal regardless of individual targets, prejudices and status. Co creation is much more agile, produces better results and builds long term sustainable team performance.
The 4C framework can be quickly implemented and applied in just about any scenario where group facilitation would produce advantageous results. Use it both personally and professionally to facilitate and build truly performant teams.
