Most teams are in fact TINO’s (Team In Name Only). You don’t want this to be you. And most people in teams aren’t crystal clear as to how their role and key deliverables ladder up to something more significant than what they can achieve through their own efforts. You don’t want this either.

Team Trademarks emanate from the world of elite sport, an arena in which performance science is constantly evolving. In these high performance environments, teams and their coaching staff co-create a ‘trademark’ (or similar) - the articulation of a clear ambition and series of behavioural commitments they make for themselves and each other. Which then becomes a ‘stamp’ or ‘seal of approval’ - a means by which the team and all the players and coaching staff can hold each other to account.

We have been facilitating workshops using the Pigs Can Fly Too Team Trademark construct with clients for c.20 years now. It works as well today as it ever has. It’s a simple framework, posing simple questions, that are oftentimes very difficult to answer. You don’t get to nail down super important thinking on behalf of your business, function or team, easily.

We facilitate highly participative and interactive Trademark workshops to shine a light on the why, how and what of a business, function or team, including a commitment to the right values and practices (aka behaviours) to be lived and breathed by everyone, every day.

Your Trademark then acts as a ‘stamp’ that defines why you exist, what you stand for, what tasks you’re focused on, and how you’ll realise all of this via how you show up. Getting your team to design this helps to create unity, community and resilience, along with a focus on the business-critical priorities that will help you realise your ambitions over the next 1-3 years.

We always try to underpin the high-performance work that we do with data, to help create objective understanding, insight and tracking of progress, which in turn enables coaching to happen with pinpoint accuracy.

Teams- We use a world-class tool with our clients to help instil objectivity into what is often a subjective matter - the development of a high performing team. Squadify is a real-time high-performance team diagnostic tool, that allows us to measure and track how teams (squads) perform over time.

The focus is on the 3C’s (Clarity, Climate & Competence) and six Dynamics (trust, psychological safety, team forming, innovation, engagement and execution) of performance.

The data helps us to elicit action-oriented insights i.e., to coach with pinpoint accuracy. Best practice is to run a Squadify survey every 2 months, with un-metered coaching for both the squad leader and the squad, after each survey report has been generated.

Individuals- For Executive Coaching to succeed, the first step is for the coaching counterpart (coachee) to find the right coach to work with.

So, our first step is to hold a traffic light matching conversation, to ensure that both parties have a strong sense they can do awesome work together - that both parties are ‘green to go’.

We then create a ‘coaching contract’ - a triangulated brief that is written by the coachee and their sponsor(s), and then shared with the coach. Where possible, data points from 360’s and / or profiling tools will be added into the brief, to bring objectivity to personal insight and awareness.

Coaching then commences, using either a traditional approach, with sessions taking place every 3-4 weeks, or an ‘always on’ approach, where, in addition to these diarised sessions, the coach is also available to the coachee at all times.

Because leadership is all about role modelling the right behaviours, we build leadership capability programmes around the gold-standard Robert Dilts’ behavioural model.

We explore:

• The environmental factors (macro and micro, situational and personal) that impact how you show up

• What your purpose is as a leader

• Your identity

• Your core values, beliefs & attitudes

• Developing core leadership skills, with a heavy leaning to ‘leader as coach’ , plus giving and receiving feedback and delegation

Whole Brain Technology (HBDI profiling), helps us to assess individual and team-based thinking & communication preferences and competencies, including when working under pressure. This profiling tool is a brilliant way to create a short cut language for all of your people, helping you to engage with each other with greater empathy, the #1 requirement of leadership today, and critical to high performance.

How your people think and communicate will equate to the means by which you can enjoy efficient and effective ways of working. Using this tool can help you to do this with real confidence, because it’s based on brain science. We can look at both individuals’ and teams’ profiles, to elicit key insights to help reinforce the things that you do that are working, as well as to make changes where we identify the need to do certain things differently.

Having ‘leader as coach’ as a foundation set of skills, means that we will grow bench strength while helping all of your people to realise their potential. As Simon Sinek says, “Our job as leaders is not so much to be in charge (aka management), as to look after those who are in our charge (aka leadership)”.

We usually design Leadership Programmes to extend over a 6-month period, with a combination of group work, follow up workshops to test real world application of key principles and models, and one-on-one coaching.

Coaching triangles, where the participants support each other outside of these workshops, also helps to embed learnings and create accountability from within the group, in so doing contributing towards learning that sticks.

• Pitching to win - Adopting the ‘who/what/how’ approach to pitching, we work alongside you from the moment a RFP is received, through to the final pitch meeting and beyond. We work to the truths that most pitches are won before the pitch actually happens - and that people buy people, as much as they buy products or services.

• Presenting with impact - Bringing a combination of your authentic self, with building a narrative using our 9-box planning methodology, you’ll learn how to plan and deliver presentations/meetings with real impact. We only ask you to work on real world content. And video recordings will give you additional insights to work on.

• Strategic value selling & client engagement - We help you to shift from transactional to consultative selling, by honing your meeting management and questioning skills. You’ll learn to change your self-talk around selling being a dirty word, into embracing it as an enjoyable, constant part of your role. And to refine your perspective on what a client actually is and what they need.

• Purposeful creativity - Using the Systematic inventive Thinking (SIT) Toolbox, we work with you in honing your problem identification and articulation skills (a problem well stated is a problem half solved), right through to a series of idea generation techniques first used by Russian nuclear physicists as they tried to solve chaos theory! We’ll focus on your current real-world problems, not hypotheticals.

The first part of the word facilitation is ‘facile’, which translates, in French, as ‘easy’. Our job as a workshop facilitator is to make the journey of an offsite an easy one for all participants to follow. We go where the group and the conversation needs to go, not where we want the conversation to go.

We bring energy, organisation and consultative provocation to the craft of facilitation, working closely with you in designing the pre work, workshop agenda, and follow up work required to ensure the investment you make in taking your team out of the business for a day or more, pays back handsomely.

The typical workshops we are asked to facilitate include:

• Board / Executive Team retreats

• Designing Team Trademarks

• Strategic planning sessions

• Building high performance behaviours