The client
Heks
Industry:
Representation from the Republic of Moldova of Swiss Foundation HEKS/EPER
Background:
Swiss Foundation HEKS/EPER is active in over 33 countries with 255 projects around the world. HEKS is headquartered in Zurich and has a business office for French-speaking Switzerland in Lausanne.
HEKS/EPER established its first contacts to the Republic of Moldova in 2004. The geographical focus lies in all regions of Moldova and the thematic focus is on social assistance and economic development, improving the capacities of local civil society and local public authorities and facilitating the cooperation to jointly solve community problems.
The Context:
We were contacted by HEKS Moldova Country Director and asked to organize team-building workshops for their partner organization teams. The reason was that they work in different areas across the country and they want to become more effective when working together as a team.
The Challenge:
The partner organizations are based in different parts of Moldova and the distance between the teams makes the decision process between the teams not very effective because of the different habits of working inside every different organizations.
Gathering all the partners from different offices they will have the chance to work together, not necessarily on the same team like in the real work environment but to work together on the same organizational level, having the opportunity to make decision on their own and not under the direct supervision of their managers.
Our approach:
We had a single team coaching intervention, for 2 consecutive days with the whole team, in which the participants had the opportunity to work on their strategies for development.
There was a mix of teams, on different levels in organization, so they had the chance to be more aware about the activities that happened around them and to offer different perceptions to the people who are not their colleagues in the office. There was some resistance at the beginning but after the first part of the first day, all the groups started to have real results, having an increase in making decisions, in delivering on time and being more aware about what they had to develop to become effective.
The Results:
The results from the coaching program delivered over 6 months included:
- Better understanding of how teams are created in order to become more collaborative
- Greater trust, mutual accountability and effective working relationships
- Improved communication and more efficient planning meetings.
- Development of a team’s culture, relationships and results
References:
“What I liked most about working with team coaching training was the sense that we were developing something together. It was a process of support and joint creation.”
This was a kind of “an eye opener” program. It helped us to better understand our different roles and ourselves as a team. The training made us understands better each other and how to behave better in our project planning sessions.”
The training was a great opportunity to do a self-analysis of the team behavior, to figure out how to organize a team for its best performance – using new techniques in conducting team planning meetings.”
Veronica Cazacu
Country Director
Heks
