Just because a group of people have been together for a long time it doesn’t make them a team. The ten Directors of this public health organization had known one another, on-and-off for some years. For the most part the different members of the group liked one another and where mutual liking was missing a measure of professional respect did exist. And yet for all this, when interviewed individually, each member of the group had something to say about the lack of cohesion, the haphazard method of making decisions and the tendency of the group to fluctuate between either managing to avoid conflict altogether or to get completely buried in it. The Chief Executive and her group wanted to feel better prepared to face the very many challenges that were soon to be externally imposed.



Through a mixture of one-to-ones and group sessions the team began to get to the root of its problems. Not all realizations were spoken out loud; some were simply demonstrated and highlighted in a session before being resolved in private between individuals.

 

The members of this senior team now share a much greater understanding of one another’s roles, ways of doing things and personalities; as a result, decision-making, whilst not a perfectly smooth process, does happen much more evidently and transparently. Conflict does still occur but without the old brewing-up period which made it so impossible to handle. This group will always suffer from having bombshells thrown in from Head Office but it is now rarely the case that one individual is left to sort out the damage by themselves.