Interaction Associates

Team Sponsorship™ is a research-based workshop that provides a flexible framework for setting up, managing, renewing, and closing teams.

Workshop participants learn eight key responsibilities of effective team sponsorship. This proven model will help your teams ramp up more quickly and avoid obstacles to effective action. Most importantly, this workshop offers team sponsors a blueprint for guiding teams to peak performance.

For greater impact, Team Sponsorship™ is designed to complement our Teams in Action® workshop. Teams in Action™ is a two-day learning laboratory that teaches team members and leaders how to build informed agreements, resolve conflict, and take effective action.

How participants learn

Unlike workshops that offer vague concepts and historical case studies, Team Sponsorship™ offers a practical model and proven methods for enhancing team performance.

Participants work on real-life challenges facing their teams right now. Our workshop leaders are seasoned experts who have coached, led, and facilitated teams in a variety of industries and organization structures. They understand today's complex business issues and offer practical advice on how to boost team performance immediately.

Team Sponsorship™ is customized to address your organization's critical team issues. We help you assess your needs, tailor the agenda, and deliver the workshop according to your time frames. We can also break the workshop into modules if needed, for just-in-time training.

What makes an effective team sponsor

Research on team effectiveness shows that six of the eight top organizational causes of poor team performance stem from the actions — or inaction — of the person who sanctions the team: the team sponsor .

Even skillful teams fail when they encounter these roadblocks:

• Team tasks are not aligned with strategic objectives
• The team charter is unclear
• Managers refuse to give up control and empower the team
• The team lacks adequate resources

Sponsors of high-performing teams share responsibility for planning and implementation, and for achieving results.

Effective sponsors :

• Guide
• Monitor
• Bridge differences
• Provide timely advice and feedback
• Coach
• Leverage their own experience and authority to bring out the best in their teams

Benefits for team sponsors

At the end of the workshop, team sponsors will know how to:

• Link the team's work to strategic objectives
• Set up and launch a team quickly and successfully
• Prevent team breakdown
• Intervene when a team is stalled
• Identify causes of poor performance and take corrective action
• Rally support for the team within the organization
• Build a strong relationship with the team leader to ensure results
• Celebrate and reward teamwork and team milestones

Benefits for the organization

With better sponsorship, organizations will gain:

• Alignment of strategic objectives with team goals
• Measurable decrease in time from team start-up to implementation to results
• A reduction in wasted resources and rework
• The ability to evaluate the impact of teams
• A way to ensure organizational learning about teamwork

Benefits for team leaders and members

With effective team sponsorship, team leaders and members will:

• Understand how their work supports organizational goals
• Have a clear charter and understand their roles on the team
• Know where and when to find the coaching and external resources they need
• Encounter fewer roadblocks to success