Top Team Work
The goal of top team coaching and facilitation is to improve business and organizational outcomes. We help teams work together to lead in complex times, unleash innovation, establish a growth mindset and other vital performance-enhancing culture shifts.
Deep Water by Jim McManus, Mobius Featured Artist
The quality of “teaming” – with a special emphasis on the alignment, effectiveness, and openness of the Executive team, is the single most powerful resource within any organization.
We find that most Top Teams are in fact working groups. The first step is to help them see how the quality of teaming is a required skill set to build organizational efficiency – so that senior leaders get more done together, more easily.
We help top teams tackle the elephants in the room, equipping individuals with the disciplines required for advanced levels of teaming. Our global network of seasoned team coaches and facilitators have supported executive teams across some of the world’s largest and most impressive organizations to establish practices for rich collective intelligence.
We draw on a deep lineage of process consultation, team intervention, and action science with the privilege of ongoing collaboration with renowned pioneers in the field of team effectiveness.
Begin with the individual. Cultivate each leader’s ability to lead themselves and increasingly manage strong emotions, articulate their vision, navigate through conflict and unlock their full potential.
Prioritize experiential learning over theoretical models. Senior leaders possess a wealth of knowledge and intuition – we focus on removing the barriers, the long-held mindsets and behaviors that create interpersonal breakdown and inhibit creativity.
Informed by systemic principles, we help organizations to understand and address the deeper dynamics and tacit forces that shape and influence the organizational culture.
Building blocks of a Top Team Journey
1. Deep diagnostic work to understand the core challenges and establish a shared understanding of the status quo
2. Immersive workshops for reflection, leadership development, and accelerated team learning periods
3. Coupled with real-time, on-the-job team coaching, business mediation, and team intervention as needed
4. Where appropriate, individual coaching and customized immersive learning for individual team members
5. Conducting organizational constellations to establish systemic alignment and foster legacy integration
6. Ongoing support to the team to embed learning and enable a cascade into the organization
Our highly trained faculty – required for this work, establishes a healthy learning context which is psychologically safe, allowing for the level of challenge necessary for real and transformative change.
Alex Kuilman, Trusted Advisor for Senior Teams
Alex Kuilman, a co-founder of Mobius Executive Leadership, has led the top team practice since 2005. His work focuses on journey’s for executive teams, helping them to address long-standing issues, surface unspoken tensions, and refine an aligned vision for the future. Known for his humor, bluntness, and intuition, Alex serves as a consilgliere to business leaders, entrepreneurs and social visionaries. His practice includes executive coaching, executive retreats, team offsite facilitation and longer consultations as a team coach. Alex is also an expert in larger scale culture change work and supports clients undergoing digital transformation and other large scale transformations. Finally, Alex has expertise in working with Founders and early stage companies and Family Owned Businesses, each with their own unique challenges and dynamism.
Our Top Team Services Draw on Multiple Disciplines
ACTION DESIGN Identifying gaps between an executive’s desired intention and the unintended impact of their actual in-the-moment behavior. Making these often, invisible gaps, visible is the start of the individual’s work of becoming more coherent, intentional which builds greater trust within the team.
STRUCTURAL DYNAMICS Understanding and observing the four, basic conversational “moves” individuals make, allows teams to surface and interrupt stuck team patterns within typical team discussions that derail team effectiveness. For example, courteous compliance or covert opposition are two such frequently occurring patterns.
RELATIONAL THEORY AND PRACTICE Engaging creatively with tough or divisive issues, requires a high degree of coherence and trust. Our team coaches mediate conflict, surface complex topics and help to foster emotional attunement and maturity among team members.
SOCIOMETRY The team’s ability to incubate new ideas and experiment are critical to the kind of iteration and organizational learning that drives innovation. Our interventions seek to optimize verbal communication, address habits of miscommunication, and support a learning culture.
SYSTEMIC INTELLIGENCE AND ORGANIZATIONAL CONSTELLATIONS Understanding the principles of systemic intelligence enables teams to make seemingly small interventions which lead to breakthroughs in complex team dynamics and organizational challenges such as post merger integration, transformational change, business performance improvement and culture change.
ADAPTIVE LEADERSHIP Internalizing and applying the evolutionary skills and tools needed to take on adaptive challenges, including auditing the team’s and the organization’s adaptive capacity or change agility.
Organizational Constellations by Mieke Jacobs and Paul Zonneveld
Senior Mobius Consultants Paul Zonneveld and Mieke Jacobs lead our Systemic Practice working with senior teams and organizations as part of our top team offering.
Their work pivots around core systemic principles drawn from organizational constellation theory as below.
When these principles are respected, or restores, the system works optimally.
Connection and Inclusion: Everybody that belongs to the system deserves a place and nobody can leave the system unnoticed.
Order and Occupying One’s Place: People recognize beauty and experience trust in the world through symmetry. We can sense when something is aligned or out of order.
Purpose: The inner drive of an organizational system to contribute.
Exchange and the Balance Between Taking and Giving: Captures the health of the inter-related facets of the system and the quality of the relationship shaped by the exchange between the relevant parties towards mutuality.
Theories of Team Dynamics that Inform Our Intervention Methodologies
Andrea Winter, Senior Practitioner, Top Team Practice
Andrea Winter is a core member of the Mobius faculty, and a longtime practitioner of Winning from Within. She works as an executive coach (individual and team), facilitator of transformation, developer of facilitators, mediator and culture change consultant across a broad range of industries in Southern Africa, the Americas, and Europe. Andrea has worked with Mobius as a facilitator, coach, and developer of facilitators for the past 13 years.
Thomas Halbeisen, Senior Practitioner, Top Team Practice
Thomas Halbeisen is a Leadership Advisor, Management Consultant and a Principal at Mobius Executive Leadership. He has over 15 years of consulting experience in leadership development and transformational change – including accompanying companies and top teams in transformational and cultural change processes; leadership development programs; and re-organization and organizational development. Prior to joining Mobius, Thomas was an Expert Associate Partner at McKinsey & Company, Zürich and co-leader of the global initiative, McKinsey Leadership Development.
Sally Arundell, Senior Practitioner, Top Team Practice
Sally Arundell has over 15 years of consulting experience advising senior clients on their most strategic business challenges. She specializes in leadership development, transformational, organizational and culture change, top team effectiveness and strategy. Sally has worked with companies and senior teams across a multitude of industries, including financial services, consumer products, professional services, private equity, retail, and oil & gas. Sally focuses on designing and delivering transformational senior leadership programs, and supporting top teams and senior executives to drive organisational change.
Illustrative Case Studies
LEADING INTERNATIONAL CHEMICALS PLAYER in the middle of a transformation including major growth initiatives and long-term investment projects and shifting the culture towards more performance and risk-taking. Mobius supported that journey on multiple levels, working with the CEO and his top team to lead the transformation, support the overall architecture of the change journey, coaching the top 30 players, helping sites drive cultural shifts in the context of their site-specific challenges, and providing support for individual growth of senior executives.
LEADING EUROPEAN BEAUTY RETAILER. Conducted a workshop series to shift the top team’s focus from leading single countries to utilizing the benefits of being an international group. Major theme was the required shift in individual and collective behaviors and mindsets in working with each other and in the leading the countries and group functions. Based on the work at the group executive team the journey was cascaded across operations in different countries.