Improving Communication

Back-to-Back Drawing Divide your group into pairs, and have each pair sit
on the floor back to back. Give one person in each pair a picture of a shape, and
give the other person a pencil and pad of paper.
Ask the people holding the pictures to give verbal instructions to their partners
on how to draw the shape without actually telling the partners what the shape
is. After they've finished, ask each pair to compare their original shape with the
actual drawing, and consider the following questions:

How well did the first person describe the shape?

How well did the second person interpret the instructions?
Were there problems with both the sending and receiving parts of the
communication process?
Survival Scenario This exercise forces your group to communicate and agree
to ensure their 'survival.' Tell your group that their airplane has just crashed in
the ocean. There's a desert island nearby, and there's room on the lifeboat for
every person plus 12 items they'll need to survive on the island. Instruct the
team to choose which items they want to take. How do they decide? How do
they rank or rate each item?
CASE STUDY 1 KEEPING THE EDGE SHARP

The need: Pfizer, one of the worlds leading providers of life-saving drugs, wanted to
maintain top performance in one of its largest manufacturing plants located in Dalian,
China after its current Managing Director retired. The pressures to keep the edge sharp
and the plant at peak productivity were enormous.
The Solution: After careful planning with the client, Team Results designed a customized
2-day program based on identifying, reality-testing, reformulating and retesting the top-
level leadership strategies that would lead this critical plant into the future. Characterized by
fun, laughter, the right cultural fit and a basis in the four Team Results principles
Originality, Credibility, Results, Measurement the leadership team emerged with practical,
proven refinements to the world-class dynamics which they had already had in place under
the previous leadership.
The Results: After the program and the post-retirement change in Managing Director, the
Pfizer Dalian plant went on to new strengths, handling the leadership transition smoothly
and maintaining in fact, slightly increasing all productivity measures. Though the credit
for productivity improvement should always go to the client, top Pfizer management
identified the Team Results program as critical in sustaining and improving performance over
the transition and into the future.
Productivity measurement results can be seen in the Measurement section.
Weve used Team Results in China before. They were so
successful that we brought them back for this critical
mission. A successful handover of power to the new
leadership team was essential, and there is nobody we
would have trusted for that but Team Results. They ran a
two-day session that was fun, relevant, practical, business-
 based and very right for our team and organizational
culture. It was a pleasure working with them again!

Ms Lu Hong, Vice President for Human Resources AsiaPac,

Pfizer

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CASE STUDY 2 -FIXING A CRISIS

(Note: Since this case study describes a major challenge at a client, the clients identity has
been protected.)

The need: When 1500 staff walked out at a large

manufacturing client, costing the controlling company a total of $2.5M a day in lost
production, the company came to Team Results for solutions. Based on a long-standing
relationship with the controlling company and on high-speed consultations with top
managers, and in the absence of any identifiable cause, Team Results concluded that the
likely cause was a subtle but rapidly destabilizing feature in team dynamics which needed
practical investigation and correction.
The Solution: Team Results invited a specially-selected group of key opinion leaders to
attend a 2-day customized productivity-improvement program which was focused on
finding, diagnosing and correcting the destabilizing features in the team dynamics. About
two-thirds of the way through the program, and through using proprietary, fun but well-
provenanced techniques for investigating these dynamics, the survival terrain of work
teams at the plant had been well-mapped and the cause a complicated cultural instability
triggered by a simple event was identified and tackled. Back-channel strategies designed to
defuse such instabilities in the future were created during the program, and then
implemented at work.
The Results. Workers at the plant returned to the job, and more significantly, there has not
been any similar incident in about six years since. Confidence across the workforce remains
high that the former instabilities have been successfully tackled with practical strategies
developed on the program and then sustainably continued in the workplace.
An academic paper was written on this work by Team Results and delivered at Johns
Hopkins University, leading to a collaborative project in cutting-edge team dynamics research
with UCLA. This paper, and further information on current Team Results thought- and
practice- leading research activities, can be found in the News Room section.
Team Results helped us turn a near-disaster into a triumph.
We needed not just talk, not just analysis, but action and
results. The program unified the supervisors, created a new
level of productivity and got to the bottom of the problem
that caused the walkout. Theres no-one I know of that can
compete with Team Results in that area.

