TEAM PERFORMANCE

It seems that everybody these days claims to be an expert on leadership and team development. Why choose me and my colleagues to help you develop your own leadership capacity or the effectiveness of your team?

That depends upon what you need. Is the issue one of building the capacity and effectiveness of your team, skill development, clarifying priorities, improving decision making, dealing with change, interpersonal effectiveness, following through on commitments, or something else? Or some combination of these? Click here to identify and assess your needs using our Performance Leadership Audit.

These are some of the benefits you can expect from working with me at Ascendo Consulting.

For Individual Leaders:

• Greater understanding of your strengths, limitations, motivation and operating style;
• Clarity about what is most important to you;
• Increased capability to understand and interact with others;
• Effective decision making and problem solving;
• Strategy-focused action that is aligned with what is most important.

For Teams:

You are not a leader in a void. You are a leader in the context of teams: the teams of which you are a member and the team which you lead. Here is what I can do to assist your teams:

• A Strategy-Focused approach that addresses individual needs and values in the context of organizational reality;
• Effective use of the organization’s power, accountability, authority and responsibility to motivate individual change and support leaders as the team members apply what they learn;
• Clearer alignment between what is important to the organization and what is important to the team;
• Teams that are focused, aligned in their efforts, and effective in their communication.

How is this done?
My emphasis is always on addressing your needs in the context of your work. One size definitely does not fit all! Coaching, consulting, training and facilitation are approaches that can be used, as needed. Click here to see an outline of these services.

Leaders wanting individual coaching or training work directly with me in a program that we design together to accomplish what you want. Coaching over a period of time (e.g. three months) is usually needed in order to accomplish significant change.   Coaching sessions can be carried out in person and/or by telephone and are generally held once a week. They can be longer sessions of approximately an hour, especially near the beginning of the coaching program, or as short as 15 minutes, as needed.

To address the needs of organizations, I work with my colleague, Janice Calnan, to assess your needs, design a package of services that address these needs and deliver the program that you want. The program may include facilitation and consulting along with coaching. When the scope of the project warrants it, we can draw upon the services of other colleagues who have been trained specifically to work with leaders in a business or organizational context and are experienced in doing so.

CLIENT TESTIMONIALS

A small team in our Sector prepared a session (a retreat) to begin addressing communications issues in our larger team, which had recently gone through a significant change with new members and activities. Our objective was to have all the members of the larger team learn more about each other and about themselves as individuals and in relation to the larger team. Lee Wallace provided the perfect structure and tools to undertake this task. The tools Lee Wallace brought provided an excellent springboard for discussion about how we operate as a team now, and how we would like to improve that in future. Thanks to Lee Wallace and his creative and diplomatic running of our retreat, we now have a simple, working document that is the foundation for our new principles for communication and collaboration in our team. He was flexible, knowledgeable and very professional. Our management team commented that it was one of the best retreats they had participated in.

Karen M. Zarrouki

Senior Policy Analyst, Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat