Team Stories

Crafting a team culture in a scientific organisation

Overview 

Significant changes in a scientific regulatory agency required the development of more agile and interconnected teams. The team development work was in part driven by a lack of clarity and performance between two key scientific assessment and regulatory teams.

To address this ‘performance roadblock’ the work included defining how the teams worked together, with a focus on roles, responsibilities and expectations. A key outcome from the work  involved the teams co-designing and agreeing a service level agreement that defined what each team needed to deliver to whom, and by when, to ensure shared high performance.

The end result was improved performance built on more agile and connected relationship between key leaders and their teams.

The Program

Stage One: Co-design the culture

This component was aimed at building relationships that were built on trust and shared understanding. This team formation work is important to fundamentally agree what they  stand for and ways of working together that can help achieve that vision. By identifying the most important values and underpinning behaviours the teams can begin to shape and commit to ways of working together to achieve the desired performance agreements.

Stage Two: Working Together

Now we know who we are and how we can best work together. What do we need to do?

This is where understanding the ‘whole system’ becomes important. By seeing the whole systems and identifying the various dependencies and interdependencies between the teams it is possible to better understand the ‘flow of work’. How the services and products get developed and transition through the organisation. This can provide the backdrop to fully understanding the service and product relationships between the teams. The end outcome from this process can be the development of a service level agreement. Essentially this translates as to ‘who needs to do what for whom, to what standard and  by when’. The end outcome is to ensure that expectations from all sides are clearly understood and agreed. There is also a body of work here that needs to explore the impacts and ways of resolving unmet expectations. What do we do if a team or individual doesn’t meet their agreed level of service? Essentially this is focused on dealing with the ‘tough stuff’, dealing with conflicts and learning from mistakes.