HR Manager for Manufacturing, client

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CASE STUDY 3 HITTING A PERFORMANCE TARGET

The Need: When giant telecommunications provider Telstra sold its Yellow Pages business,
it was essential that the Yellow Pages I.T. Department the most critical team to the sale
do its best work ever in the three months leading to the transition. The catch: there were no
jobs waiting for them at the end. The challenge: the business data must be in top saleable
condition, and I.T. had no reason to care.
The Solution: Team Results met with senior Telstra leadership to identify the areas of
performance that were most critical. Then turning its attention to the Yellow Pages I.T.
Department, Team Results designed a customized 2-day program tailored to identifying,
developing practical strategies for, and implementing the answer to a simple question if
there is no job waiting at the end, what unifies a work team to turn in the best performance
of their lives?
Working with Team Results, I.T. department staff identified a key area of choice and control
they could take charge of ensuring their own high-value marketability across the I.T.
community, the business community and the business media after a very successful sale and
handover of the Yellow Pages business. The team then focused on using the program to
develop tested and proven strategies for the short-term unification of a group of
professionals to achieve world-acclaimed performance.

The Results: Strategies developed by the I.T Department during the program were
instantly transferable and highly successful at work, leading to the successful and
uncontentious sale of the Telstra Yellow Pages business at the full asking price. Wide acclaim
of this success in the business community and the financial press led to all members of the
former Yellow Pages I.T. team finding excellent jobs within three months, in many cases at
higher seniority and salaries. By comparison, other outplacement efforts for equally-qualified
staff in other parts of the business which did not engage Team Results look longer, cost the
business more and were much less successful.
It was a real puzzle. How do you create great levels of team
effort when youre also telling everybody that their current
roles and jobs are disappearing? With typical ingenuity,
Team Results ran a practical program that was perfect for
our needs, got everyone enthused, involved and laughing,
and delivered very concrete business results when it came
to the business changes and positive outcomes for the
people. We were able to celebrate our successes and give
everyone a positive mindset for the future.

Ms Wendy Bliss, I.T. Director, Telstra Yellow Pages Business

(now head of Service Delivery at Toll Logistics)

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CASE STUDY 4 GETTING ON THE SAME PAGE

(Note: Since this case study describes a major challenge at a client, the clients identity has
been protected.)
The Need: A globally-known car maker needed its dealerships to freeze sales during a long
weekend so that the system could be overhauled to meet new tax regulations. The
dealerships met the request with a hostile and angry refusal. The company was facing an
impasse on a national scale, complications on every side, and a non-negotiable deadline for
tax compliance.
The Solution: Recognizing that only the senior management saw an urgent need for
resolution of the impasse, Team Results asked the company to send key managers and
opinion leaders from the three most-affected departments dealerships, finance and I.T.
to a 2-day customized program at a neutral location. Focusing on the need to emerge with
practical team strategies for an apparently impossible project, the group managed a
simulated project together which accurately reproduced the challenges of getting a unified
result across major cultural differences and legitimately different business priorities. The goal
was to develop a set of practical, tested and shared strategies to get a complicated job done
on time even when compromise and sacrifice were required by all.
The Results: Using negotiation strategies developed on the program, the managers and
key opinion leaders returned to work and won support in their work areas for the impasse-
solving strategies also developed on the program. The tax switchover happened on time and
without excessive compliance costs, and the dealerships implemented agreed stop-gap
measures which allowed trading to continue. Though all sides retained their legitimately
different business pressures, their now-unified strategies and practical discoveries about
trust and teamwork enabled this massive tax change to be completed on time and with no
loss of goodwill.
We just had to get past the conflicts. There were
legitimately different pressures and viewpoints in the
company, and we were in danger of gridlock. Weve relied
on Team Results before in all kinds of situations, and once
again they proved their worth by running exactly the right
 retreat for the situation. I dont think the deadline could
have been hit in any other way or by any other partner.
We know we can rely on Team Results.

Board Director for Finance, client