Team Development with
Goodwill Training
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As
with workshops under other headings, these workshops are custom designed for
particular customers, can be run on their own to address a particular need or
can and often do form part of a broader programme. These will often include some
self awareness profiles, such as Belbin
or MBTI to
help people appreciate each other better.
Roles
in Teams
Introducing
the concepts researched by Belbin and others, which show that everyone brings
different strengths, ways of working, likes and dislikes to a team. How to
appreciate these different gifts, how to manage them and maximise their benefit
to the team. Usually included in our other team programmes, when appropriate.
Self-Managed
Teams
Looking
at how groups develop and mature into genuine self managed teams. Exploring the
necessary leadership, competences and culture for teams to become authentically
autonomous.
Team
Building
Helping
new teams to come together, or established teams to improve their performance.
Looking at team objectives, culture and processes to help develop team spirit
and identity. Typically using practical activities, sometimes outdoor tasks, to
highlight and practice team behaviours, structured review processes are used to
help the team agree its own path to effectiveness.
Working
in Teams
Aimed
at people who need to develop their team working skills in a general context,
for project work or for working in multi disciplined teams.
Innovation in Teams
- see article below. |
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Basic
Team Working
What is a team anyway?
-A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are
committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which
they hold themselves mutually accountable
-Small Number
-Complementary Skills
-Common Purpose & Performance Goals
-Common Approach
-Mutual Accountability
Ten common teaming problems
-Floundering
-Overbearing participants
-Dominating participants
-Reluctant participants
-Unquestioned acceptance of opinions as facts
-Rush to accomplishment
-Attribution
-Discounts and "plops"
-Wanderlust: digression and tangents
-Feuding members
Five issues to be considered in team building
1. Interdependence
This is the issue of how each member's outcomes are determined, at least
in part, by the actions of the other members. The structure of the team
task should be such that it requires cooperative interdependence.
Functioning independently of other team members, or competing with them
should lead to sub optimal outcomes for the entire team. Tasks that
require the successful performance of sub tasks by all team members are
called divisible, conjunctive tasks.
2. Goal Specification
It is very important for team members to have common goals for team
achievement, as well as to communicate clearly about individual goals they
may have. The process of clarifying goals may well engage all of the
issues on this list. Indeed, shared goals is one of the definitional
properties of the concept "team." A simple, but useful, team
building task is to assign a newly formed team the task of producing a
mission and goals statement.
3. Cohesiveness
This term refers to the attractiveness of team membership. Teams are
cohesive to the extent that membership in them is positively valued;
members are drawn toward the team. In task oriented teams the concept can
be differentiated into two sub concepts, social cohesiveness and task
cohesiveness. Social cohesiveness refers to the bonds of interpersonal
attraction that link team members. Although a high level of social
cohesiveness may make team life more pleasant, it is not highly related to
team performance. Nevertheless, the patterns of interpersonal attraction
within a team are a very prominent concern. Team building exercises that
have a component of fun or play are useful in allowing attraction bonds to
develop. Task cohesiveness refers to the way in which skills and abilities
of the team members mesh to allow effective performance.
4. Roles and Norms
All teams develop a set of roles and norms over time. In task oriented
teams, it is essential that the role structure enables the team to cope
effectively with the requirements of the task. When the task is divisible
and conjunctive, as are most of the important team tasks in our society,
the assignment of roles to members who can perform them effectively is
essential. Active consideration of the role structure can be an important
part of a team building exercise. Task roles may be rotated so that all
team members experience, and learn from, all roles. Even then, it is
important that the norm governing the assignment of roles is understood
and accepted by team members.
Norms are the rules governing the behavior of team members, and include
the rewards for behaving in accord with normative requirements, as well as
the sanctions for norm violations. Norms will develop in a team, whether
or not they are actively discussed.
5. Communication
Effective interpersonal communication is vital to the smooth
functioning of any task team. There are many ways of facilitating the
learning of effective communication skills. Active listening exercises,
practice in giving and receiving feedback, practice in checking for
comprehension of verbal messages, are all aimed at developing skills. It
is also important for a team to develop an effective communication
network; who communicates to whom; is there anybody "out of the
loop?" Norms will develop governing communication. Do those norms
encourage everyone to participate, or do they allow one or two dominant
members to claim all the "air time?" |
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All work and no play
… makes for an innovation dead-end
New research by London Business School professor
Babis Mainemelis and doctoral candidate Sarah Ronson shows how the best
ideas are born in fields of play and how to ingrain more time and space
for creativity within organisational settings.
Next time you spend a little more than your lunch
hour playing with your colleagues, don't feel too guilty. Professor Babis
Mainemelis of London Business School has identified two fundamental ways
in which play has a positive impact on creativity in companies. In a new
paper to be published in Research in Organizational Behavior in August
2006, Professor Mainemelis and phd student Sarah Ronson focus on two
manifestations of play in organisations. The first is play as a form of engagement
with work: when employees turn their core work into play, play facilitates
the cognitive, affective, and motivational processes that creativity
requires. The second is play as a form of diversion from work, which is
much more than water cooler gossiping. Play as a diversion, argue
Mainemelis and Ronson, fosters creativity in a peripheral way by creating
a psychological and social-relational climate that is conducive to
creativity.
Current normal work environments can be seen to
stifle creativity. But should we worry about this? Work is what one gets
paid for, and productivity surely is key? Apparently not. According to
Professor Mainemelis creativity is increasingly important to companies,
and not only those in the so-called 'creative' industries. Encouraging
creativity and innovation via play is beneficial on many levels: it can
generate creative ideas for new products or processes; it can calibrate an
organisation's ability to flexibly respond to future challenges; and it
can also contribute to the creation of a social context that stimulates
creativity in the first place.
So what can organisations do? Professor
Mainemelis argues that companies can nurture play in three ways: by
creating a playful work environment; by providing freedom, time, and other
resources that allow employees to select and turn their work into play;
and by delineating a dedicated organisational time and space in which
employees feel safe to play freely with new ideas that may not seem at
first useful in generating new products or processes. Mainemelis and
Ronson observe that some companies have started to recognize the power of
play. Companies like IDEO and Pixar have created very playful work
environments, while companies like Google, Gore, and 3M, encourage people
to use up to 20% of their work time to play freely with new (even strange)
ideas which may lead up to new products or processes.
For example, the manufacturer Gore's 'Elixir'
non-breakable guitar-wires were invented by an engineer who used his
"free-time" to improve the gear cables of his mountain bike.
Then he asked how these cables could be used to develop less brittle
guitar strings. He teamed up with an engineer who had invented Gore's
'Glide' non-breakable dental floss and with a second colleague who was an
amateur musician. They played together with this idea for 3 years without
being subjected to any form of direction or control. Today, Gore controls
35% of the acoustic guitar strings market, although Gore had absolutely
nothing to do with the music market prior to this invention. In fact, the
Elixir guitar wires were invented in one of Gore's medical product plants!
Mainemelis and Ronson argue that play is the only form of behaviour that
can lead to such unexpected and surprising discoveries. |
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