The Team with a Shrinking Budget
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Creating a tight knit, skilled team of leaders can require more than training. Most leaders are pulled in many directions at once. They know in theory the leadership best practices they should follow, but implementation, given their day to day workload, can be challenging. Below we share the experience of a team who came to Diamond Insight for help as it developed cohorts of leaders and improved performance.
The Team with a Shrinking Budget: Integrating Leadership Training to Meet Real World Challenges
This team is part of a Federal agency facing increasing customer demands with a shrinking budget. Recognizing this challenge, the team launched initiatives to streamline processes, update technology, and train its leaders, from front-line supervisors to the most senior Director, to better manage people. Now it faced a dilemma: how could these leaders apply what they learned in the classroom to their challenges? In other words, how could they make the leadership best practices their second nature, not just ivory tower ideals? How could they build relationships across the team to support each other?
Diamond Insight, collaborating with other coaches, proposed a Group Coaching solution. The coaches specifically designed the sessions to have the leaders bring their actual business issues out in the open, so that they could apply the training that they invested in the prior year directly to resolving challenges as a team. The team formed cross-division cohorts of ten managers each, and offered six, three-hour sessions over the course of six months. A professional coach encouraged open dialogue on specific real-world challenges, such as handling difficult conversations, managing poor performance, managing time more effectively, prioritizing work for themselves and their teams, delegating, and dealing with difficult employees. At each session, participants worked in small groups to determine how to apply these lessons to their specific situations, and then committed publically to the group about what they would do in the coming month.
At the program’s end, participants said they especially valued group coaching for bringing together a cross-section of leaders so that they could discuss common problems they were facing, share best practices and alternative ways of addressing these problems, and expand their social networks. Participants reported that group coaching helped improve their personal productivity and that of their work group, as well as complete projects with higher quality. They were able to increase team productivity by more effectively managing their teams’ work requests and priorities, and by distributing the workload more evenly. Managers also learned ways to improve their listening skills, ask more insightful questions, and not be sidetracked by assumptions about people or situations.
The approach was so successful that the team continued it the next year, with intact ‘sub-teams,’ to collaborate on specific projects and common issues, and be in a stronger position to support one another.
Note: To protect client confidentiality, case studies are simplified snapshots, used for example only, to illustrate common client situations and solutions. We are happy to provide references upon request, with client permission.
