High performing teams in STEM, Biotech and Pharma

The verb ‘to team’
team. /tiːm/
verb
gerund or present participle: teaming

1. come together as a team to achieve a common goal.

Dynamic ‘teaming’ is one of the ways to really propel an organisation onwards and upwards. The better that groups can team and re-team as they reorganise, the better they can deliver top performance. The more they can work in trust, the better they can solve the big problems. And in shock news, teams who work in high trust, alignment and psychological safety describe a happier, more sustainable, healthy world too. Teams who gather for coaching which is focused on the team itself, rather than the task in hand, will become more aware of the dynamics, the objectives and systems at play. In times of crisis and long term disruption (like every day now, for example) a team needs to stop and think together, if it’s going to keep delivering and innovating throughout.

When the team isn’t aligned

Great external team coaching and facilitation can lead to faster, clearer and safer team formation and acceleration. Reaching the optimal environment where even positive conflict can exist safely, is one of the aims of the experienced Team Coach: support and challenge in perfect balance. Each character is welcome in the team, with a clear and unique role in the team. Trust grows and the team can progress towards its purpose, with agility and sustainablity.

Choose with confidence

If you are an L&OD Leader, an HRD or a Head of People, looking to find a coaching team to work with your senior leaders, we understand the huge sense of responsibility and pressure around that. Talk to us and we’ll help you explore options.

Building High Performing Teams

    The most common requests we get in 2020-2021 are:
  • Bringing a team together to think, solve problems and mindfully navigate the recent global challenges
  • Aligning behind a team purpose, mission and charter
  • Exploring potential dysfunctions in the team
  • Improving communication between different personality types or business areas
  • Building a high performing team journey
  • New leader assimilation
  • Building a coaching culture at the top

Are we the team for you?

    If you are:
  • Aiming to build agile teams
  • Looking to support your team’s resilience, connection and reflection
  • Bringing your senior leaders together to solve the big problems
  • Focused on accelerating performance as teams form and re-form
  • Seeking a partner to work with you from the board to the aspiring leaders
  • Supporting leaders through transition and transformation

3 ways…

We work with teams as follows:

121 Coaching for
Leaders in STEM, Biotech & Pharma

Flexible virtual and face to face coaching programmes for senior leaders.

    General programmes as well as specialist programmes including:
  • Route to CTO
  • Route to CSO
  • Maternity Leave Return
  • First 100 Days

Clearworks Coaching Circles

Semi-structured, affordable group coaching programmes to support and challenge leaders in STEM: “The six by six”: Six leaders, six months, one specialist coach.

Early STEM Career Development Programme

Leadership development for new and aspiring leaders in STEM on the specialist Lab To Leadership™ Programme.


Recent examples

Aligning as a new team

A new team in the vaccine sector had been formed from a group of seven scientists working in different geographies and disease areas. They were all high performers but hadn’t felt any benefit from coming together as a team to operate. We worked with them to explore what makes their team a team: What would the difference be if they worked as a team rather than a group of experts who happen to have the same boss? We worked to help them establish the team’s shared vision and purpose, before moving into individual working styles and preferences. As trust began to build, so did the big conversations. Alignment on ways of working, was built quickly from there.

A team leading the change

A small biotech was hitting the big time as their product successfully came to market. The mindsets and behaviours of a research organisation would no longer suffice as the commercial sales world beckoned. The top team was aware that leading the organisation through a full culture transformation would need to come from the top down, and they did not feel ready as a team. We put in a place a 90-day accelerated team coaching programme combining 121 and team coaching to achieve clear, agreed behaviour change. Moving from ‘this’ to ‘that’ as a clear set of aspirations. Moving from ‘closed to new ideas’ to ‘inviting new ideas every day’; from ‘suspicious between sciences’ to ‘all for one’. The team learned to model and demonstrate the new ways of being to their teams, in order for the whole organisation to change direction more quickly.

Too lovey dovey

We were asked to work with an established team who described themselves as ‘fairly high performing”. The team got along well and respect between them was high. A diagnostic process led to the realisation that the team never indulged in more challenging conversations or positive conflict, as every team member feared upsetting the happy atmosphere. Coaching enabled the group to establish boundaries, hopes and fears, and to recognise that fear of conflict had become a risk. Every leader committed to the culture shift within the team and we worked with them individually and as a team to make the changes needed. We worked with them for six months, returning to this topic often. They now operate in a high support/high challenge culture and are reaping rewards from the new way of working.

Getting on each other’s nerves

A group of leaders had deteriorated into mis-communication and irritation. Everyone had become locked into their own way of seeing the world and silos were stuck fast. The difference in specialities, languages and working styles was making things worse, though the purpose of the team remained critically important. We invited the team to participate in a Facet 5 Teamscape™, where each leader completes a personality preference assessment to raise self-awareness. Next we brought the team together to build understanding of how others like and don’t like to work: Raising the awareness of others. Seeing the world through a different lens was a turn key in helping this team operate more effectively and a fantastic way to accelerate team performance.