Team Development
Our Approach
Introduction
Angela Dow, our Principal Consultant specialises in working with new and established teams to improve the way in which they work together, by focusing on how they work together - the process.
Angela has worked on scores of such projects, including Board Level Teams, Directors and their teams, Managers and their reports, Fast Stream Teams, as well as cross functional teams, including Directors and their negotiating partners from various Trade Unions, and a national steering group.
Although teams vary in their exact requirements, we have found an approach which seems to yield the best results, so this case study describes our typical approach to such a project.
The Customer Requirement
Scoping the Programme
When we scope programmes for Team building, although we get an original brief from the client, in the usual way described in our project methodology, we also write to invite every member of the team to list:
- What currently works well in the team
- What areas need addressing in order to improve how the team works
- And, if there was just one thing they could achieve during the team building programme - what would that be?
We have found that there are two key advantages of this approach:
- As everyone shapes the objectives and hence content of the programme, this gains a considerable amount of buy in from participants. This is important, as usually the team is not working together well, and is demotivated - we have never been asked to help teams who are performing exceptionally!
- We can hit the ground running as soon as the programme starts - the anonymity afforded by written responses means can put the issues on the table immediately.
Typically, we also ask participants to complete and return, ahead of the intervention, some sort of psychometric questionnaire. This might be Kirton's adaptor innovator inventory, or the Myers Briggs Type indicator, for example. We use this approach as invariably, the team needs to improve communications, and this is a fun, energetic and non - threatening way to unpack issues around inter - team communications.
Developing the Programmes
Once we have agreed outcomes with the client, added those aims that individual team members wish to address, and interpreted the results of the MBTI, we can develop an appropriate intervention. Usually, our clients opt for a minimum of two days, as this ensures that we are able to surface and address what might be fairly sensitive areas.
Typical objectives include:
By the end of this Away Day, team members will be able to:
- Identify key current strengths of the team, and how we can capitalise on these
- Identify key improvement areas for the team, specifically in the areas of:
- Communications
- Problem solving
- Decision - making
- Conflict
- Managing change
- Agree a plan to implement strategies for improvement
- Identify their Myers Briggs Team Type
- Identify the overall team type, and any implications of this
- Agree a plan to implement strategies for addressing any implications.
Facilitating the Programmes
The diverse nature of different teams' requirements means that we need to facilitate these interventions with a large degree of flexibility. The event and outcomes belong to the team; it is our responsibility to facilitate the process.
Some typical interventions we make on such events include:
- Using analogies. We often ask the participants 'if this team were an animal, what sort of creature would it be?' This enables the team to use analogies to describe some aspect of the team in a fun way, whilst making a serious point. Often answers include dinosaur, sheep, and ostrich. We then ask them to imagine the team in 12 month's time - how would they like it to be? Answers here might include eagle, race horse, and leopard - much more positive responses.
- Behavioural Analysis. This is most useful when some team members tend to dominate team meetings, to the exclusion of quieter members. It is a method of recording and classifying the number of contributions made by each team member, and is a very powerful way of modifying unhelpful behaviour. One Director said that this intervention for his team was the most powerful intervention for changing behaviour he had ever experienced. Sometimes, we supplement this with preparing a sociogram, which tracks the direction of the contributions, which is useful in uncovering coalitions or conflict.
- Myers Briggs Type Indicator. Here, we help each group to understand their preferences, appreciate the value of those with preferences different to our own, and work together to capitalise on the strengths of the team.
- Processes - for negotiation, decision making, problem solving. Often teams experience problems simply through the lack of a common route map for addressing their day to day work. Equipping them with the right process means that they can use time more efficiently, reduce tensions and achieve more productive results. For example, on a recent event, the team operated as a committee, and had difficulty arriving at decisions - those who lobbied hardest and longest invariably carried their case. We got them to practice a range of voting techniques - multi voting, paired comparisons, nominal group technique.
- Café Conversations - a technique developed by Peter Senge, to enable large numbers of people to process multiple issues simultaneously.
- Ground Rules - many teams do not share common protocols for operating together effectively, so have no benchmarks when individuals behave inappropriately.
Conclusion
We receive many commissions for team building. One measure of our success is that several clients, upon promotion, ask us immediately to facilitate a team building event for their new teams. Two clients have, to date, asked us to run four team events for them, over a period of several years, with successive new teams.