Doing is Believing! Get your D.I.B.s on Teamwork!
Teamwork. It’s one of the business competencies that gets bandied about a lot and has a lot of different connotations depending on your definition of “team,” which has gotten more complex as technology has enabled us to establish far-flung teams around the world. We’ve worked on teams where we never even met our fellow team members face-to-face!
So how do you get “D.I.B.s” on Teamwork?
One of our clients wanted to get more out of their sales force without taking time out of the day of the sales people. They had data to support that “moving the middle” would provide the biggest bang for the buck. In other words, leave the high performers alone, forget about the laggards, and ask sales managers to nominate their high potential “middle performers”. The solution was to target this last group with the goal of moving them up the ladder, and have them selling more solutions.
Virtual teams were formed and given weekly challenges. What made the challenges tempting and doable was the fact that each “challenge” was directly applicable to the participant’s real sales situation. By participating in the weekly challenge, each sales person was seeing a beneficial impact on their daily selling motion. Meanwhile, back at the collaboration board, a virtual knowledge community was forming where participants not only got coaching from an expert career coach and help on their solutions to the weekly challenges, they also got input from the rest of the virtual community.
The dispassionate coaching that we provided as a disinterested 3rd party was augmented by peer-to-peer coaching by people who only came together for the purpose of the training. This happened with groups of 20 people at a time, and after many sessions, we had an astounding result of many millions of dollars of increased opportunities in the forecast pipeline. All because small groups of 20 people came together, enabled by Teamwork, to take their abilities to the next level.
Comments are welcome, and we would also love to speak to you about it at our booth at ASTD 2013, #245, where we’ll help you “get D.I.B.s on Teamwork!”
Can’t wait to see you at ASTD! I call Dibs! Welcome to the blogosphere. Programs where an individual can work remotely but feel personally connected are the new success-trend. I am looking at MOOCS and trying to merge that personal contact with online training. Here’s hoping it works.