A change programme with IT and Finance people to deliver a vital programme for a large corporate organisation. A regulatory requirement with huge fines and even imprisonment if the programme failed to deliver on time. A group of teams made up of tribes at war with each other in hostile territory, lining up the blame for each other in case it failed, as they thought it would.

I was asked in by a former client who was a senior leader in the organisation to work with the teams to help them get working together and focused, together, on achieving the goal.

I started with interviewing each of the team members individually, and the leaders they worked into. I got a sense of what it felt like to be part of the programme, what the challenges were, including the relationships and the ecosystem within which they worked. There were many themes that came up consistently – lack of respect for the other teams, lack of feeling respected by them, a heightened sense of risk, stress and anxiety. Each team working with highly constrained realities that they couldn’t get across to each other, had given up trying. And no sense of working together to achieve a common goal.

I created an anonymised report which was shared with all of them and their leaders, to summarise the themes and started to prepare for part two.

Part two was to bring the teams together into two workshops. One was a workshop on team performance, empathy and collaboration, framed by the need to deliver and the realities that they had shared in the interviews. Having built strong relationships with them as individuals in the interviews, I was able to act as a bridge for them in the workshops, able to call out shared frustrations and to challenge evenly across the group where it was fair. The second workshop was a business simulation that involved them working together in various roles to deliver customer outcomes – it combined fun with pressure and they forgot the day job as they collaborated to deliver the simulated goals.

The first signs of progress could be seen during the workshops and in the informal time before and afterwards. People on both sides of the divide talking together about how what they were learning and how they could put changes in place to make the team work better together, and to work together to challenge and address the broader issues getting in their way. Even participants who had struggled with talking about the interpersonal, inter-team challenges were able to stay involved and were some of the most active people looking for shared ways of working together.

Afterwards leaders from both parts of the team came back to me, together, to share how much better the team morale, collaboration and progress was after the assignment. They went on to deliver the programme successfully and the client hired me for another transformation assignment soon afterwards.