When a group of the world’s best talent & development leaders come together to share ideas, it’s not something you want to miss. That’s exactly what happened at Valence’s recent webinar, The State of Teams. This group of HR and talent leaders walked through some of their approaches to enabling teamwork, and the surprising impact that has had on employee growth and retention. Something most companies are striving for in turbulent markets.

Here’s a rundown of who joined this panel:

- Eric Van Der Sluis, Global Head of Leadership Development at Vanguard

- Sue McGrath, Currently leader in new stealth organization, CHRO at Cellanome

- Darrin Schulte, Vice President of People Analytics at Wells Fargo

- Adeline Looi, Global Head of Integrated Leadership Development at Nestle

‍

The panel discussion was moderated by a teamwork expert in his own right, co-founder of Engineers Without Borders, former McKinsey alumni, and current co-founder and CEO of Valence, Parker Mitchell. He asked the panelists some of the biggest questions on talent and development leaders minds today, like:

- What practices and resources have you put in place to better enable managers?

- How are you democratizing manager enablement and helping leaders lead more effectively… without straining your own HR team’s resources?

- How do you foresee the challenges and requirements associated with hybrid and distributed work changing in the coming 6 months or more?

- What team-focused data points and how are you using them to inform talent decisions?

- How do you assess performance and help the middle or lower performing teams adopt practices from the best performing ones?

- Peter Drucker said "you can't manage what you can't measure". There's no doubt that improving team effectiveness leads to improved business outcomes, but this can be hard to measure, and HR departments run the risk of being seen as cost centers without direct revenue relationships. What kinds of things are you doing to quantify the impact of your programming?

- Whether in an enterprise or high growth environment, what practices are you putting into place to find and retain top performers?

The speakers shared both strategic and tactical examples to give a peek behind the curtain on how they do things at these world-class companies.

If you missed the discussion, no worries! You can catch the recording on-demand here.

The 45-minute conversation is well worth the watch for anyone trying to uplevel the efficiency and impact of the teams within their company. Whether that’s through coaching and supporting managers to better lead their own teams, or helping high-performing individuals make a bigger impact in their work - and thus feel fulfilled and more likely to stick around.

Some key quotes from the session:

“Your team health drives your teams outcome and performance” - Eric VanDerSluis

“Effective teams have strong psychological safety and for organizations, this results in high outcomes and manages risk” - Darrin Schulte

“As we think about tools like Valence, there’s plenty of areas we can explore within our organization to build new skill sets and capabilities by building stronger teams.”- Darrin Schulte

“The better we get at working hybrid the better we get at making everyone feel like they are part of the team” - Adeline Looi

This discussion revealed the desire of HR and talent leaders to develop their own networks to continue the conversation - to learn and grow from each other. If that’s something you’re interested in, let us know here. Valence is gearing up to launch a new kind of community for HR professionals. One that centers around close connections and a focus on sharing forward thinking strategies amongst enterprise leaders. We’d love to see you there! 

And in the meantime, you can always catch this webinar on-demand and sign up for future webinars and other content like this here. 

[[button-cta]]

‍