Leading and Coaching Teams to Success

Phil Hayes: I think it's really helpful. I think it's something you sometimes keep to yourself, you don't necessarily bring to the awareness of the members of the group but it's something which you know informs what's going on, sometimes, contrary to what I just said, it's really important to bring it to the attention of the team. So, for example, if you notice something about their language which reflects the culture of the organization, bringing that to their attention can sometimes be quite a light bulb moment for them, things they just take for granted being brought to their attention.

Rachel Salaman: Now you've been working with teams for 20 years or so?

Phil Hayes: That's right.

Rachel Salaman: What are the most common challenges that you've seen that they face?

Phil Hayes: Well I'd say that there are either challenges of over-achievement or under-achievement in very broad terms, so sometimes when a team is doing well they don't necessarily recognize the need to continue to develop and get better, and under-achievement is sometimes again something unrecognized. I've worked with a lot of teams where they sort of understand at an unspoken level that they're not achieving but nobody really talks about it, so those sort of two dimensions are really quite frequent.

Rachel Salaman: In your book you talk a lot about coaching.

Phil Hayes: Yes.

Rachel Salaman: And you also talk about training and leading teams.

Phil Hayes: Yes.

Rachel Salaman: So how do those three things relate to each other?

Phil Hayes: Well they do all relate to each other and to some extent they all join together. What I was trying to express in the book was the idea that if you want to take a coaching approach to teams you need other skills too which complement the coaching approach, so you need to be able to facilitate team discussion, you need to be able to consult around the organization, you also need to be able to provide what are sometimes called team building activities for teams, structured sessions which allow them to learn in particular ways, and all of those things enhance the coaching role. But at the heart of the coaching role is really the ability to draw out from the team issues and learning that they themselves are able to discover, and that's the very heart of the coaching approach, so it's drawing out the resourcefulness of the team.

Rachel Salaman: So in your view to what extent should a team leader, any team leader, also aim to be a coach?

Phil Hayes: Well I think it's part of the repertoire that a modern leader needs to have, and it's not a replacement for everything else, I would say it's part of a spectrum of skills. So a leader needs to know when to be directional, they need to know when to delegate, and they also need to know when to coach, and I think that awareness of when to do what and when is really an important part of it. You shouldn't coach all the time, for example, it's important to know when it's a good idea to coach and how to do it.

Rachel Salaman: How can someone know when?

Phil Hayes: Well, for example, if the group needs to own the solution to the problem, that is if they need to be able to think it through collectively because they have to manage it collectively, then that's a really good indicator that coaching would be appropriate. If it's just something the team has to do, you know, in a kind of transactional way, coaching might not be appropriate. So when a team has to learn together, when a team has to take ownership together, when a team has to cooperate together and find a solution together, that's often an indicator that coaching is the right approach.

Rachel Salaman: Now you also distinguish between coaching teams and coaching individuals.

Phil Hayes: Indeed.

Rachel Salaman: What is that difference and which is more important?

Phil Hayes: Well they're both important, and I do both, quite a good deal of both. I think the key difference is probably quite obvious really, that in one-to-one coaching there's a degree of intimacy, it's very much more personal, and you'll get a level of disclosure and a level of revelation from an individual that you might not get, in fact almost certainly won't get, in a team context. So it's very much about tuning into one person, it's very much about digging around with them into the issues and subjects they find important, it's highly personal, and what you find in coaching one-to-one is that no one solution will ever fit, so people literally have to find their own way forward. In teams it's not quite as intimate, there is that public dimension, a lot of team work isn't secret is it, a lot of it is out there in the public arena, and so you're always working with what people will let you hear and there's a lot more held back I would say in a team coaching session than there might be in a one-to-one coaching session.

Rachel Salaman: So again the team leader or the team coach needs to know which of those two things is appropriate?

Phil Hayes: Absolutely.

Rachel Salaman: And how can they work that out?

Phil Hayes: Well they're not necessarily exclusive, in fact they should be complementary, but a team leader should be able to take a coaching approach with their team and also take an individual coaching approach with each individual member of staff, so they're not exclusive at all, they're just rather different in terms of skill set.

Rachel Salaman: And different situations suit each of those things?

Phil Hayes: Well absolutely, absolutely. So if you have a crisis, for example, an emergency, you probably aren't going to take a coaching approach, you're probably not going to ask people how they feel about things and look at ranges of opportunities, you're probably going to be more decisive. If, on the other hand, you're thinking about future strategy over a long period, then a coaching approach can be very appropriate.

