When there’s Trust, Teams Perform

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Trust comes from positive experience when doing things together.

If colleagues are authentic..

If they listen..

If they explain their perspective..

You trust them.

Solve a problem while you build a team

Catalyze Collaboration! workshops and their Metaphor Mapping tools are “serious-fun” and always focused on an issue, whether improving quality, setting a vision or building a strategy.  They encourage people to be open and authentic and team building is always a by-product.  Mapping encourages constructive behaviors that further a group’s objectives. Those behaviors and the resulting group effectiveness are called teamwork.   Trust grows from understanding where your colleagues’ feelings as well as their thoughts about a situation.

If you want to build a team or improve teamwork, select an area critical to their objectives and  build a Village Map of it.  Example areas might be:

  • Show the team in relationship to their environment
  • Identify what groups have a stake in their success?
  • What values guide them?
  • What problems or competitors are they facing?
  • Define the components of their work and how they enter-relate
  • What doesn’t work well, and why?
  • What’s their vision of how they want their work to flow?    Where will the benefits be visible?

You can explore the “soft side” of their interactions and reach group agreement about roles and behaviors, using The Zoo

 – or – plan a project or set of actions, such as how to achieve their vision, with River Mapping

 – or – establish clear responsibilities, with Facecards

Metaphor Mapping’s modules help the group achieve all this, and make it great fun at the same time!

In a metaphor language workshop, all the members are faced with the challenge of thinking in metaphoric terms. They need help from each other to think visually and that makes them interact in large and small ways. Members learn the perspectives of their collaborators and how problems in one part of their work process affects others. By solving problems together, building visions and plans together, they commit to each other and take joint ownership.  When they’ve solved a problem, they’ve become a team.  With Metaphor Mapping, it’s visual, hands-on, fast and fun.

Links for added information:

Developing teams in developing countries

Collaboration in High Performance Teams

Metaphor Mapping and High Performance Teams