“It’s given me a whole new way to think about my career in the arts”
Online Coaching Session using the Team Leader View Assessment to give the coaching conversation a clear direction and purpose
David works in Arts administration in Asia, leading a team of around 20 people. While his responsibilities are mostly pastoral towards the theatre’s performers, he also often found himself in a position of devising policies.
When he worked with Grow Better Together, he was looking for ways to improve upon what he felt was a failure of communication within the organisation. He felt that the team was suffering from a lack of effective collaboration, with members working in their own limited areas, leading to a reliance on short-term thinking and firefighting.
While the team was enthusiastic, clear on its common goals and still achieving results, David felt that working processes were taking a lot longer than they should have and were unnecessarily fraught with tension, with team members sometimes getting overly defensive in response to feedback or criticism.
Working with Gen, from a first set of questions aimed at understanding the team’s current strengths and weaknesses, seeing the team as a system and understanding how that system responded collectively to different situations, David says he immediately began to see these issues in a different light.
“It made me think of other people’s perspectives in a way I hadn’t before. Even though I’m constantly asking myself ‘what is this person thinking and how can I best support them’, this approach helped me to see it in a fuller dimension than I normally would have,” David says.
“Nobody normally asks you these questions; we don’t have an HR department, so simply having those questions in front of me felt like having the full support of an HR professional.”
With a diagnostic approach to outlining areas where his team, and his own performance as a leader, were at their strongest and in which aspects they were most in need of improvement, David began to reflect on ways to leverage the strengths to improve upon the weaknesses.
He began to consider how the team’s tremendous enthusiasm and optimism, coupled with its inherent curiosity and creativity, could be drawn upon to drive flexibility and change, coming up with new solutions to achieve results and finding innovative ways to approach feedback, ease tensions, and recognise and celebrate the team and its results.
The process helped him uncover his own perspective in relation to that of his team, and to consider how to best bring them together to achieve results.
“The value of this process is huge: it’s a great opportunity to begin resetting and thinking about my own perceptions. I love that it’s given me a whole new way to think about things, and I’m excited to begin putting those thought processes into action. I immediately began thinking about how valuable this would be for the rest of my team. Just using this vocabulary can plant questions in people’s minds, which can then be nurtured into positive change. The biggest block for me has been feeling that implementing change isn’t something that would be welcome; this has made me realise that, while I can’t steamroll anything, there are things I can do to stimulate change just by incorporating them into my own working practice.”