Rachel Salaman: Now there's an interesting passage in your book where you outline Meredith Belbin's theory of informal team roles.

Phil Hayes: Yes.

Rachel Salaman: There's more on this theory on the Mind Tools site.

Phil Hayes: Sure.

Rachel Salaman: But for those who are unfamiliar with it can you just explain how it works?

Phil Hayes: Well it works by looking at what people's informal role in a team is, so outside of their special role. So it doesn't look at what they might do as a functional specialism, it doesn't look at whether they're into finance or into HR or any of that sort of thing, it looks at what they tend to do in the social dimension of the team. So some people, for example, are people who tend to care a lot about team process and they tend to care a lot about how the team is functioning, others are very focused on, for example, being completers, making sure the job gets finished, other people like to drive and are very dynamic presences in the team, and the Belbin work looks at that in a degree of research detail. I've found it very useful with teams because it has face validity, people buy into it, they go "Yes, I recognize this," and if you do a team profile people will say "Ah, that's why we never get anything finished" or "That's why we tend to rush off because we don't sit down and plan." So it gives people a kind of language to use in which they can explore the effectiveness of the team and how individuals are performing within in.

Rachel Salaman: Isn't there a risk though that it could lead to pigeon-holing people, so they're not seen as a complex, rounded person, and may end up being under-used within the team?

Phil Hayes: Well I think, as a matter of fact, you've hit the nail on the head about the use of a lot of psychometric instruments, in that if you give people a superficial understanding they're likely to take away the pigeon-hole descriptions of themselves and they're likely to get almost a cartoon version of the theory. So I think you have to be very careful to present the thing reasonably thoroughly and to give people a chance to understand it thoroughly, and you have to give them the opportunity to work through it and to gain real familiarity with it, and to understand it for what it really is and understand that it is there to help them to grow and to learn as opposed to stereotype, and that can take a little bit of time. So I would tend, if I introduce something like Belbin, reintroduce it, talk about it again, perhaps look at how the team is working and say "Hang on, how does this relate to the work we did on Belbin," so that they begin to have much more of a grounded understanding of it.

Rachel Salaman: So take from it what's useful but don't take it too seriously perhaps if it doesn't fit exactly?

Phil Hayes: Well I think actually Belbin is very, very good at that, because it's something which you can take at a relatively light level. Some of the psychometrics, if you take, for example, the Myers-Briggs type inventory, that's not really a light instrument, it's a very complex, deep instrument and you can't really play around with it too much. Belbin, you can have a bit of a playful element in it, so, for example, sometimes I will give a team a practical exercise to do, some kind of experiential exercise, and we'll look at how people worked and compare it to what came out of their Belbin profiles, so you can have a bit of fun with it and bring it to life.

Rachel Salaman: Now all teams hold meetings of course and you have some tips in the book about how to make team meetings as effective as possible, what are some of those tips?

Phil Hayes: Well the number one tip I think is to have an outcome described for every part of the agenda. So if you just have Topic X, the danger is that nobody's really clear what they're hoping to get from a conversation about Topic X. So I would say top tip would be put up Topic X and say "This discussion is aimed at reaching a decision," or aimed at eliciting ideas or aimed at just transferring information, so that people know what they're trying to get at in that particular bit of the conversation, it could be chaired therefore in a way that doesn't ramble and it can be a real time-saver. Number two tip, I think if you're chairing a team meeting you pay attention to body language and pay attention to what's unspoken and not take silence as assent, so very often silence is not agreement, it's just a kind of silent protest, so I'd say paying attention to the unspoken as well as the spoken is really important.

Rachel Salaman: Making people voice what they think as well I suppose?

Phil Hayes: I think so, I think the skill of giving people feedback and in a fairly light way is useful in a meeting just as it might be useful in a coaching session. So you might say, if you're chairing a meeting, "I notice, Tom, that when we came to that decision you actually shook your head and looked to the ground, I'm wondering what you're really thinking about this," as opposed to just letting it go.

Rachel Salaman: That sounds like it has a lot to do with the general atmosphere in the meeting, is that something that the team leader or the chair of the meeting has under their control?

