What pattern does your team need?

What will you include in your next team launch?

What will you fine-tune mid-flight?

Here, red10 ‘s Will Sudworth proposes how teams can increase their effectiveness by “planning flights” that deliver their strategy.

What rhythm does your team need?

What ambition does your team have?

The chances are that this ambition can’t be delivered in just a day or a week. It might take a few months; most likely it will take years.

If delivering that ambition will take a concerted effort over many years, then you’ll improve your chances by breaking up the delivery into manageable blocks. What would work best for your team – perhaps 6, 12, 18 or 24 month stretches?

With our love of plane metaphors in red10 (see why we’re called red10 ), we often describe these blocks of time as ‘flights’ that create a helpful pattern for the team:

  • There’s a launch, where the team take-off
  • There’s a mid-flight fine tuning, where the team check they’re on course
  • There’s a point at which the team comes into land, to debrief, perhaps change crew, and then prepare to take off again

Let’s explore each of these stages in more detail

What will you include in your next team launch?

In red10, we encourage teams to hold a retreat where you can co-create your flight plan. Typically this is a two-day investment, yet there are always ways to tailor to the specific needs.

In terms of content, the most important task is to help the team to co-create a psychologically safe and great climate.

This then allows the team to increase their chances of a great launch, by putting these five conditions in place:

1

Building trust in each other

2

Getting everyone on the same page on where we are now

3

Co-creating the Ambition together that can then act as a North Star 

4

Co-creating the essence of the strategy. Together with Must Win projects, with named owners and plans, that deliver the strategy.
Doing this during the retreat accelerates a team by 2-3 months of otherwise elapsed time 

5

Co-creating ways of working that support all of the above

What will you include in your next mid-flight?

Not everything works to plan – either with people dynamics, or projects.

Mid-flight is the ideal time to find out what is working, and what needs some fine-tuning.

It’s at this point that we like to Take the Team’s Temperature – asking the team to:

  • Give feedback on themselves
  • Inviting the team to celebrate what’s Working Well
  • Enabling the team to co-create their own solutions for Do Differently

Landing and taking off again

And now we repeat – just with very different content.

Each flight the team goes through enables them to be more comfortable with the process and able to focus more on the content.

Might this flight pattern be of use to you? Please get in contact for more information.