12 steps to make a good team a great team!

12 steps to make a good team great!

1. Roles
An effective team will have a blend of different talents, abilities and personalities. It is important to remember that leadership is only one of many vital team roles. A balanced team generally will have thinking, supporting, doing and challenger style roles in addition to the leadership role.

2. Clear objectives and agreed goals
An effective team knows the goal it is working toward. Having clear objectives and agreed goals is more than knowing what results you want. The goals of the individual must be reconciled with those of the team for effective teamwork to occur. Begin with the end in mind to scope not only where you want to go, but also what are the milestones necessary to get there.

3. Openness and confrontation
In an effective team, people feel that they can state their own views, differences of opinions, interests and problems without fear of ridicule. There is no "stab in the back" mentality.

4. Support and trust
This is the skeleton on which an effective team is built. Support is not sympathy, but strengthening through assistance. With trust, people can talk freely about their fears and problems - knowing that they will receive from team members the help they need to become more effective.

5. Cooperation and conflict
People put the team's success before their own. Individuals trust and respect the abilities of others and are not suspicious of their motives. Conflict is also present and valued in an effective team. The team will work through an issue that causes conflict and use the result to achieve objectives. Conflict helps to avoid complacency and laziness and can often be the source of new ideas.

6. Sound procedures
The effective team thinks results first and methods second, but also realises that sound and proven working methods and decision-making help to achieve results. Good procedures help ideas to be captured and worked through without being lost and also ensure optimum usage of human and material resources for a challenge. Plan well, brief well, execute well and then de-brief.

7. Appropriate leadership
The best teams have leaders whose leadership style varies according to the situation and the needs of the individual group members and the group itself. In fact, the role of leader in an open and supportive team, can change from person to person as dictated by the situation. This situational form of leadership requires both the tolerance of members and the control of egos.

8. Regular review
Good teams understand not only the team's character, but they also look at the way that a team works, how it arrives at decisions, deals with conflicts, etc. They then use this information to develop new methods or plans and then implement these ideas. Reviews are best when teams are willing to go beyond personality and simple causes to actual root causes with a view to improving operating methods.

9. Individual development
Members of high performing teams feel good. They have opportunities to attempt new and challenging situations within the team framework and know they have the support of those around them. They are motivated to be successful.

10. Sound inter-group relations
The successful team can often appear threatening to less successful groups. This can cause isolation and hostility. The effective team works at its relations with other teams and ensures that help for others will be given when needed.

11. Good communications
Team members are aware of developments within their own team and how this fits into the larger picture of the organisation. When people understand why things are being done, they avoid duplication of effort. Rumour is replaced by fact.

12. Celebrate and acknowledge success
In the same spirit that errors are identified openly and reviewed for improvement to occur, success needs to be identified and celebrated to ensure that "what we do well" is equally addressed in tandem with areas for improvement.www.teambuildingaustralia.com.au

Team Working

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?"

(From Scholtes, Peter R., The Team Handbook, Joiner Associates (1988))