Phil Hayes: Well I think they have a huge influence, and I'm sure you have too but I've attended thousands of rather unstructured, purposeless, meandering meetings which waste hours and lose motivation. For my money, having a well-managed, well chaired, purposeful, very clearly structured meeting is something that most people welcome, and I think that's generally the responsibility of the team leader, but he or she can also coach other people in the team to take that role as part of their development.

Rachel Salaman: One of the most useful chapters in the book I thought is called Handling the Problematic Team.

Phil Hayes: Right.

Rachel Salaman: In what ways can a team be problematic?

Phil Hayes: Oh gosh, how long have we got for this particular broadcast? In so many ways, it's difficult really just to pinpoint one or two ways. I think I talk about teams that are over-macho in their approach, I sometimes talk about teams that are a little bit toxic, where there's a kind of emotional toxicity, sometimes there are teams which are just lacking in clarity about what they're trying to do, and I think a lot of other behaviors can stem from basic lack of clarity and basic lack of purpose. So in response to that I think there are a number of ways in which a team leader and a team coach can get a team to be very, very clear and very, very focused on what they're trying to achieve, and that goes a long way I think to clearing up some of the other potentially bad behaviors.

Rachel Salaman: We can talk about a couple of those that you mentioned.

Phil Hayes: Sure.

Rachel Salaman: Firstly the macho team, which in your book you make clear can consist of women as well as men.

Phil Hayes: Oh very much so, yes.

Rachel Salaman: What are the signs of a macho team?

Phil Hayes: Well there are many and varied. I want to say also that a macho team can be quite an exciting and quite a powerful team, it's not all bad, but you do have to watch out for some of the downsides of the upside. There are macho teams I've worked with who are hugely energetic, full of very intelligent, purposeful people, and yet they don't necessarily work effectively as a team, partly because you see people competing with each other. Sometimes they undermine, often the guys use playfulness, banter which might at face value seem to be just about fun, can be corrosive, and I've seen plenty of teams where banter is used as a weapon. Sometimes you see teams being... I was going to say sexist but it's not always sexist, but there's a lot of "isms" that you can get in teams, often they're intolerant of anybody who's not just like them. You often impatience in a macho team at anything that looks like naval gazing, which in fact might be very important, reviewing or trying to learn about how they're working. So you get this kind of sense of being driven, not always driven in the right direction, and quite a lot of spiky and sometimes quite aggressive behaviors, yes.

Rachel Salaman: And what can a team leader do about all that?

Phil Hayes: Well it's not something which you can change overnight I would say, but it's something you need to confront and deal with and take seriously, because I have seen teams almost pulling each other apart, and I've seen good leaders who acknowledge what's going on, who raise the issue rather than running away from it, who confront it, who confront individuals with their behavior, who will make how the team is working part of the agenda and not just ignore it, and I think it really just needs a bit of moral courage and intellectual clarity really to face up to it and to make sure that these things aren't just left to fester, because if they're left to go wrong these teams can get very nasty indeed.

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Rachel Salaman: Your book includes quite a lot of case studies.

Phil Hayes: Yes.

Rachel Salaman: One of them is about a team you worked with that you called The Rubber Barons.

Phil Hayes: Oh yes.

Rachel Salaman: Would you just talk us through what their problem was and how you tackled it?

Phil Hayes: Well it's a long time ago I have to say, but I did work with them for quite a few years as a matter of fact, and they were an archetypal macho team. They were empire builders, hence I called them the Rubber Barons, they spent a lot of their time politicking for their own interests within a highly political organization. They would tend to compete rather than collaborate, they would tend to try and dominate in discussion, they were a real handful.

Rachel Salaman: What did you do, how did you set about sorting them out?

Phil Hayes: Well I wish it was a nice, slick, easy answer for this, but it was really just hanging in there to be honest with you. I had to be very persistent with them, and I had to... I more or less just didn't go away for a while until they started to find me useful. We did some very practical things, and one of the things that we found very early was that they didn't really know what they were doing, they had a very complex organization, they were bogged down with initiative after initiative, and they were too proud of themselves and each other to say "We're a bit lost and a bit stuck." So one of the things we did was a very practical mapping exercise, looking at all the different projects that they had and making sure they were able to organize them, and that practical approach I think got me a few Brownie points and enabled me to stick with them and start doing some stuff around their behavior, the way they worked together and more fundamental things like that really.

Rachel Salaman: Now you mentioned toxic teams.

Phil Hayes: Yes.

Rachel Salaman: I think most people would understand what's meant here, things like blaming, bullying, cliques, favoritism and so forth.

