Acceleration through Team Coaching
Concurrent with the listening sessions and initial survey, an ambitious series of Team Advantage™ programs (referred to as “games” because of the team bonding focus common to sports) were being conducted throughout the enterprise. Team Advantage™ is a 16-week team coaching process that accelerates team cohesiveness and performance by establishing team charters, setting an extraordinary but tangible business goal, coaching through breakdowns and team dynamics and celebrating success.
While all of Sanofi’s strategic imperatives were positively influenced by the coaching initiative, the one most impacted was, “Energize our People and Culture.” Specifically, this included:
1. Enable employees to problem solve, innovate and continuously improve;
2. Build employees’ change agility and energize the culture by simplifying processes and engaging employees; and
3. Raise the leadership capability and expectation across the organization to demonstrate the behaviors and values deemed critical to the company’s success.
More than 60 Team Advantage™ games were conducted throughout the enterprise in the first year, directly impacting an estimated 25% of the workforce and indirectly impacting many more as energized teammates spread the word about the shifts they were making. While invigorating the participants, this coaching initiative helped employees build the skills to more effectively problem solve, work as a team toward innovative and farreaching goals, and communicate and collaborate across work groups and departments. With a new confidence gained by this positive experience and in a spirit of continuous improvement, employees spoke out to identify processes that needed to be simplified, revised or repurposed.
This experience, combined with the process changes and new leader visibility, had the effect of accelerating change because multiple teams were being equipped with the skills needed to achieve their aggressive business goals. Individual participants modeled the core competencies that were foundational to build the coaching skills for each team leader through the team coaching experience. This layering of experiential learning accelerated the desired organizational changes, which were confirmed by the second survey results.
Download Article 1K Club
