The Performing Tribes path

How it’s built

Performing Tribes alternates working sessions with activities in the field, and the alternation is a deliberate part of the method. The path is lived through experiences with a strong emotional charge, and the classroom lesson stays out of it. A concept discussed around a table and the same concept lived through inside an activity don’t weigh the same: the first is forgotten in a fortnight, the second stays.

The path runs in four phases. Before it begins, two profiles are drawn, one for each person and one for the team as a whole, and they stay the reference point for the rest of the journey.

Phase 1: Alignment

Pointing the group’s energy in one direction. You work on vision, mission, values, competences, climate and environment, in that order, because each one makes the next possible.

It’s the phase you always start from, and it’s also the one almost every company would like to skip in order to get to the objectives sooner. The detail of what happens is on the Alignment page.

Phase 2: Experiential training

A team’s qualities show in the field, more than in the description the team gives of itself. This is where the team building formats come in: inside a coaching path they work as the instrument for checking whether what was declared in the first phase holds up against the facts. This phase carries the first check point, where everyone meets to look at what has moved and, if the team needs it, to change the direction of the path.

In this phase the musical and creative activities work best, because they ask for coordination and for listening to each other without putting people against one another. The competences that get the most exercise here are communication, time management and the language of leadership, along with the plainest lesson of all, that a difference between two people is worth something.

Phase 3: Challenge Day

A day where the group gets put in harder conditions. We use physically demanding activities: Survival, Orienteering, Desert Training. The second check point falls here.

It’s needed because under strain the old habits come back. What was learned in the earlier phases either holds up there too, or it hadn’t really been learned yet. It’s also the day when people build trust by helping each other out of their own comfort zone, and the labels colleagues had quietly attached to each other stop fitting.

Phase 4: Recognition

The path closes with a moment of recognition, and that isn’t decoration. Closing explicitly is what fixes what has changed, which otherwise dissolves the moment ordinary work resumes. What the team decided, what it actually changed and who carried it gets named out loud, in front of everyone.

What makes it different from a team building

The difference is the monitoring. Inside a path, progress gets checked at fixed points, on dedicated days spaced through the programme, and there’s a review before the close. A team building is a day: it surfaces a lot and it has no afterwards.

Vertical and horizontal

Vertical coaching involves a team together with the person who leads it, who takes part in the sessions. These are people who work together every day and who already have a shared history.

Horizontal coaching, also called peer coaching, brings together people at the same level, who may belong to different departments or even different companies. They have similar functions and responsibilities and they aren’t used to working together. It’s for when the knot to be untied sits between functions rather than inside one.

Team Integration

What the path makes possible is the move from a sum of people each reasoning with their own competence to a group that reasons as a whole.

You start from the individual profile, build the team profile, and each person becomes aware of their own potential and of everybody else’s. The capabilities being worked on are concrete ones: listening to each other, holding relationships that work even in disagreement, defining rules and roles instead of leaving them implicit.

How long it takes, and who it’s for

From a few months to a year, depending on the depth you want to reach. Four meetings is the minimum that gets anywhere on the basic material; fifteen is the average when a team wants to work on itself properly, and that’s usually six months to a year. Alignment on its own can be concentrated into a handful of close-together sessions.

It makes sense for teams that will keep working together. If the group breaks up in three months a path is out of proportion, and a single day is the better idea.