Welcome to our Latest Scoop Page (March 2025)
Shifting From Good Teams To High Performing Teams
This edition is intended to be a helpful and practical skip read for you to ‘snack’ on. This edition features valuable thought leadership tips to help you, your teams, and your workplace - estimated reading time is 120 seconds.
Cutting to the chase… we’ve noticed that many of our clients are facing similar challenges, and we recognise that things aren’t straightforward right now. This is primarily due to ongoing global and local economic pressures. And let’s face it, despite these challenges, you likely have ambitious growth targets to meet in the year ahead—all of which place pressure on leadership teams, your people, and your culture.
The encouraging news is that some companies appear to navigate these challenges better than others. What are some doing that others aren’t? And what can you learn from this? In light of that, we have decided to share four of our best tips to help you shift ‘good teams, to high performing teams’ in the hope that something here might be of benefit. If anything sparks your interest, and you’d like to chat further, please contact me directly or speak with one of the Partners on our team.
Gary Cole, Founder and Partner
Partner Tips
Building a mindset of ‘Taking 100% Personal Response-Ability’
Why is it important?
Professor Damian Hughes, Partner
If individuals embrace this mindset, your team is in a commitment culture. Period. It will have a powerful impact on innovation, creativity, resilience to resolve what is in front of you and above all inspire colleagues and direct reports to be empowered to discover more meaningful next steps.
What?
This is best captured by a memorable equation [L + R = O]. Life events will always get thrown our way, but if we believe they are Personal, Permanent or Pervasive we remain stuck and repeat unhelpful patterns - look out for these signs. We can always choose a more intentional Response/Reaction. This in turn will lead to the Outcome we need, especially in challenging moments - this makes teams great.
How? Useful tip
1. Pause and reflect on the Beliefs/Assumptions that are causing us to React negatively or pessimistically.
2. Then Reframe these into more helpful, alternative behavioural choices.
3. Lastly, be mindful of the language we are using as language is contagious. The best root question used by all high performers is “How can we?" vs. "Can we?. Without this mindset, high performance culture is impossible to achieve.
Building & executing your Big Picture vision
Why is it important?
Kirsten Gillard, Partner
Successful teams are crystal clear on their big-picture vision. This ambition should inspire and unite everyone, reinforce purpose and commitment, fuel ambition and foster collaboration. It is also the foundation for all strategic decisions.
What?
When it comes to building or delivering your big picture vision, we often ask Executives to engage in cursive writing exercises. The physical act of putting pen to paper often creates genuine breakthroughs, by unlocking our subconscious thoughts and allowing our brains to form new ideas and solutions.
How? Useful tip
1. Define your strategic challenge.
2. Write to yourself, from a selected date in the future, where you have successfully achieved your challenge.
3. In your letter explore your successes, how did they happen? What hurdles did you overcome and how?
4. Disregard spelling and grammar, keep your pen moving for at least 15mins, allowing your stream of consciousness to freely flow.
5. Review the emergent themes and insights.
Understanding the high performing habits that drive your team
Why is it important?
Brian Cashman, Partner
To elevate your team from good to great, consistent behaviours are essential in turning your ‘big picture’ vision into reality. Trademark Behaviours (TMBS) provide the glue between vision and execution, ensuring that culture isn’t just a set of ideals but a truly lived experience. They set the standard for ‘how we do things here’ in clear, unambiguous terms, shaping the daily habits that drive sustained success.
What?
TMBs are the non-negotiable touchpoints that define elite teams. More than values, they are lived, repeatable habits that shape a commitment culture and sustain success.
How? Useful tip
1. Identify – Describe your best/most successful days as a team. Seek out the behaviours that made that possible.
2. Build – Use those behaviours as the keystones for your TMBs.
3. Embed – Reinforce your TMBS through role modeling, recognition, and repetition.
Identifying & embracing your most powerful talent - your ‘Cultural Architects’
Why is it important?
Gary Cole, Founder
When times are tough, your Cultural Architects are even more important to battle the ‘toxic cynics’ in order to maintain the consistent team behaviour that directly helps you win through. If you leave this to chance, you are leaving high performance to chance!
What?
Your Cultural Architects are VERY special individuals who naturally role model your company values/unsaid best practices in their approach and inspire others with their attitude. They are naturally respected by the team because of their authenticity and commitment. In a high performance environment, it is important that a minimum 20% of the base is made up of these special people.
How? Useful tip
1. You will know this already, but if in doubt, just casually enquire who they are - they will quickly emerge.
2. Identifying them is key, as a disproportionate amount of your leadership energy should be directed to them. Click Here for a simple survey we use, to identify them. This could be a useful exercise for all team members to complete, and discuss who is an Architect … and possibly who is an Assassin!
3. Once you have established who they are, it is important to delegate and empower them with some of the hottest People and Culture initiatives you are working on.
4. Always ensure you ask them to directly contribute to your cultural design ambitions, and take away the limelight from the cynical assassins that might otherwise dominate a culture.
CLIENT STORIES
B&Q Owning It
‘OWNING IT’ - The Annual B&Q Leadership Conference at NEC was on February 4th! This is arguably one of the most impressive and inspiring ‘moves’ to help an entire culture shift from ‘good to great’ we have ever seen from an Archipelo Coaching client.
Just imagine having the courage, drive and 100% alignment from Board, Director and 650 of the SLT to completely abandon the traditional event format of ‘show and tell’, and instead, dedicate the entire event to a wholehearted, inspiring and meticulously planned launch/communication of a HIGH PERFORMANCE multi-year strategy. We are proud to partner with B&Q and we are so, so proud to have played some small part in making it all happen.
Swisscom
An amazing Archipelo Coaching client project with the leaders at Swisscom Ventures in Switzerland recently. A seriously fun, intensive and highly practical immersion into the creation and implementation of high performance culture, with a big focus on shaping and committing to new Trademark Behaviours. Snowballing at a target to eliminate The STOP List in order to be a high performing team, possibly the funniest thing we’ve set up on a workshop!
NCC 2025
Join us for the next Naked Coaching Club with Professor Damian Hughes on July 4th in London. This exclusive event will explore real challenges clients are facing at a deeper level. Spaces are limited, click here if you're interested in attending.
