Our Approach
Step 1
Initial Consultation
We discuss your team’s challenges, goals and aspirations. This
helps us understand your requirements in further depth.
Key Activities
- Preliminary discussion with team leaders
- Understanding team composition and dynamics
- Identifying primary challenges and objectives
Step 2
Data Gathering
We conduct a quantitative and qualitative analysis to gain insights into your team. This means sending out a questionnaire and interviewing all team members, including a deep dive with the team leader.
Key Activities
- Distribution of questionnaires to whole team.
- One-on-one interviews with team members.
- In-depth interview with the team leader.
- The design of a customised workshop based on this data.
Step 3
The Workshop
Key Activities
- Discussion of questionnaire results.
- Alignment and Environment: our core concept that focusses on syncing team goals and fostering a positive working atmosphere.
- Psychological Safety and Communication: building trust and information flow within the team.
- Careful activities to address identified challenges and promote team cohesion.
Step 4
Workshop Follow-up
To help with the implementation of outputs from the workshop we have follow-up activities.
Key Activities
- A report with the key decisions and next steps from the workshop.
- AA de-brief video call with the team leader/s.
- A clear understanding of if/when a further workshop is needed at a later date.
We also offer our Core Workshops and a New-Team Training Week, which we would also be delighted to describe to you in further detail.
Alignment-Environment
We have developed the concept of ‘Alignment-Environment’ for understanding the factors that define success at the team level. Whether it is just two people or more and whether a professional or personal context; the success of people in any endeavour will be defined by two factors: how in-sync they are and the atmostphere between them. The former is their Alignment and the latter their Environment.
It is common for most team development workshops to focus on just the relationships within a team. This is a mistake. Alignment will define the success of a team more than other factors.
This key observation is more important today. Globalization has resulted in a larger variety of assumptions, backgrounds and societal norms within professional teams. Many past things that went unsaid now need to explicitly be said, and possibly debated first. We help you to set the tone of this discussion, forging a team that is unified in its purpose and comfortable in its means.
Alignment-Environment: On Holiday
A helpful way one can think of the dynamic between these two concepts is with two friends, or even a couple, travelling together. Let’s say that the ‘environment’ between the two is very favourable. That is to say, they are happy in one another’s company and that they are open and honest with each other about important things.
Now consider their alignment – how aligned are they in their purpose, goals and the reasons behind them? One of the two sees a holiday as an excellent opportunity to catch as much sun as possible, decompress and get up as late as possible. The other, prioritises getting up at sunrise to beat the queues at all the local galleries, temples and museums (which he has already listed in order of priority to visit, along with a convenient list of restaurants for lunch. Who wants to lose time walking aimlessly to find food?!).
Do you think that their strong relationship will help them come up with a happy middle ground of a plan? Or could it be that this misalignment on what they want does damage to the relationship? Our job at Dowlais is to break down the variables that make up this dynamic and help teams address them – be it from a position of strength or to address problems have already emerged.
The answer to the question: it depends how much is at stake and the time pressure. Teams with significant amounts of these things have increasing reliability on alignment and competence. Those that don’t will notice environmental factors far more.
