Strategy Execution Playbook

Introduction

Strategy Execution Playbook

A healthy team dynamic is crucial to high performance; it allows team members to make effective use of their time, be truly engaged creatively and, therefore, find optimal solutions to problems [111] 6 . IMD’s Professor Ina Toegel suggests that you can enhance your team members’ selfawareness and foster trust with teams by focusing on the following: • Feedback. Members (including the initiative/ group leader) are comfortable giving and taking feedback from each other, and they do so in a predefined, consistent and regular fashion. When teams institute regular weekly or monthly feedback sessions, members become more skilled at formulating and receiving feedback. • Check-in and check-out. High-performance teams begin and end their meetings with a discussion about their relationships. A “checkin” is a short sharing of feelings, with each member sharing positive or negative sentiments, such as: “I worry about this deal because …” “I was anxious last week because …” or “I feel relieved because ….” A ”checkout” might revolve around questions, such as: ”How satisfied are we with this meeting?” ”How well did we listen to each other?” and ”To what extent did we resolve the tensions in the room?” It is the team leader’s task to role model that it is safe to share such sentiments, as long as they are constructively phrased. Both the checkin and the checkout provide an opportunity for team members to share positive emotions or unburden some frustrations. When negative emotions are not verbalized, they tend to build up and, therefore, magnify tensions in a team and decrease productivity. Members are encouraged to speak up to test assumptions about issues under discussion.

• Creating psychological safety to foster innovation. Paying attention to team relationships is important not only for productivity and efficiency, but also for innovation. Team members who feel safe and supported by the team are not afraid of making a mistake, and they feel greater freedom to experiment. Psychological safety is the difference between traditional efficiency-focused organizations and more innovative learning-focused companies. Conversations that enhance empathy and engagement within the team have a positive effect on the bottom line.

6 IMD. Ina Toegel, Top 6 tips to create a highperformance team and better collaboration. https://www.imd.org/research-knowledge/leadership/articles/how-to-create-a-high-performance-team/ (visited on 06/23/2022)

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