The art of building better Teams.
There´s no magic formula. Every person and team has different talents and is currently living in a particular emotional state based on assessments that can take the team to a better place or limit their development.
As an experienced executive, coach and facilitator I have worked with hundreds of people and multiple teams.
Case Study – Superior Brand losing Market-Share
This example illustrates how an approach focused on the team, before jumping into action plans mode, can transform the way we see things and lead to true innovation and significant impact.
A few years ago, I was working with the marketing team responsible for an innovative product for a specific type of cancer. The brand was highly innovative, with better efficacy and fewer side effects compared to traditional chemotherapies. The expectations of the leadership were enormous, but the company was losing market share to the competitor. On the eve of presenting the business plan to the president, we had a meeting with the whole team. The stress in the air was clear. It felt like a black cloud was hanging over us.
After a brief opening by the team leader, several participants began to pour over ideas about what the team had to do differently, to beat the competition: create a new marketing campaign, distribute more product samples to healthcare providers, expand the number of sales representatives, change the promotional messages or, finally, simply start from scratch, relaunching the brand into the market.
THE TEAM WAS doing what everyone does in the corporate world in high-pressure situations:
rushing to change the action plan in the hope of achieving different results.
Based on these observations, I provided a reflection exercise. Each individual was allocated time to reflect on the following questions:
- How much do we believe in our product? Do we really think we’re better than the competition? Why yes? Why not?
- How are we being perceived by the company’s sales team? After all, it’s them, the salespeople, who are on the front lines, trying to convince doctors to prescribe our product. Do they believe in us? Do they believe in our strategy and action plans?
- Are we collaborating with other internal teams (sales, medical, access, global) to beat the competition?
The meeting moved in this direction. We had an honest discussion about these questions for about 30 minutes and then resumed the discussion about which type of action plan was needed to beat the competition. The quality of this new plan was much better. Instead of reinventing the wheel, the team opted for reinforcing the qualities of the current plan and pay more attention to other aspects that were being ignored: the quality of the communication with the sales team, the level of trust in the brand and how to make the collaboration with other areas more effective.
As a result, and having the leadership commitment to create space for these honest and deep discussions on a monthly basis, the brand performance returned to growth in the following quarters.
One of the key lessons here is that when we recognize and allow space to discuss how the team is observing a particular situation (observation being defined as beliefs, emotions and engagement), the action plans generated will be much more effective and will lead to better results.
Want to talk and discuss your team needs? Feel free to contact me here.
