Leadership and Team Development

VISTA's high involvement approach is ideal for the development of leadership and teams. We use the notion of transformational leadership as described by James McGregor Burns in his book 'Leadership'.

In our work with leaders we focus on the common issues issues, which prevent them from working as a team. At the forefront of these are the power dynamics of the team, and the team within the organisation. Top teams rarely act as teams. They usually each head up significant teams in their own right. This is because there is always a need to respond to the complexity and responsibility of large organisations by developing specialised areas of responsibility. If we are not careful these differentiations thicken and become private turfs. Territory is divided and the leadership system becomes vulnerable to breakdown around issues of unequal burden, not feeling respected, supported or trusted and struggles about direction and strategy.

We work with leaders to develop share responsibility across the team. This enables them to balance the needs of the leaders as individuals with the need to act and work as one team.

Whether a senior leadership team, or another team in an organisation, our approach to team development is based on the work of Drexler Sibbet.

A typical leadership or team development project might include:-

• A Questionnaire and Interview to encourage reflection and generate a lot of information and ideas related to leadership development and alignment. The patterns from these can then be used to accelerate progress and aid resolution of issues and development of integrated ideas.
• Leadership sessions following the team development stages and incorporating work using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator to explore and understand personal working preferences within the team, identify potential misunderstanding that can occur in the team and understand how to work together using the preferences.
• Individual coaching to consider how individuals interact in the team and how they could make improvements and how they could start to embody the principles and plans agreed at the leadership team into their own work These coaching sessions will be based on action inquiry. It could also include a look at managing ambiguity and the paradoxes of change using 'polarity management'.