So often I experience organisations hellbent on pursuing one or the other. The challenge of our time is to do both simultaneously.

Collaborative Enquiry provides the potential to balance the profit and people objectives to deliver sustainable long term success. An environment where strategic aims and people’s development needs are delivered continuously and together.

If we work with what is real and present and nurture a culture that deals well with all issues we create the environment where people and profit look after each other. We create high performance teams that deliver on the strategic aims by building cross functional capability.

The From Me to We book is about a collaborative design and construction program that was established to nurture loyalty in a bullish market. The outcomes astonished everyone involved. As Ian said,

We recently undertook a project in our building company and improved productivity (if building for less is an accurate measure) by between 5 and 7 per cent over four to five years on projects ranging from $5 million to $45 million.

What did we do? We treated everyone, from subcontractor principals to labourers as human beings. They responded in an amazing way. Subcontractors and their employees began to trust each other and ”productivity” improved. Of course it was more complex than this, but in essence it is what we did. We behaved ethically, we cut waste and changed lives in a glass half-full way, not by cutting entitlements, sacking people or hunting the lowest price.

Collaborative Enquiry can support you if you want to achieve this objective. We start this process by looking at the workplace culture and the prevalence of high performance teams. We use a diagnostic process that identifies your team in one of 6 phases; Forming, Storming, Norming, Maturing, Customising and Innovating.

We have also developed a range of workshops to provide the framework behind this success and it enables you to join the path.

We can guide up though this process and provide the necessary interventions to build high performance or we can just deploy the diagnostic for you to implement the necessary change. Once again it is your choice.