APAC Issue 4 2018 - Leading Teams

8 APAC / Issue 4 2018 , Leading Teams to Genuine Success Leading Teams is an innovative Australian firmdedicated to creating high performing teams and supporting individuals to become exceptional leaders. We caught up with directorMartine Harkin to find out more about the firmand explore how it has achieved the incredible success it enjoys today. Drawing on more than 25 years’ experience supporting a vast array of clients including elite sports teams, NGOs, schools, banks and major corporations, Leading Teams has achieved incredible success thanks to its innovative high performance model. Martine reflects on how this unique method has helped the company to support its varied clients and meet their individual needs. “Here at Leading Teams, we have three core areas of practice: supporting team alignment, driving cultural change and assisting with individual performance improvement to help create strong leaders. Our team of facilitators is based across Australia, and we all work together to support our clients and offer them solutions that are tailored to meet their individual needs. Our offering is flexible, and we work directly with teams and their leaders to create high performance teams and drive cultural change, as well as offering individual training for clients looking to bolster their leadership prowess. It is not exclusively managers we work with; our model can be applied to individuals in any given team, no matter the size or the industry. This bespoke offering has led us to work with a wide range of sporting clients, including the Australian Diamonds Netball Team and 16 of the 18 AFL clubs as well as a host of household names from the corporate world including Virgin Australia, Flight Centre, Aldi and M&C Saatchi. “One of our founders, Ray McLean, has written two books on team performance and leadership, and his first was titled Any Given Team, which encapsulates our service offering. Our model works for any team and we adapt our delivery to the needs of any client. By working closely with them, we understand exactly what they want out of their relationship with us and then collaborate with them to achieve this. Often, we begin this process by working with the leaders in the business, as they are responsible for driving the overall culture of the team. Then we work with specific functional teams within the business on targeted issues to help cultivate the culture that the client needs to achieve their goals.” The first step to creating a high performing team is to define why they exist as a team and how they want to be seen. From there, Martine highlights the four fundamental factors that Leading Teams believes are essential to any high performance team, no matter what industry they operate in. “High performance teams all share four key characteristics, and as such Leading Teams have built these into our model and constantly support leaders and their staff to achieve them. The first is a clear purpose; this is not just the overall organisation’s mission statement, but an individual focus which unites the team itself. Secondly, all high performing teams have an agreed behavioural framework, which may be shared with the whole organisation, and allows team members to interact with each other in a safe and supportive space. “The third characteristic is strong professional relationships between team members that are based on mutual trust and respect. All of these characteristics combine to create the final indicator of a high performance team - a safe environment within which there is space for genuine conversations about performance. The focus 1801AP01