Solving Performance Issues in Real Time

When leaders find ways to integrate skill-building into their team’s real-time work, everyone can benefit from instant improvements in team collaboration, accountability, and strategic alignment—as well as achieve key business objectives.
But what’s the key to generating an immediate, measurable impact on your team’s effectiveness and overall business performance? It starts with learning how leadership team coaching can leverage experiential learning to solve performance challenges in real time.

Bright Arrow’s CEO Tegan Trovato was featured in a recent webinar that discussed the best strategies, tactics, and tools to achieve these desired goals.

You can check out highlights of the webinar below, which is now on demand.

Understand the Power of Experiential Learning

Experiential learning involves embedding leadership development into daily tasks, which creates fast improvements in team dynamics and business outcomes. The value of leveraging experiential learning with executives is that it allows teams to use real-world scenarios for learning. “It allows us to learn through doing,” Tegan explained.

For example, a C-suite team can learn through attending a class or through asynchronous learning online—but learning by doing is often the most impactful way to learn at certain points in our career. “We don’t have a ton of time as senior leaders to be in a classroom environment or offline,” she said. “So the ability to solve real problems and learn while we do that and apply that in business is really important.”

At its core, experiential learning allows you to either use real-world problems or similar conundrums that you’re trying to solve as a leader. You can do this by creating hypothetical scenarios that you or your team will likely face, running through them in real time and asking the right questions to learn in advance of having to deliver on particular challenges.

Tegan shared an example of this practice in action for an executive team: imagining that their company is facing a cybersecurity attack and proactively thinking through their options. “What would we do? Who would we have in the room? Who would we call? And what do we learn in advance of that actually happening by running through that scenario in real time together, really using the tools we have at our disposal to test it out and see what we can learn before we face the thing head on?” she said.

A key piece of the experiential learning process is ensuring that it incorporates real-world observation and reflection. As you review the details of that experimentation, think about what the team learned and what you as a leader want to make sure to apply going forward. “You get to come up with new ideas on the fly and really connect them to broader components of the organization’s challenges—and it gives you active experimentation opportunities,” Tegan said.

Enhance Team Accountability and Alignment

Another critical component of experiential learning and solving performance issues in real time is discovering strategies for improving your leadership team’s accountability, ensuring you have alignment around strategic goals. This requires designating clear accountability structures and checking that they’re aligned to team goals.

“So for example, if we were to think about creating accountability structures as an experiential learning exercise, you need to get the teams clear first on: what do we deliver together? Let’s learn about what is uniquely ours to deliver for the organization, and then who does what on the team?” Tegan explained.

To do this successfully, you can leverage the RACI Model, which helps leaders walk their teams through who should be responsible, accountable, consulted, or informed in different projects.

Let’s continue with the example of the executive team that’s running a scenario for experiential learning in which the company has experienced a cybersecurity attack. Leaders could use the RACI model to set out all the responsibilities that they need to cover as an executive team when they face a situation like this, specifying who is responsible for each of them, who is accountable, who is consulted, and who is informed.

“If you think about this, then you’ve got your playbook,” Tegan said. “So you’re not yet as a team under any kind of attack here. But in case that happens, you have your playbook ready to plug and go, and you will have already learned in advance of that scenario happening what each person needs to do, how the team needs to be ready to act, and when they need to be able to act.”

Create a Clear Communication Strategy

Experiential learning can be applied to leadership teams to drive skill development while they work on critical initiatives and foster real-time leadership growth. But in order for a team to learn together, they also need to be able to rely on a leader’s clear communication strategy.

Tegan emphasized that healthy agendas are the number-one consideration in your communication strategy. “We have seen so many versions of agendas when we come in to work with executive teams,” she said. “Many of them are highly tactical. There’s not a ton of time spent on the strategic. And often what we have to remind the team of is that anything on their agenda should track back to a measurable result.”

She noted that when working with leaders, Bright Arrow coaches may use agenda design as experiential learning, creating a hypothetical scenario for the team based on a potential upcoming challenge. “We ask the executive team or senior leadership team, ‘What is it that you need to be talking about every week in order to be successful in this scenario?’ and have the team create an agenda that reflects what they intend to do over the next several weeks—or if it’s more urgent, in a shorter time window—and to really draft that agenda and discuss what they learned from putting that together and being prepared for the future,” Tegan said.

Another simple and impactful tool that Bright Arrow coaches often use is helping teams communicate first about who they are and what their group experience is together, reflecting on the current state. She suggests bringing your team together and asking these four questions while documenting the answers:

• What do we need to learn as a team?
• What have we learned by reflecting together in our experience as a team—in other words, what do we like and what do we long for when we work together and how we deliver on our work?
• What have we learned?
• What is lacking?”

Any “longed-for” areas that the team identifies—what they feel they are missing in their work as a teammate—should become action items. “It becomes the roadmap for what your team either needs to build or learn or grow in together,” Tegan said.

Results in Action

Case studies can show firsthand how leadership teams have improved performance and cohesion through experiential learning. Tegan next shared a case study of a Bright Arrow client organization that was acquiring a new product. Every executive and functional area had to reimagine how they would do their work to support this product launch to ensure its success.

Bright Arrow started out by first doing the 4Ls exercise with this team—what they liked, lacked, learned, and longed for in their teaming. “It was a really lovely way for the culture to open on that team and to create some safety and honesty in their sharing together and get it all out on the table,” Tegan said.

Next, Bright Arrow coaches conducted a “Before Action Review” exercise, which gives executives an opportunity to reflect on their previous experiences instead of reinventing the wheel. “We have so much knowledge in senior leadership, and we often will approach new problems as if we’ve never seen them before, when in fact, we have experienced so many things over time that if we string it together, we have probably enough information and experience inside of a team to tackle the next challenge with a lot of confidence,” Tegan noted.

Before Action Review, Bright Arrow led the team through questions like:

• What did we learn from a previous experience of bringing a new product in?
• What information have we already gained?
• What pain have we already endured in previous experiences that we can learn from?

The coaches next took the leadership team through imagining a future world scenario. “We asked the leadership team to imagine that the product is theirs—they have finished the acquisition, they are taking this on—and to work through how they could accelerate its adoption and the sales of the product, and what roadblocks they may encounter,” Tegan said.

This meant that before the product was ever brought in-house, the leadership team was able to anticipate some of the real-world scenarios they were going to have to navigate together. The exercise provided the organization with a playbook for how they planned to tackle those challenges much more strategically.

Bright Arrow coaches also led executives through a RACI matrix for the team to identify who would be responsible for owning different parts of the new product’s success. “We took them through thinking about the product lifecycle from the time of acquisition—internal stakeholders touching that product all the way to end users and customers buying that product—and really had that executive team think about who they needed to be and how they needed to behave and what they were responsible for from end to end.”

Lastly, the coaches helped the leadership team create an action plan. The result was that instead of being reactive, the organization had a planful, proactive strategy rooted in historical experience based on running potential scenarios. The leadership team not only reported faster product ramp time, but they also enjoyed greater clarity and much less conflict than they had experienced in past product launches. “Just a really great testament to how experiential learning can really serve as proactive preparation for individual leaders and executive teams,” Tegan concluded.

To learn more about how to solve performance issues in real time, watch the webinar on demand.