Building the Team

Every successful manager and leader is doing team building. Energy lost to gossip, anger, blame, frustration, personality conflicts, fear, goal and role confusion is now being constructively directed toward fully understood and common goals built on trustful relationships and dialogue skills. Informal work patterns, rules, practices and habits are supporting the organization rather than slowing it down. People are confronting each other in ways that make it safe to respond, and responding in ways that make it easy to understand. Team members are making choices for greatness over safety.

Team building gets people focused on supporting goals and helps build clarity into the decision-making process. Team Building also gets team members looking at their own personal effectiveness and identifies ways to improve everyone's problem-solving, communication, strategic planning and goal accomplishment capabilities.

Taylor-Nelson does team building with a unique built-in e-based assessment and evaluation  process that works to make sure that team learning and improvement sticks long after the event.

WHAT TEAM BUILDING IS AND IS NOT

When people come together in the work place, activity takes place on two levels or planes. The task or what people work on is one plane. The other plane is how (the process by which) people carry out their tasks.

Team building is about the "how" we work together, our emotional intelligence in action (EQ). IQ without EQ suffers!

Team building is an on-going group process specifically tailored to the unique needs, components and characteristics of the work unit. An effective team building experience takes into account the design, the opportunities, the particular constraints and environmental forces acting upon the team.

Team building is not a generic off-the-shelf training session; the team works on its own issues and develops its own unique strengths. Team building is not a one-time "fix-it" session but an on-going process that can be easily built in to the day to day business activities.

Step One

Effective team building starts with the process of collecting data. This can be done in a variety of ways, including meetings with small groups of employees, one-on-one interviews, written surveys and questionnaires, 360 degree assessments or web-based values surveys. All responses are kept strictly confidential. In broad terms, information is collected in the areas of what is going well, not well, what is getting in the way of performance and on the ideas held regarding what needs to be done. The data is then analyzed by the consultant team, and a the team building session is designed around these issues.

Step Two

The work team gets together for a period of time usually two and one half days away from the work site. The consultant team assures that everyone in the group is "protected" and the environment is "safe". Although the consultants use the data to come up with a preliminary framework within which the team building session activities will take place, the group actually determines the specifics of what needs to be addressed while the team building event unfolds. Taylor-Nelson is uniquely equipped to turn on a dime offering mini-training sessions as the learnable moments occur.

• Usually the team devises ground rules that can be adapted to govern their relations in between meetings.
• They clarify what the best performance of their team will look like and strategize on how to achieve that performance.
•  They experience win-win solutions to problems through group exercises and decision making.
• They are grounded in contemporary leadership and dialogue skills.
• They learn more about the advantages and disadvantages to their unique way of responding to problems, decision making, conflict and interpersonal communication.
• They learn and practice win-win negotiating skills.
• They learn how the informal organization and their norms powerfully impact their success.
• They agree on the values they want to govern their team and strategize on how to make those values come alive in significant ways.
• They set goals and make plans for the teams and organization's future growth and development.
• They learn how their personal style and behavior either works for or against team outcomes.
• They clarify goals, roles and rules that govern their relationship.
• They learn about new ways of planning for and directing change efforts.
• They make personal commitments to each other and the team.
• They devise strategies to internalize and institutionalize their commitments.

Step Three

At the conclusion of the session, the group decides what the next steps need to be and what follow-up will look like. Responsibility charting, commitment planning and self monitoring is necessary to sustain a healthy team once the initial groundwork, agreements and climate have been set.

Step Four

Evaluation of the team building process is recommended periodically to ascertain the impact of the initial session and the effectiveness of the follow through. Healthy teams assess where they are every three months, and revitalize their commitment by coming together to address the current issues as needed. Taylor-Nelson provides e-based questionnaires to team members to report their progress and the status of  team and organizational health and vitality.

  WHAT KINDS OF ISSUES ARE GENERALLY ADDRESSED?

Issues addressed by team building typically fall in one or more of the following categories:

Mission &        goals	Roles and Relationships	Structure
Systems change	Trust	Leadership
Employee morale	Transition management	Mergers & acquisitions
Values clarification	Group or interpersonal conflict	Strategic planning

   Why Off site and overnight? Ask anyone who has been through team building and they will tell you they spent two and one half days "somewhere" doing it. Over the years this has become standard, basic, minimum practice.  Some teams spend the whole week together, especially if they are beginning major new work together or are coming together for the first time.

• All the parties and the work place organization needs to know this work is special and not just a passing fad.
• Off site time and effort demonstrates that the organization and parties are serious about improving how work gets done.
• We can accomplish more than 40 hours of work in a two and one half day team building session.
• We can follow up with important interpersonal stuff if we have the time and opportunity to keep people together  for a couple of days.
• We need everyone's undivided attention to the concepts and techniques underlying effective teamwork.
• The team needs to know each other personally to start a stronger framework of trust so they will not second guess each other when the going gets tough.
• The rest of the organization needs to see a united front, a major new beginning.
• We will be learning and practicing new skills. When we return to familiar home circumstances at the end of the day the chance that these learning's will be lost is high.
• We will need time to work through some confrontations that require healing.
• We will be asking people to spend time by themselves, journaling and reflecting on what kind of organization they want to cause.
• We will need special time for pairs of people to walk and work together to discuss thorny issues they are trying to work through.
• We want the team to learn to depend upon one another in their daily living arrangement for a short period of time.
• The team needs to experience a new beginning so they can look back and measure progress from a new beginning point.
• Friends and loved ones have formed impressions of the workplace, and we want to work away from those reinforcing influences for a short period of time, giving change a jump start.
• Team members need to demonstrate that they are willing to make a personal commitment to change; being away from home and sharing accommodations is a hardship for some, and willingness to put oneself in an uncomfortable setting underscores a person's ability to put service over self interest.
• This investment in time and the personal commitment of organization leaders helps to reconfirm that key stakeholders are sincere in trying new ways of doing things.

How the time is used together. What do we do?

Typically the first half day is warming up stuff:

• Reviewing our purpose.
• Some win-win exercises.
• Getting the basics of our style differences known.
• Appreciative inquiry
• Principles, assumptions, steps and techniques of teamwork

The second day is usually devoted to skill building:

• Starship Factory simulation
• Conflict styles and cycles
• Dialogue skills and communication formulas
• Confrontation exercises in the evening
• Norms mapping
• Values work
• Group and individual conflict work
• Identifying key success actors and how to measure their accomplishment.

The Third day bring things to closure and on-going evaluation commitments:

• Visioning an ideal future
• Settling on the kinds of values we want to support
• Behavioralizing values and commitments
• Setting goals 
• Contracting around expectations and new behaviors
• Agreeing on a code-of-trust
• Agreeing on consequences of broken agreements
• Charting responsibility and getting the new design started
• Celebrating our new team.

              Let us know if you would like our free article on team building.  Contact Taylor-Nelson

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