Building Extraordinary Teams

Great teams don't happen by accident.

The Problem

Organisational performance hinges on team performance. Yet the natural state of a team is dysfunction.

Left alone, even a group of talented, well-meaning individuals will drift there, pulled apart by competing priorities, unspoken tension and the simple gravity of everyone focusing on their own patch. Talent alone does not make a team.

The Insight

The best teams do not leave it to chance. They deliberately work on the team, not just as a team, investing in both the Results they deliver and the Relationships that carry them. Do that and the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts, by some margin. Few teams reach that altitude and fewer still hold it, but it can be built on purpose. Michelle Rushton and Shaun Kenny, founders of People of Influence, have helped hundreds of teams level up their performance. We call this Building Extraordinary Teams.

The Program

In the Building Extraordinary Teams Workshop, leaders learn the science-backed principles and repeatable practices they can put to work so their teams become genuinely high performing. The foundational framework is the Extraordinary Teams Model.

Watch
Shaun and Michelle on Building Extraordinary Teams.
What is an Extraordinary Team?

Over more than a decade working with hundreds of teams and thousands of team data points, Shaun Kenny and Michelle Rushton have learned what separates extraordinary teams from the rest. It comes down to two things working together.

Relationships, built on trust and candour. And Results, driven by alignment and execution. Deepen both, and a team becomes extraordinary.

Why Relationships and Results?

Relationships and Results each matter, but on their own neither is enough. A team high in Relationships but low in Results is comfortable but does not deliver. A team high in Results but low in Relationships delivers for a while, until trust frays and performance follows.

Only when a team has both does it become extraordinary, deeply connected and consistently delivering.

The goal is the top right: deep relationships and strong results. That is an Extraordinary Team, and it can be built.

Key Outcomes

What your leaders and teams walk away with

01
Know what great looks like
A shared picture of what an extraordinary team really is, understanding the depth behind our Building Extraordinary Teams Model.
02
See where the team stands today
The Building Extraordinary Teams Diagnostic gives the team one shared, evidence-based picture of its current performance, from every member's perspective.
03
Strategies they can use immediately
Practical, repeatable practices to deepen trust and candour and to sharpen alignment and execution.
04
A toolkit and an action plan
Each participant receives a Takeaway Toolkit, plus the team's action plan built in the session, owned by the leader and the team.
05
Nudges that reinforce over time
Behavioural nudges delivered to every team member to reinforce the new behaviours and track progress over the months that follow.
The Diagnostic

The Building Extraordinary Teams Diagnostic

Pair the workshop with our validated diagnostic. Like a 360 on the team itself, every member and the leader answers, producing one shared, collective profile across Trust, Candour, Alignment and Execution.

The Team's Report
A detailed picture of the team's current state, the gap to great, and the priority areas to work on together.
The Leader's Report
A separate report for the team leader, with insight into their own leadership behaviours and how to lead the improvements.
See the Diagnostic →
The Building Extraordinary Teams Diagnostic report shown on a laptop
Session Flow

How the session unfolds

These are the elements for a full day session. Shorter sessions won't include every element.

1
A Team Challenge
True to our experiential approach to learning, we begin with a team-based simulation. Whichever team of 3 people that finishes the task first wins. High energy, competitive, collaborative.
2
Why build an Extraordinary Team?
In the debrief to the exercise we first grasp why an extraordinary team is so important, what separates an extraordinary team from a group of extraordinary individuals, and why so few teams reach that altitude.
3
How do we build an Extraordinary Team?
As part of the debrief we unpack The Extraordinary Teams Model in detail, Relationships (Trust and Candour) and Results (Alignment and Execution), and the science behind them.
4
Hold up the mirror
The team sees its current profile through the Building Extraordinary Teams Diagnostic: one shared, honest picture drawn from every member. The organisation's Dashboard shows patterns across your teams.
5
Trusting Relationships Workshop
We learn and practise the 4 elements of the trusting relationships formula.
6
Cultivating Candour Workshop
We learn and practise the four steps of creating a culture of candour and psychological safety.
7
Alignment Workshop
We learn how to get aligned on the Why, the What and the How for a team.
8
Execution Excellence Workshop
Practical, repeatable practices to drive results together.
9
Make it real
The team commits to a prioritised plan for the specific shifts that will move it towards extraordinary.
10
Embedding
Over the following weeks to months: behavioural nudges, facilitated peer group coaching, individual coaching - a range of options depending on the engagement.
Format & Delivery

Shaped around your context

Duration
Half day or full day
Delivery
In person or virtual
Audience
Intact teams: executive, leadership, functional or operational
Two ways to work with us

People of Influence is the consultancy through which Michelle Rushton and Shaun Kenny deliver leadership programs, team offsites and impactful conferences.

Contact People of Influence →

Leadership Engine is our proprietary platform for measuring and improving leadership effectiveness with diagnostics, dashboards and behavioural nudges.

Visit Leadership Engine →