Getting the Team to the Starting Gate
Supporting the Leaders
Getting the Team to the Starting Gate
First we have a look at what the leaders will be doing to get the team to the starting gate.
Overview of Leaders Preparations
To get ready for your 100-Day Challenge, the leaders chose you as coach and are busy with four things:
Getting Buy-in from leaders in other departments and/or organisations so they are willing and able to support and cheer the team along during the 100 days.
The Challenge Strategist together, with leadership stakeholders, decide on a specific focus area for the 100-Day Challenge.
Selecting a 100-Day Team of 10-12 people, based on the focus area the leaders selected and inviting them to the Start-up Workshop with a Challenge note.
The Challenge Note is the scoping document that defines the teams’ “mission”, gives them guidance from leaders, and frees them up to pursue it in the way they see fit,.
Leadership Engagements
The Challenge Strategist will invite other leadership stakeholders for a meeting to brief them about the 100-Day Challenge and to engage them in deciding on the Focus of this next 100-Day Challenge and on 100-Day Team membership. They can also have one-on-one conversations with the leadership stakeholders or meet them in small groups. For a list of suggested leaders to engage with, click the button below and a list will open on a new page.
In case the Challenge Strategist are planning one event for all the leadership stakeholders to engage them in these decisions, we prepared a slide pack that they can customise and use at the meeting. Click on the button below to download it. The Challenge Strategist will reach out to you to help them facilitate the meeting.
100-Day Challenge Focus Area
There is no right answer here, but whichever focus areas is chosen, it is important to define it sharply enough so it is possible to pick a reasonably sized 100-Day Team (8-12 members).
If the focus of the 100-Day Challenge is too broad or too vague, such as “we want to make progress on ending gender-based violence in our municipality”, it will be very difficult to decide who needs to be on the 100-Day Team, or the team will be way too large to be a real team. As you probably have experienced, when teams get to be too large (more than 15 people), they become very slow and tough to manage.
Social Impact Challenges
100-Day Challenge focus areas in the social sector and in Government typically involve ways to demonstrate impact in the sector, and these could be quite situational.
For example, in the education sector, focus areas could be:
- Increasing access to schools
- Reducing dropout rates
- Increasing registration of girls in schools
- Improving maths scores among matriculating students
Each focus area targets an issue that exists in the community (for example – girls are not registering in schools), and it challenges a team to create a better version of the current reality in 100 days.
GBVF 100-Day Challenges in South Africa are a means to localise the National Strategic Plan (NSP) to end GBVF. These are currently being convened and organised by Courts, Municipalities, TVETs and Universities. The impact indicators below have been culled out of the NSP as possible Focus Areas for End GBVF 100-Day Challenges. These are organising by convening entities. The numbers in parentheses are the NSP pillars that this impact indicator corresponds to. See the previous Deep Dive on the “Strategic context of GBVF in South Africa” for additional background on the NSP pillars.
Courts
- Reduce backlog of cases. (Pillar 3)
- Speed up time from filing to resolution. (Pillar 3)
- Reduce withdrawal of cases-(Pillar 3)
- Improve the experience of court clients (model court). (Pillar 3)
- …
Municipalities
- Increase number of women- owned businesses (Pillar 5)
- Increase the number of support services that survivors of gender based violence actually receive (Pillar 4)
- Reduce incidence of GBVF in “hot zones” (Pillar 2)
- Reduce incidents of gender-related bullying in schools (Pillar 2)
- Reduce incidents of sexual abuse in the work place (Pillar 5)
- Etc.
TVETs & Universities
- Break the Silence: increase the number of survivors who come forward and report experiences of GBVF. (Pillar 2 & 4)
- Heal the Wounds: Increase the number of survivors who receive high-quality care, support, and counselling so they can overcome the trauma of GBVF. (Pillar 4)
- Create Deterrence: Increase the number of perpetrators held accountable through disciplinary actions in TVETs and courts. (Pillar 3 & 5)
Caution: Avoid "Activity-oriented" Focus for 100-Day Challenges
Notice that the Focus of 100-Day Challenges is articulated in terms of the desired impact (e.g. improved enrollment of girls) and not the means to achieve this impact (e.g. conducting awareness-building campaigns).
Even if you are convinced that the way to increase girl enrollment is through awareness campaigns, your challenge to the team needs to remain at the level of impact.
Leaders in the social sector find it difficult to restrain themselves from telling 100-Day Challenge teams to focus on a particular solution or activity. Please do your best to resist this temptation.
Exercise
The next exercise aims to drive home this distinction between activities and impact.
Which statement in the following pairs, A or B, is a more appropriate Focus for a 100-Day Challenge? Click the button to choose.
Helping the Challenge Strategist Prepare a Short List of Focus Areas
Preparing a short list of focus areas for 100-Day Challenges may seem simple, but it can be quite tricky, and it is profoundly important. In some business schools, a whole course is devoted to this topic. It gets at the critical distinction between vision and strategy, between results and activities, and between means and ends.
