If consulting happens outside the work, it stays outside the results.
A lot of team effectiveness work lands well in the room; but fades quickly when the team walks out the door.
The reason is simple: the intervention runs on a parallel track. A deck, a standalone workshop, a tidy model – they’re a brief sojourn, disconnected from the real business of budgets, customers, and hard trade-offs.
If we want change to hold, we have to do the work in the same place the consequences are felt: inside operating rhythms, between teams, and in the grain of day-to-day decisions.
Work in the flow (not around it)
Our model for team work is experiential.
We sit in the meetings where priorities are set and money is allocated.
We watch how decisions actually form, name what’s happening in plain language, and help the group make a choice in the room.
That proximity keeps analysis and action connected. A conversation about “low trust” becomes a decision about ownership, sequencing, or standards that shows up in next week’s plan.
This matters most in the seams.
Performance rarely fails inside a single function; it leaks between functions – in hand-offs, re-litigation, duplicated effort, and slow responses to customers. You only see (and fix) that by working where it happens: “between, not within,” as we frame it in our System of Teams work.
Coaching the spaces between teams is the job, because teams don’t perform in isolation.
“We stopped pushing conflict down and worked it at the top…we became more effective – and the impact showed up for employees and shareholders.”
CEO, Telefonica O2
Action learning: development that moves the work
Action Learning gives leaders repeated practice at judgement, on real issues. Small peer sets meet on a live topic, inquire with discipline, agree a single next step, and reconvene to learn from what happened.
Capability grows because people make choices where their work lives – not in hypotheticals. The common thread is practicality: topics owned by participants; outcomes tied to the operating plan, not to a workshop artefact.
“Practical and engaging. We left more connected, empowered by feedback, and committed to elevating our impact together.”
— Global People Growth & Strategy, Mondelēz
A short example
A product head arrives with a sensible quarterly plan and three “dependencies” on Marketing and Operations. In the usual rhythm, those dependencies are noted and sent offline.
In Action Learning, we keep the group with the issue long enough to decide:
What gives first?
What changes in sequencing?
What do we stop to make room?
One visible commitment exposes the real trade-off and removes a month of quiet re-negotiation.
Use conflict cleanly
Strong teams don’t avoid tension; they contain it and convert it into decision quality. That means naming the choice, stating the trade-off, keeping the debate close to data and customer impact, and closing with a commitment (who does what, by when, and how we’ll know). Done this way, conflict speeds work rather than slowing it. Avoided, it compounds cost.
“Supportive, direct, and appropriately challenging… we ramped up candour and active debate, with impact from the first session and a clear build by the last.”
— Chief Customer Officer, Lloyds Banking Group
The system of teams: where leadership lives
Leadership doesn’t live in one person or one room, it lives in the system; in the interfaces where strategies meet and break.
Our System of Teams work focuses on those interfaces: strengthening the seams, building fluid leadership across boundaries, and developing followership that can align behind decisions beyond one’s own remit.
We design multi-team, multi-month work that makes collaboration visible (often using a light pulse to track progress) and we run focused cross-team workshops on real value-stream issues so leaders learn while they deliver. The outcome is sustained systemic capability, not a short-term spike.
“Ten senior teams moved from protection to shared purpose… a cultural shift from ‘me and mine’ to ‘us and ours’.”
— Senior Executive, Lloyds Banking Group
What changes when you embed the work
When consulting stays close to the work – experiential sessions, Action Learning habits, and system-of-teams focus – a few patterns show up consistently:
- Fewer parked items; fewer repeat debates. Because the decision is made where the dependencies meet.
- Cleaner hand-offs. Because ownership and sequencing are adjusted in the room, not weeks later by email.
- Decisions where they belong — between teams. Because horizontal work is treated as the unit of delivery, not an afterthought.
- Leaders who get better at inquiry, choice and follow-through. Because they practise in context, not in simulations.
“Operating rhythms that led to a more highly functioning top team week to week… a better leader through the process.”
— President & CEO, Aderant
Why this sticks
It’s not the tools – it’s proximity. By keeping interventions inside the business cadence, you collapse the gap between “what we noticed” and “what we’ll do”. You shorten presentations and lengthen time on two or three enterprise issues that cut across functions. You make visible, cross-team commitments small enough to track, and important enough to review. Over time, the language changes, then the rhythm, then the results.
“Fresh thinking, commercial focus, and an open style of facilitation… high-impact experience.”
— Global Head of Leadership & Team Development, Vodafone
Bottom line: analysis builds shared reality; decisions change performance.
If you want team-effectiveness work to last, run it where next week’s plan is made, coach the spaces between teams, give leaders practice on live issues, and handle conflict cleanly enough to close. The rest is theatre.
To learn more about making team development work stick, sign up to our monthly bulletin below – or check out our work with teams here.
