Creating a ‘high performing team’

Following a period of transition for Active Lincolnshire including several changes in the operational team and Board, I wanted the support of external expertise to help us on our journey. I approached Human Alchemy to facilitate team ‘away days’ with a brief to support the development of our new team, and embed the Let’s Move Lincolnshire strategy, and our vision and values across the organisation. I also sought the work to engage with the Board to ensure understanding of the strategy and its impact on the direction of Active Lincolnshire.

Our specific requirements were for our small team to be a ‘high performing team’, and for us to spend time together out of the office to explore together what it means to embed the vision, values and strategy across our work. We wanted to define how as a team we make a shared contribution to positive outcomes and to motivate and inspire our workforce.

Human Alchemy provided me with a clearly laid out proposal for how they would help us to achieve these objectives; we sat down and worked through the options and they spent time to get to better know our organisation. The plan was for Human Alchemy to facilitate an initial 2-day workshop, with a follow-up day for the staff team, plus a half day with the Board. We are yet to run the Board development session, but the workshops with the team have been transformational.

The workshops that we held in the wonderful new meeting spaces at Lincoln Cathedral took us through what ‘Extraordinary’ looks like for Active Lincolnshire - and as a result, we often talk about aiming to be in the ‘top right box’. Thanks to the skills of the Human Alchemy facilitators we had two days to remember. With their guidance, and examples of what it means to be a high performing team we have developed a new set of language (we share our ‘background conversations’ and we admit when our ‘bathtubs are full’). This has now become common, understood language and has helped all of us to more comfortably approach topics of discussion between colleagues that can sometimes feel difficult.

Human Alchemy brought a range of useful and relevant tools to help us learn and remember a range of techniques that enable us to work better together. During the workshops, we started to build our own ‘Team Code’ - this is now printed on a t-shirt and framed in our office! It is a reminder of the behaviours we all agreed would help us to be a high performing team. It is a code we choose to work by that aligns with our values and helps drives our work forward.

The content of the Human Alchemy programme stays with you. In fact, 6 months after our workshops, one of the team said to me ‘I really enjoyed that Human Alchemy work’. We use the shared language in our conversations, we revisit the team code and check and challenge our actions against it.

Active Lincolnshire are a strategic organisation, funded by Sport England and the lead for the coordination of physical activity sector in Lincolnshire. Human Alchemy have been a huge part of our transformational and positive change. Their knowledge, content and delivery style is exactly what we needed. They hit our brief and gave us more!

I couldn’t be happier to recommend Human Alchemy as a High Performance leadership consultancy and look forward to working with them again with our Board.