Phil Hayes: Yes, that's right.

Rachel Salaman: What steps can a team leader or coach take to try to get rid of that toxicity?

Phil Hayes: Well I found in practice it's about being bold enough to name it, to name the issue, and to point out what's happening, at least as you see it, and to produce some evidence for that, and to make it legitimate to talk about it. So sometimes these behaviors are undiscussable, apparently undiscussable, and even the undiscussability of those undiscussables if you like, they're so deeply hidden in terms of the conscious discourse of the group, they're ignored but they're present all the time. So bringing these things into awareness and raising them and putting them on the table to deal with is I think something a team coach can help to do and the team leader should do.

Rachel Salaman: How often is the tone of a team, for example, the toxicity of a team, set by just one toxic team member?

Phil Hayes: Well that's a very interesting question and I have come across teams where there are one or two people who really just set the whole tone, and often they're quite potent, powerful individuals who create a bit of fear, and even fear for the team leader, and it can just become too hard for the team leader to confront them, too hard for them to deal with it, they're just running scared of them, and I have seen one or two teams dominated by characters like that, yes.

Rachel Salaman: How do you know when a team has passed the point of no return, where it just needs to be disbanded and start again?

Phil Hayes: Well that's another great question. I've probably only worked with two or three teams like that in 20-something years, where I've actually had to wash my own hands of them. I think the key for me is when we've continued to raise issues, when they've promised to each other that they'll make some changes and they keep going back on their promise, and no matter how often you bring it back to them and no matter how often they commit to doing something different the old habits just won't go away, and there are only so many times you can do this, you can deal with it, you can try. Obviously you need to be flexible and you can try lots of different approaches to help them deal with these things, but if in the end they don't have the will to do it then you have to walk away, and there are a couple of times I've had to do that, with regret I might say because it does feel like a bit of a failure, you know, if you have to do that.

Rachel Salaman: In the book you point out that self-management for the team leader or coach is an essential precursor to dealing with any difficult behaviors, what exactly do you mean by self-management in this context?

Phil Hayes: Well I think the root of it is about emotional self-management, and the beginning of that is to understand yourself and to understand what drives you and what your values are and your beliefs and your kind of emotional hotspots too, understand the kind of behaviors which others might create which can unsettle you. So that's the beginning of it, and then I think there's a more conscious process of understanding what you focus on when you're working with a group, emotionally as well as intellectually, and what you're attached to emotionally as well as intellectually. I'll give an example of what I mean by attachment; for example, I'm attached emotionally to the group succeeding, I want the group to succeed, but I want them to succeed for themselves, I'm not attached to me succeeding for the group on its behalf, so it doesn't become the Phil Show, it doesn't become the team coach show. I'm attached to having a good relationship with the group and to being reasonably socially open and friendly with the group, but I'm not attached emotionally to leading the group, I don't want them to necessarily embrace me or include me as a member of the team, I need to keep a bit of detachment. So a lot of it is just about emotional awareness and emotional self-management, which you can then use to manage the relationships with what after all can be a very diverse set of people. So that's really at the heart of self-management, is that emotional understanding.

Rachel Salaman: Have you come across team leaders who just aren't suited to that role?

Phil Hayes: Many times.

Rachel Salaman: And what can they do, what should they do?

Phil Hayes: Well there are some things which they can do at the level of skill, you know, there are skills that most leaders can learn about handling their teams better. Some things are about personality, and they could even do some things about that if they're prepared to have some coaching, work on themselves, do something different, make some commitments to change, so you can do things. I guess I would say there are people who aren't naturals but they can be helped to be as good as they can be, you can make a lot of progress.

Rachel Salaman: What would you advise someone who found themselves in a team leadership role and they just felt, even if they've had coaching, that they're not a leader, they're a practitioner or they're whatever their original career path was?

Phil Hayes: Well as a coach I wouldn't do any advising, but I would explore with them where they're at and where they need to be, and help to look at alternatives and help them to look at things which are really going to be much more suited to who they really are in terms of their values, their beliefs, their personality, their sense of self, and of course their own personal goals, and that's really the whole of the coaching approach, it's about helping people to recognize those important parts of themselves and to move towards them, make changes towards achieving what they want to achieve.

Rachel Salaman: And if that means that they move from a leadership position into a different role, that shouldn't be seen as any kind of failure or step backwards?

