Before engaging Tamsen Garrie of Alpha Associates, we had a lot of talented individuals working in silos. Previous approaches to improving team-work had resulted in a feel good factor, but our growth goals were making it more important than ever to demonstrate value so that significant changes followed through into the workplace and impacted on the bottom line.
I was introduced to Tamsen and was inspired by her profoundly audacious and novel perspective on developing a high-performance team and organisational culture.
Tamsen facilitated workshops for the team where together, we developed a collective shared vision and values that supported that vision. The process included encouraging team members to identify their own individual vision and purpose and goals and roles, based on their strengths. Individual team members also completed a process that identified their behavioural style, which resulted in personal revelations about what was important, valuable and challenging for them when working as part of a team. This was then used as a way of addressing the fundamental issues around conflict in teams and how to improve team collaboration, which gave us a framework and a common language for pre-empting and resolving that conflict.
After three months, we saw deeper and more personal connectedness in the team, improved communication and a greater willingness to approach each other for help and to support, enhanced openness and preparedness to reveal when they felt challenged or had made a mistake, confident that they would be supported rather than penalised, significant improvement in collaborative working, increased energy and positivity about their work and a long-term perspective on their future with the team and the company. Productivity increased significantly, the backlog of work reduced considerably and we reported ZERO unplanned absence and a 20% increase in revenue after the first quarter.
Since then, we have doubled our turnover in two consecutive years and we’ve seen a transformation to becoming a high performance culture. We’ve also had a lot of fun along the way, celebrating our success!
Most impressive of Tamsens’ approach is the utilisation of the shared collective vision, values-driven behaviour and the enabling of sustainability of extraordinary results. Tamsen delivers a myriad of custom programmes designed to maximise levels of engagement with every client, regardless of size and scope. Her process is challenging, illuminating, provocative and an undeniable prescription for breakthrough performance.
Two years on and Tamsen has become a trusted colleague within our business and I cannot recommend her and her work highly enough.