Team Building

Team building in an organizational consulting context occurs when a group embarks upon a process of self-assessment to gauge its own effectiveness as a team by seeking feedback on its current strengths and weaknesses as a team; and to improve its own performance as a team by using the assessment feedback to design a strategy for closing any gap between the group’s desired and actual states.  The team building process usually includes clarifying the group’s goal(s), building group members’ ownership of them, and identifying the inhibitors to teamwork and removing or overcoming them, or if they cannot be removed, mitigating their negative effects on the group’s teamwork.

We design and facilitate customized training and data-based interventions that help the members of a group or team within an agency or organization to assess and improve their effectiveness in working together as a unit.  When we provide this kind of team building assistance our primary objectives include some or all of the following:

• accelerating team development
• strengthening team cohesiveness
• building team effectiveness

Accelerating Team Development. When we facilitate the acceleration of team development, our main tasks are to help the individual members of a team appreciate the principal elements of teamwork and to reduce those elements to a set of competencies that the individual members can recognize and identify, understand and value, self-assess against and reflect on, experiment with and practice applying on the job, and ultimately internalize and master.  Our team effectiveness training gives participants skills and knowledge that increase their ability to function as a member or leader of a team, and ultimately to increase the effectiveness of their teams.  It addresses topics such as problem solving, decision making, communications, goal setting, meeting management, conflict resolution, research tools, presentation skills and team success factors.  Participants in some of our team effectiveness workshops come from a variety of different teams.  In other instances, entire teams come to our workshops to benefit from learning together.  In the latter cases, we combine teamwork training with team building by affording the intact teams opportunities to assess their effectiveness and use the learning from the workshop to improve their team performance.

Strengthening Team Cohesiveness. The team cohesiveness interventions which we design and facilitate typically concentrate on: creating an agenda for a team building meeting or a team task meeting; identifying the individual members’ information processing, problem solving or decision making styles and how those styles are influencing the team’s performance; helping the individual members to identify and communicate about issues they feel are limiting the team’s performance; and identifying and providing for the changing needs of the team such as, for example, when there is a change of team leadership

• selecting and orientating members
• defining and clarifying members’ roles
• setting goals and planning actions
• getting motivated for and executing tasks
• allocating and managing time
• surfacing values, beliefs and interests
• clarifying expectations and preferences
• solving problems and making decisions
• managing conflict and resolving disputes
• maintaining and managing boundaries
• communicating interpersonally and with stakeholders
• diagnosing and solving the team’s own problems

Our data-driven interventions typically originate with a client’s request for a team building process and the development of a contract between us and the client spelling out the various tasks that will be involved in designing and implementing an appropriate intervention.

The first of these tasks usually is our conduct of data gathering relevant to the client’s work team(s) situation and objectives using some combination of interviews, questionnaires and focus groups. The next step typically involves our processing and analyzing the data collected, formulating conclusions and recommendations, providing feedback to the client, and jointly determining with the client whether, and if so how, a team building intervention process should be designed and implemented.  Assuming there is a joint decision to go forward, we next design a team building intervention model customized to the organizational context and purpose of the client’s work team(s).  One of our team building intervention models typically includes some or all of the following steps:

Step 1. Conduct one-on-one interviews with the client and with team members to help clarify the team’s mission and purpose or to create a new vision for the team. 

Step 2. Use one of the many collaborative processes in our inventory of team building activities either to facilitate the team’s efforts to write a mission or purpose statement or to conduct a values clarification or future visioning exercise with the team. 

Step 3. Conduct one-on-one interviews and/or one or more focus groups within the team’s larger organization to secure feedback on the team’s draft mission, purpose, values or vision statement, or on its operational effectiveness. 

Step 4. Convene a meeting to provide feedback to the team on the results of the one-on-one interviews and/or the focus groups. 

Step 5. Help the team to develop an action plan to address and resolve the issues raised, themes presented and problems identified by setting dates and times for follow-up team meetings and assigning individual responsibilities for specific follow-up action items.

We can and often do extend the team building model described above to address elements of a team’s operational effectiveness such as role clarification, team development, problem solving, conflict resolution, boundary management and/or stakeholder communications.  Experience has taught us that the key to using the team building model and related collaborative processes successfully is ensuring that the client understands they are vehicles for improving the team’s performance and for increasing its ability to be self-reflective, self-directed and self-renewing.

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