The CCS Ideal Team and GROW

Guest Blog by Glen McKernan, Director GM Growth Consulting

I recently facilitated a session with a senior leadership team using the CCS Ideal Team process paired with a group GROW conversation.

I found the use of the CCS cards to be very valuable as it allowed the leaders to speak more freely about the key ingredients that they believed make up the ideal team. In some instances the cards served a dual purpose: they gave participants a way to identify what ingredients they believed may be missing from the current team and an area for improvement.

Something about you
To start the session I used the Something about you ice breaker activity — each person goes through their vision pack and finds one card that is a springboard to describe something about themselves that no-one else in the room is likely to know. As a relatively new team this worked really well as there were plenty of life achievements that people did not know about one another and I can still see the smiles on peoples faces when they were talking about their life events or moments.

I then transitioned to the ‘Ideal Team’ part of the session asking everyone to think of time when they believed they were part of an excellent team and to choose 5 cards that best describe the elements of this excellent team experience. Using key open questions as they searched the vision decks assisted their thinking to focus on the constructive ‘behaviours’ of the team as opposed to ‘what’ the team was actually doing. Questions like: ‘Think about how you behaved? How did you feel? How did others behave? How did you communicate with each other? What did you like about being in that team? What happened when you gathered together? How did the team work together? How did you treat each other? What was good about the team?’

We then broke into a pairs activity where everyone shared their thoughts on the 5 cards chosen, followed by an all-in activity where each individual shares their thoughts back to whole group.

Very powerful to see at this stage that people have had a diversity of different ideal team experiences but there are some very common themes or key ingredients across all people.

Moving into the close out phase I had the team break into two groups of four, and work together to “Choose 4 cards that you believe, as a group, best represent the ideal team that you would like to be, in the present day and into the future”. Once they had selected their top 4 cards, the teams used the CCS stickers and a template to clearly record what each card meant to their group.

Each group then played back to the whole team about their group’s choices, while and I as facilitator scribed the key elements on a flip chart to represent their ideal team.

As icing on the cake, I then used the agreed elements from the 4 card ideal team feedback and facilitated the team through a group GROW conversation to have the team collectively agree on a few options and actions that they would commit to implementing to keep the momentum and move them towards being the ideal team.

Overall for me as a facilitator, I like the flexibility of the CCS cards and the different ways they can be used to suit the challenges you are helping others find solutions to and also to own those solutions.

People always respond positively to the cards and the volume and excitement you witness when the cards are produced is always a high point in my sessions.