Meta Team’s journey began in 2011, when founder Rob Shaw, then Head of Leadership & Coaching at British Telecom (BT Plc), found that despite significant investment in leadership programs across the senior leaders running the FTSE 100, team performance improved by only 6%.
Determined to find a better approach for BT Plc, he partnered with Harvard in 2012 to better understand the drivers of high-performing teams in business. This study identified common behaviours that consistently drive team success, leading to the creation of a research-backed 360-degree team diagnostic. In 2014 an impact analysis using target bonus scores from 1,200 teams revealed the teams who rated highly in the diagnostic achieved 23% increase in team performance.
In 2020 Rob co-founded Meta Team to push the boundaries of team development, digitalising these diagnostic tools, before creating 32 corresponding team workouts, now delivered globally in multiple languages through a growing network of strategic partners.
Interview with Rob Shaw — introduction to Meta Team
Overview of the Meta Team habit
When should a team use Meta Team
What’s different about Meta Team
Why don't teams work
OUR TEAM
Rob Shaw
CO-FOUNDER AND TEAM GURU
Rob is passionate about making change happen, always looking to generate insight, challenge and growth. He has been lucky enough to partner with leading consulting companies and psychologists from Harvard to discover that teams and their underlying habits make the greatest impact on performance.
He worked for BAA, Accenture and BT, where he specialised in leadership and transformation before setting up his own consultancy to coach hundreds of ambitious leaders and global teams. Rob’s recent clients include Aviva, Bristol Myers Squibb, HSBC, Unilever, Vodafone and many more where he has helped leaders and teams shine a light on underlying habits - to accelerate their growth and taking performance to the next level.
Rob was a client of Russell and Byron’s when he was at BT. They reconnected to form Meta Team in 2020, creating a scaleable and affordable digital learning platform to enable leaders and their teams to learn and grow by bringing the science of successful teams to the new world of work.
Russell Ward
CO-FOUNDER AND DIRECTOR
Russell has a unique combination of commercial and digital learning expertise across 35 years of working in every role and all aspects of sales including European Sales Director for 11 years for MAID/Dialogue and others.
He created and ran Silent Edge, a leading brand in sales transformation for 15 years whose USP was cloud-based assessment and digital learning technology. This was used by hundreds of blue chip companies across the globe to successfully drive their revenues and change behaviour. He also wrote a book called High Performance Sales Strategies that captured the approach and was published by Pearson.
Russell has been creating and developing digital learning platforms for over 20 years now and is a co-founder of Meta Capability which specialises in creating bespoke digital learning platforms enabling users to really engage and be motivated to see what they are capable of and develop quickly.
All of those years of experience of creating successful brands and platforms have gone into developing the Meta Team platform and go to market approach after forming the company in 2020 with Rob.
Byron Ward
CO-FOUNDER AND DIRECTOR
Byron is a logical, creative and ambitious learning product development technologist, focused on delivering bespoke learning platform’s for Meta Capability and Meta Team clients, covering the professional body membership sector and multinational corporates.
He left PwC where is was heading up the QA of the firms next generation global learning platform to create Meta Capability with Russell in 2019, and then more recently Meta Team with Rob in 2020. Byron manages Meta Capabilities’ development of the digital learning platform for Meta Team.
Prior to PwC he was the CTO of Silent Edge a VC backed sales and talent management organisation who licensed SaaS technology, offered consultancy and training services. He developed learning and development technology products, licensed by blue-chip global companies generating reoccurring revenues of up to £10 million.
Overall Byron has had +20 years leading UX teams, solution architects, developers, content teams, and support resources, as well a cross functional corporate teams client side. He focuses on identifying commercial opportunities and developing world class learning and development products.
Andrew Perkins — FCCA
Head of Strategic Partnerships
Andy has been deeply involved in learning and development for almost 35 years. A reformed accountant, his learning leadership experiences include Kaplan Global Vice President at Kaplan, Commercial Director at The Inspirational Development Company and as the CEO of EW Fact plc – the first FTSE accountancy training company.
He has been fortunate to work with exceptional people and high performing teams to design and deliver some of the largest leadership programmes for global businesses such as HSBC, Barclays, JP Morgan, Shell, BAE Systems, UBS, and in the Middle East for Saudi Aramco PDO - Oman, Capital Bank Jordan, Al Turki - Oman. AL Dar - UAE, King Abdullah Fund for Development Jordan, General Secretariat of the Executive Council UAE.
He embraced learning tech when working as a director of a UK television production company in 1998, when all things web were the Wild West, building and launching the first audio visual learning platform. He has followed his enthusiasm ever since leading a large and unique corporate learning platform for Kaplan from 2015 to 2021 as the Global Vice President and in partnership with the expertise of Meta Capability.
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Making Teams Work