Phil Hayes: Well it's tricky isn't it, I mean, it's tricky because organizations see these things differently, and in some organizations you can get high kudos and esteem by being a great professional. So if you're in the NHS you can be a consultant, if you're in the BBC you can be a producer, etc., but in some organizations getting to the top means being a manager, means being a leader, and for them it can be more uncomfortable, so there can be some difficult choices to confront, and who said it was easy? It's not easy, and for many people they have to make very tricky personal decisions about their own careers.

Rachel Salaman: There's a section in your book devoted to Team Coaching Interventions, as you call them, and by this I think you mean team events and away days and things like that?

Phil Hayes: Yes, yes.

Rachel Salaman: In your experience do all teams benefit from interventions, or does it only suit certain types of teams or organizations?

Phil Hayes: I think it suits some teams some of the time, it wouldn't suit all teams all of the time, so I find that there are teams where it's useful to have rather conventional meetings to begin with. If they are, for example, quite a conservative team or quite a timid kind of team you might not want to take them on some kind of big experiential binge, you might just want to give them the confidence of just having proper dialog together first, you know. So really it's a matter of every case being individual, there's no prescription, there's no formula, you have to read it and you have to negotiate with them. It's one of those things where you can't prescribe, you can only do it if they want to do it as well. So in essence how you work with a team and what you do with a team depends on the relationship that you create with them, the contract that you have with them, and the degree of mutual trust that there is with them, and then it just carries on being a negotiation, you do what you do with them on an adult-to-adult basis, where the whole team decides along with you, it's not really a question of prescribing. You may sometimes say 'Look, I think this would be a good idea', but that's very different from saying 'You've got to do this, you know, this is what I think you need to do', you have to negotiate every second of the way.

Rachel Salaman: So if you and the team think that it's a good idea to have one of these interventions, what are some of the useful things that you can do on let's say an away day?

Phil Hayes: Well I think I get quite a lot of mileage and have done for a long time just giving teams something different to work on, give them a problem to solve, so much comes up from this and they get so energized when they're given a task as well. So, for example, if you're looking at Belbin, you can directly map Belbin on how people perform in any kind of given problem solving task, you can review how they approach the task in the context of how they work together, so you can just ask simple questions like "How does what we've just done relate to how we normally work together, what are the analogies that we ought to be drawing here and what did we learn from the work we just did, this particular task which could be useful in the way we approach work generally?" So there are all sorts of powerful metaphors really for taking people away and doing active things, and they can just also build rapport and facilitate better discussion when people have a bit of fun together, when they have some purposeful activity, when they take on challenges, when they have to work together in different ways, it can build a lot more confidence in each other and build a sense of rapport and even trust. So a lot of benefits can accrue.

Rachel Salaman: You talk a little bit about learning styles in your book.

Phil Hayes: Yes.

Rachel Salaman: Can you just talk us through the different learning styles and how useful it is to know about that?

Phil Hayes: Yes. I must say, I don't worry too much about learning styles, except that I do know that people learn in different ways and I like to reflect that in a program of team coaching. So some people do like to, for example, if you make an assertion about what might be good in terms of leadership or team behavior, some people need to know where that assertion comes from, they want to know the theory, they want to know the origins of your idea, they want to know that it's got some respectability, you know, a decent track record. Some people even want to know the references that you're quoting, you know, so some people really want to know on what authority you speak. Other people just like practical hands-on things, some people like highly reflective sessions, and some people like things which are about planning into the future and being very pragmatic, and all of those things are learning styles in fact, they're well-established, well-known learning styles. And I like the programs that I run and the team coaching interventions that I create to reflect the fact that people need that variety, all teams need a bit of variety too in the way that they learn, otherwise it's going to get stale quite quickly.

Rachel Salaman: So if you have a team which demonstrates a lot of different learning styles you try and put together something that's going to work for everybody some of the time?

Phil Hayes: Exactly, and most people most of the time. I make this an overt part of the discussion, you know, I say "I notice we've been doing a lot of talking, how do people feel about this, do we want to do anything different?" So I keep the process alive with people and keep people critical of the process as well as the content.

Rachel Salaman: You talked a little earlier about the importance of the culture of an organization.

Phil Hayes: Yes.

Rachel Salaman: Can you talk a bit more about that, what difference does the culture make to how teams perform?

