Leadership Team Development at AL with Georg Fasching

At AL we regularly post blogs discussing our passion for growing and maintaining a great Company culture, living our values and keeping our people and our clients at the heart of all we do.

In fact our two founders described their views just recently when being interviewed about what it meant to them to place highly in the UK’s Best Workplaces in 2018.

As they so eloquently highlighted, critical to building a company equipped to execute on it’s collective mission is building a strong and autonomous leadership team who are empowered to work together to make the right business decisions. To help us on this continual journey AL engaged Georg Fasching, a leadership coach with a great depth of experience delivering coaching and mentoring to support teams in achieving their goals.

Georg took the time to really get to know the team and the regular sessions that have followed have been designed to tightly couple with our business objectives. This has led to practical outcomes, such as a team charter and skills analysis, that have had a positive and lasting impact on BAU.

Our General Manager Vicky Schildkamp explained what it is about Georg’s coaching style that’s really helped us get the most value from these sessions.

”Georg has amazing credibility and has worked with some fantastic companies. He has so much experience of working with teams, he has an exercise or way to position every possible situation.   He’s also an excellent facilitator – a cool head and able to gently get us back on the right path.”

Norm, AL’s Co-Founder, also commented on the importance of creating the environment and the conditions where people are able to speak openly and honestly to build the relationship that’s needed to foster trust among management.

“For teams to learn to be effective, there typically needs a degree of vulnerability and learning trust; a safe place is needed for that.  Georg creates this safe place with ease.”

The workshops that have been run to date include;

– Team skills radar– helping to define the skills that are important to deliver on our goals, giving each individual within the team an opportunity to assess and share their perception of personal strengths and weakness and highlighting areas to build upon as a team.

– Roles and expectations workshop – this workshop focused on making sure we had a clear view of what each individual contributes and how different business functions interact.

– Team charter development– articulating what we stand for and how we plan to operate

– Agile business fundamentals training – a two day course designed to grow the team’s knowledge of the history and practices of Agile and how those practices can be applied beyond technical roles to improve productivity  

The Agile Fundamentals training was just one example of Georg gifting the team with a new perspective as to how prioritise workload, visualise workflow and apply relevant new techniques to daily business.

“Georg has been fantastic because he has enabled a leadership team that mostly comes from a traditional / waterfall style hierarchy to have the tools and vocabulary to work together in an agile way, meaning the whole business is working together, in the same way.”

Vicky Schildkamp

Having also attended these session Maria Khoury, AL’s Engineering Manager, shared some insight around how these learning opportunities have impacted her at work.

“One of Georg’s greatest skills is his ability to turn any topic into deceptively simple components. Sometimes you don’t even realise you’re learning… and then you do. A lot.

Georg’s style of teaching itself is a lesson in leadership! He’s helped me make sure I have the tools and focus to enable my team to come up with the answers and become leaders themselves.

Still a lot more knowledge to extract from Georg’s brain, I look forward to many more sessions as our company grows and the challenges become more varied.”

Looking to the future, Georg will be engaging AL’s latest intake of DevOps Academy graduates to train them in Agile Fundamentals and the principles of Scrum. This will be a significant step in setting them up with the skills they need after they graduate the Academy and begin work on client projects.

To learn more about the ways in which Georg has helped other teams to embrace Agile and work smarter as a team visit his website and get in touch today.