Unilever’s ambition was deliberately broad: help every team become more effective.
The difficulty was scale. Bespoke external team coaching might help individual senior teams, but it could never provide a practical development pathway for the many teams operating across a global organisation. The challenge was therefore to create enough common architecture to provide quality and consistency while enabling HR Business Partners and team leaders to work locally with very different team situations.
MJA helped refresh Unilever’s Team Effectiveness Model around five connected dimensions: purpose; processes and ways of working; roles and responsibilities; interfaces with other teams; and team behaviour and relationships.
Those dimensions then became an organising system. Common team situations — a newly forming team, conflict, a new leader, virtual working, a high-performing team seeking another edge, difficult interfaces or a team requiring a reboot — could be understood through the same underlying model without assuming they all required the same intervention.
A simple Team Needs Analysis provided a health check. More specialised assessments could be brought in where the evidence warranted them. Existing Unilever development resources were mapped to particular needs, and facilitation capability was built among HR Business Partners so that the solution did not depend on a small cadre of external specialists.
What emerged was less a programme than a service architecture for team development: diagnose first, understand the particular conditions affecting this team and then select the smallest useful intervention rather than reaching automatically for a generic workshop.
Scalability came from a common way of understanding team effectiveness, a reliable diagnostic front door, targeted development options and enough internal capability for teams to improve without permanent external support — not from asking every team to do the same thing.