Phil Hayes: I think it makes a huge difference in terms of not only how they perform but how they think and behave and relate. I very much like thinking about the language in organizations as a reflector of culture, so, for example, you can hear sometimes very clearly in a team's discourse exactly what the mental model is that they have for their organization. I'll give an example; I worked with an organization where they said, it was in the aerospace industry, where one member of the team said "The battle for supremacy of the air is going to be fought over the Pacific Rim," and when I heard that I thought "This team's metaphor for business is war," you know. They said "There's going to be blood, we're going to have to send our best men over the top," everything they said was a kind of war-like metaphor, and so I brought that to their attention and said "Look, this is how you're talking, my feeling is that this might be a reflection of the culture and it's sort of driving your behavior, let's look at the positives of this but let's also look at the negatives." Other teams you hear behaving and talking as if they're families, you hear that kind of "mom and dad" kind of language from the leaders, you can feel it too in the way that they relate and the way the dynamics of the group work, and again you can bring that to the attention of the team and say "Well look, let's just look at the culture of this team and the culture of the surrounding organization, and look at how it influences you, how it helps you, but also how it might be impeding what you try and do." And also sometimes I like to look at what I call The Shadow Culture, which is the culture which is unacknowledged but is there nonetheless, and often the Shadow Culture is at least as powerful as the espoused culture and can drive people to behave in ways that they don't necessarily understand intellectually but which drive them nonetheless. One example is an organization I know where their espoused valued is "We care for our people, we care for our people and we do everything for our people," and yet in that same organization, where they do care for their people, if a manager comes to another manager, senior manager, with a problem, that manager who brings the problem is pretty much dead in the water. The under-rule is "Don't come with a problem, come with a solution, and if you come with a problem you're in trouble." It's never said, it's never written down anywhere, but the Shadow Culture is that, which is "Don't bring a problem to us." So it's not just about language, it's about all the sort of... both the overt parts of culture in terms of what the place looks like and feels like, but it's also the deeper culture as expressed in value statements and just the whole way really that the organization presents itself and manages itself.

Rachel Salaman: So it's useful for people within the organization to just step back and have a look and try and analyze really both the espoused culture and the Shadow Culture?

Phil Hayes: Very much so, and just to recognize too what kind of culture they're in and what it means in terms of perhaps what might limit them as well as what opportunities a particular culture might create. I think all cultures have their pros and cons, the metaphor of machine is quite a prevalent one, you know, so people talk about "the well-oiled machine" and "the cogs in the wheel," you know, "getting the parts in the right place to fit together." The machine metaphor is great if all you're looking for is efficiency, but if you want creativity you might need to think about a different kind of metaphor, you might just think about the organization as a game, for example, or as an act of creation, or just changing the metaphor, changing the thinking can be very, very helpful. I've got a number of little exercises which I do with teams to help them to understand the metaphors that are in their minds for their own team, and also to help them to create more positive metaphors for the future, for them to grow towards. It is something which they often find quite inspiring and interesting to do.

Rachel Salaman: So from your experience of working with teams over the years, what are the most effective steps that someone could take tomorrow if they wanted to start drawing out the full potential of their team, team members?

Phil Hayes: Okay, well I would just take some very practical steps, I'd talk to everybody and I'd ask everybody in the team what they think, what they feel about the team, about how it is and how it should be, and I'd get some data, so I'd get some data for them to look at, about what they think about themselves. I also might get some data from their stakeholders, so perhaps their customers, other departments, other organizations that relate to them, to give them a picture of themselves, and when they have some data about what they're like then they can start thinking about what they need to be like, and then you can start getting into goal setting and start to get into some very purposeful activity with them. So I think the beginning is have a very clear, grounded idea of where you're at now, and then start to develop a very clear, grounded idea of where you want to be, and then there are many things you can do to move from Point A to B.

Rachel Salaman: How long should it take, or is it just like saying "How long is a piece of string?"

Phil Hayes: Well actually I find you have to be quite pragmatic, be quick about it. You know, teams don't really have much patience for very long-winded, long drawn-out things. Generally speaking I find they like results, and if a team intervention's going to have any power it has to have momentum. So I try and do things reasonably quickly and get a move on with it so they can see things happening and they can see that it's not just something which is going to be said one day and then mean nothing the next day, you have to keep the momentum going.

Rachel Salaman: Phil Hayes talking to me in London. The name of Phil's book again is "Leading and Coaching Teams to Success: The Secret Life of Teams."

I'll be back in a few weeks with another Expert Interview. Until then, goodbye.