Keith and our story

Keith McMean, Group MD, has been at the helm of TEG UK from the beginning but the thinking behind the business started much earlier. His career has moved through building businesses, creative work, marketing, technology, digital transformation and organisational development. He helped major UK brands respond to new technology and went on to build, run and advise businesses of his own.

That breadth of experience has had an important influence on TEG. Keith has spent much of his career interested in why some businesses move forward while others struggle to turn opportunity into action.

Over time, the focus moved increasingly from the technology, strategy or process itself to the people responsible for making it work.

TEG UK, formerly known as The Entrepreneurs Group, has spent more than a decade working with people and teams inside complex organisations with a focus on Intrapreneurship. Before that came twenty years of building businesses.

Our work grew from learning and development. We developed leaders, worked with teams and built programmes around communication, collaboration, decision making and performance.

We saw people leave sessions energised and ready to do things differently but that was never quite enough because the important test didn’t happen in the room. It happened afterwards.

• What changed when people went back to work?
• Were decisions made differently?
• Did people challenge when they needed to?
• Were problems raised earlier?
• Did teams communicate more effectively?
• Was accountability clearer?
• When operational pressure increased, did those changes hold?
• Most importantly, could the organisation see any measurable difference?

Those questions have shaped the TEG UK of today.

Learning and development was the starting point

We haven’t moved away from learning and development. We’ve built on it. Working with people inside complex organisations taught us that performance problems rarely fit neatly into a training requirement.

You can have highly capable people and still experience poor decisions.

You can have detailed processes and still find different teams approaching the same problem in different ways and you can have large amounts of operational data telling you what is happening without necessarily understanding why it is happening.

That gap has been central to our work.

• What happens between the process and the result?
• What are people actually doing? How are decisions being made?
• Where does responsibility become unclear?
• When do people challenge and when do they stay quiet?
• What changes when pressure increases?

These aren’t simply learning and development questions. They’re questions about behaviour and performance. Seeing the behaviours behind the numbers

Most large organisations aren’t short of data. In the sectors where we work, organisations measure safety, quality, delivery, cost, assets, productivity and operational performance. That information matters but behind every performance measure are people. People make decisions. People communicate. People challenge. People escalate problems. People take responsibility and people behave differently depending on the environment around them.

A process can tell you what should happen.

Operational data can tell you what did happen.

Behavioural evidence can help you understand what happened between the two. This is where our work sits.

Today, TEG UK helps organisations capture and map behaviours, identify patterns and understand where those behaviours may be supporting performance or creating opportunities for improvement. The aim isn’t to find somebody to blame. It’s to give leaders better evidence.

From intervention to evidence

This also changed the way we thought about development. Traditionally, an organisation might identify a need, commission a development programme, deliver it and collect feedback but what happens six months later?

• Did the behaviour change?
• Did the organisation reinforce it?
• Did the intervention address the real issue in the first place?
• Could anyone prove what worked?

Our approach connects those elements. Today, our work moves through a continuous process:

Understand → Diagnose → Act → Develop → Measure → Improve

TEGalign helps organisations understand what is happening and where action may be needed.

TEGinsight captures and analyses behavioural evidence so that we can identify patterns and measure change.

TEGacademy helps people develop and embed the behaviours needed to improve performance.

Then we measure again because insight only becomes useful when you do something with it.

Technology changed what became possible

Technology has played an important role in this development, it allows us to capture behavioural evidence more consistently, identify patterns across teams and understand whether things are changing.

TEGinsight captures and analyses behavioural evidence, helping us identify patterns and measure change but technology alone isn’t the answer. The value comes from combining the evidence with experienced human judgement, understanding what it means and deciding what to do next.

Human judgement. Behavioural intelligence. Technology.

Each has a role but together, they give leaders better evidence to understand what is happening and where action could make a difference.

Working where behaviour has consequences

Today, TEG UK works primarily with organisations across nuclear, defence, complex engineering, energy and infrastructure. There is a reason for that focus. These are environments where behaviour has consequences.

Communication matters. Challenge matters. Accountability matters. Decision making matters.

What somebody does when the pressure increases can matter considerably more than what a process says they should do. Our published work with Sellafield has already shown how behavioural insight can form part of leadership and organisational development.

We are now working more widely with organisations to integrate behavioural intelligence, technology and facilitated human insight into the way they understand and improve performance. Some of that work we can talk about. Some of it, because of the organisations and sectors involved, we cannot but the direction is clear.

So, what is TEG UK today?

Our roots remain in people and development, the expertise isn’t new, what has developed is our ability to capture behavioural evidence, identify patterns and measure change at scale.

• We gather behavioural evidence.
• We identify patterns.
• We help leaders understand what those patterns mean.
• We target development and intervention where it can make a difference and we return to the evidence to see whether it did.

Human judgement. Behavioural intelligence. Technology.

The question we started with was: How do we develop people? It’s still an important question but today we ask something bigger.

What could your organisation achieve if you understood the behaviours driving it?