You, as a Team Coach, need to understand and be able to assist the Challenge Strategist in this tricky decision. Here is some guidance to help you and steps to facilitate the conversation to Zero in on a single focus area.
It is good for the Challenge Strategist to bring forward 3-5 potential focus areas for discussion and decision with other leaders and stakeholders. This way the leaders participate in making the decision on what to focus the 100-Day Challenge on, without getting overwhelmed with too many choices.
The short list is best based on the specific context and timing:
- Which items of the menu are most relevant for us, now?
- Which of these will be most likely to garner interest and support among leadership stakeholders?
- Which of these could benefit the most from the three magic ingredients of 100-Day Challenges: intense collaboration, rapid innovation, and disciplined implementation?
At times, the impact indicators may have a natural sequence or order. For example, in Ending GBVF 100-Day Challenges hosted by Universities in South Africa, it became evident that the initial 100-Day Challenges needed to focus on “breaking the silence” – helping more survivors come forward and report their experiences. Subsequent waves of 100-Day Challenges focused on “healing the wounds” (providing integrated care services to survivors who come forward), and then on “creating deterrence” (bringing justice to perpetrators).
Steps to Zero in on a Single Focus Area
It is good to start by presenting the short list of focus areas developed to other leadership stakeholders. Leaders must collectively choose one of these as the focus for their next 100-Day Challenge. The Challenge Strategist can ask each leader to offer their perspective. Then, you and the Strategist can facilitate a conversation to see if they all naturally converge to one of these.
If the group is large, it may be helpful to split them into breakout groups of 4-5 each, ask them to discuss this, and then present in plenary to each other.
If there is no general agreement, you can use voting to select one focus area from the shortlist.
At times, and especially if multiple organisations are represented at the meeting, you may find it useful to invite each of the leadership stakeholders to talk for a few minutes about the relevant activities in which their organisation is involved. This will serve the purpose of coordination between organisations and give each stakeholder the chance to say what’s on their mind before engaging in the “convergence” discussion.
A Tip – Resist the temptation to take on more than one impact indicator in a 100-Day Challenge. This will make it difficult to choose a reasonably sized 100-Day Team. Remind leaders that this is just the beginning and that we can focus on another impact indicator in the next round of 100-Day Challenges. If there is enough interest and capacity, you can pick two or more focus areas and mobilise two or more 100-Day Teams at once. These can be launched at the same Start-up Workshop, but the Challenge Strategist will then need to recruit two teams and to prepare two Challenge Notes.
Once a focus area has been selected, you, as the team coach, can help to gather baseline data related to that focus area so it can be shared with the team before the Scale-up Workshop. This will allow them to set their Ambitious 100-Day Goal.
Selecting the 100-Day Team
Given the Focus of our 100-Day Challenge, the first question to address is which departments, functions, or organisations need to be represented on the team. You can click the appropriate button below to download a list suggested for each type of GBVF focus area.
The next question is who from each department or organisation to ask. Below, you will see a short video on how to build the right team and a list of the attributes of 100-Day Challenge Team Members.
Bear in mind that it is important to select team members who are actually “close to the ground” and have firsthand experience with the issues and potential solutions. So, where possible, err on the side of individual contributors and first-line managers versus more senior individuals. Here’s a fun diagram that illustrates why this is important: “The Iceberg of Ignorance.”
The Challenge Note
Finally, you will help the Challenge Strategist prepare or finalise the Challenge note. The Challenge Note is an important part of the 100-Day Challenge. It is the scoping document that defines their “mission”, gives them guidance from leaders, and frees them up to pursue their mission in the way they see fit, with full agency and empowerment.
Keep it simple. But make sure that the specific focus area is mentioned.
Make sure the Challenge Strategist addresses the Challenge Note to team members, with a copy to other leaders and ensure that the team members receive it at least a week or two before the Scale-up workshop. The Challenge Note will be their official invitation to the Workshop.
The Challenge Note covers the following topics, as clearly and concisely as possible:
What the Challenge Strategist and other leadership stakeholders are asking the team to do, over the next 100 days. This includes the Focus of the 100-Day Challenge, and any “guardrails” surrounding this.
How leadership stakeholders are asking the Team to work on this – specifically the uniqueness of the 100-Day Challenge approach as a way or organising the work.
Roles of the actors involved: the Team, the Coach, and the Challenge Strategist
Additional guidance to the Team from leadership stakeholders, including recommended ideas to explore (if there are any), and the “learning agenda” (if there is one).
The logistics of the invitation to the Start-Up Workshop: where and when
Importantly, the Challenge Note needs to be upbeat, conveying a sense of excitement and confidence in the Team. See here for a template that you can customise and build on.
