Developmental Lines

Your business might excel in some areas and struggle in others. For example how deeply your employees understand your customer needs and how you create value for them. In Teal Compass, these areas are called Development Lines, and all lines have 14 coaching questions with 4 possible answers each. Please contact us if you can’t find what you are looking for.

When you set up a survey, you can choose from the following development lines.

Psychological Safety

(freely available)

Psychological safety refers to the shared belief of team members that they will not be punished or humiliated for expressing ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes.

The freedom to express themselves without the fear of retribution leads to:

• increased levels of engagement,
• stronger personal relationships and cohesion within the team,
• higher levels of creativity and agility in responding to changes and challenges.

In summary, psychological safety is one of the foundations on which high-performing teams are built. The time spent on exploring and strengthening it will be critical to your team’s success.

Topics:

• Safety of expressing yourself
• Appreciation of efforts
• Safety of asking questions
• Appreciation of each other’s work
• Respecting area of responsibility
• Group support
• Sharing of private life
• Conflict management
• Giving constructive feedback
• Failure culture
• Debate culture
• Amount of pressure to develop
• Personal relationships
• Freedom to choose how to work

Value Creation

Value creation is work completed by your team that is important and usable for your client. It matches their needs in terms of time, quantity and quality, and they are willing to pay for it.

Focusing on value creation will ensure the most optimal use of resources for your team and a timely delivery of the adequate product/service for your client.

It will also improve team morale. Knowing that they create real value for their clients will increase your team’s sense of worthiness, and will lead to a higher level of satisfaction and motivation.

Exploring this topic with your team can initiate exciting and productive discussions around:

• the real value of your work
• how much time and effort should be spent on what
• what to measure
• how to establish or improve your relationship with your clients

Topics:

Leadership style within the team

People in leadership roles aren't just those who've been bumped up the company ladder. There are folks who naturally take the lead – they might have more knowledge, experience, or insight than the rest.

These people become leaders in certain areas by taking on the responsibility to show the way and support others in a way that others appreciate and gladly follow. They're the go-to people for advice or help. For these leaders, what matters most is not their individual achievements, success, or development, but they're focused on taking care of the whole system, whether it's the ecosystem, the team, or the entire organization, making sure everything runs smoothly.

Topics:

• Bringing own ideas to life
• Taking on a directing role
• Level of Supervision
• Accountability in the team
• Agreements
• Clear boundaries and responsibilities
• Team autonomy
• Review of habits
• Collective thinking
• Improving efficiency
• Work-life balance
• Consideration of other teams
• Responsibility towards other teams
• Coaching-based leadership

Decision Making

Most people think that they base their decisions entirely on rational thoughts and facts, but in reality, we make almost all important decisions based on emotions and then support them with rational arguments.

Developing our decision-making ability leads us to a more conscious relationship with our emotions. Many people who begin to sense that their emotions play a significant role in their decisions first try to suppress or downplay them so as not to disturb rational processes. However, the opposite is needed for development: becoming more aware of our emotions.

Emotions should not be excluded from the decision-making process. By deeply understanding and relying on them, we can create a much more effective way of making decisions.

Topics

• Decision-making ability
• Expressing one's own will
• Thoughtfulness
• Flexibility in finding solutions
• Clear decision-making authority
• Following rules
• Accountability within the team
• Deviation from the norm
• Clarification of decision-making authority
• Data-driven decision making
• Using a large amount of data
• Factors in decision-making
• Intuition, bodily sensations
• Considering environmental impact

Why do I work?

A large portion of our lives is dedicated to work, so understanding why we work is crucial: for financial security, to be socially connected and feel a sense of belonging, for professional fulfillment and growth, or to contribute to society. The more of these are realized, the more content we are with our work, the more motivated we are, and the better we feel overall.

Recent researches indicate that organizations focusing on employee well-being tend to excel in their products and services. From a sense of well-being, employees' attention naturally extends to their environment, which enables them to better perceive market needs and develop products or services that meet customer requirements. Such organizations have shifted from 'customer first' to a 'team first' mentality.

Topics

• Love of work
• Self-realization
• Exercise of power
• Sensitivity to the needs of others
• Recognition, appreciation
• Sense of community
• Task management
• Flexible work hours
• Professional development
• Meaning of my work
• Orientation towards success
• Significance of personal career
• Realising a personal mission
• Value-based culture

Capacity Management

Every team aims to make the best use of its potential by managing their human resources as optimally as possible. It's not just up to the leaders, but equally to the team members as well. We can also look at this from the perspective of how well the team is able to set boundaries and coordinate with the leaders to jointly manage the capacity well.

Managing capacity is about finding a delicate balance between performing optimally and learning. While we're learning and growing, our capacity might be reduced in the short term, but in the long run, our ability to create value grows.

Topics

• Joint effort
• Setting boundaries (Saying No)
• Maintaining focus
• Self-discipline at work
• Capacity utilization
• Maintaining stability
• Role flexibility
• Managing regular overloads
• Parallel work
• Optimizing work performance
• Sustainability of performance
• Inter-team optimization
• Balance: Physical, emotional, mental
• Systemic Capacity synchronization

Connection to goals

Progressive organizations develop processes for setting and nurturing goals in a way that deeply involves their employees. The more these processes allow employees to discover and express their own inner motivations and desires, the more they'll be able to move together, focused in the same direction. It's about connecting work to what people really care about, so we are heading toward the same target with energy and enthusiasm.

Topics

• My input in shaping the goals
• Expressing my will
• Implementing my own ideas
• Alignment of individual and team goals
• Persistence
• Clarity of roles and responsibilities
• Shifting of goals
• Relation to consequences
• Understanding goals
• Enhancing efficiency
• Attainable goals
• Connection of goals and working hours
• Fulfillment in team goals
• Sustainability of team performance

Personal Learning

One of the most valuable skills in today's workforce is adaptability, resilience, the willingness to align with challenges and changes. This boils down to how eager someone is to respond to changes coming from their environment, how proactive they are in trying new things, and how willing they are to put in the effort to learn. This ability can be learned and can also spontaneously increase in a supportive environment.

Many organizations prefer predictable, repeatable work and only expect a small degree of learning or change from their employees after their initial training. Such a "challenge-poor" environment can eventually lead to a decline in people's readiness to learn, even if they initially came into the organization with strong adaptability skills. When the market environment finally forces the company to change, many people may be unable to adapt, or they may do so very slowly. This can lead to a serious crisis and, in extreme cases, even to the company's demise.

Topics

• Trying out new things
• Enthusiastic exploration
• Pace of method change
• Thoughtful innovation
• Ability to learn
• Application of rules
• Need for authorization
• Flexibility in using methods
• Self-organized learning
• Knowledge sharing
• Applying "good enough"
• Integration of learned material
• Enhancing team collaboration
• Getting help during conflicts

Communication and Information Flow

Modern organizations place great emphasis on developing the human side of communication, in addition to ensuring that information flows optimally within the organization: that the information reaches those who need it and doesn't burden those who don't.

Two crucial areas of communication are empathy and authentic self-expression. This involves learning how to listen to others with compassion, even if you don't necessarily agree with them, and how to express honestly what's alive in you without criticism or making demands.

Topics

• Dare to ask
• Firm communication
• Tone of arguments
• Openness for resolving conflicts
• Respectful communication
• Adequate information
• Willingness to confront
• Flow of information
• Effective feedback
• Confirming mutual understanding
• Quality of debates
• Information load
• Tuning in before diving into work
• Openness towards personal subjects