Team Building

“I don’t know how you read our minds about the cross currents and the jealousies, but it made such a difference.” – Senior bank manager

If a team is not working effectively together, a business is – at the very least – performing below its potential.

But how can you spot the signs of an underperforming team?

This checklist may help:

• Poor relationships with customers or other stakeholders?
• Unclear roles?
• Conflict pushed under the carpet?
• Does the team have the right members with the right skills?
• Poor team communication and boring meetings?
• Goals and purposes unclear?
• Low standards?
• Performance falling short?

We have worked with teams in meltdown, where radical steps were required to get them back on track, but it is best – obviously – not to let things get to that point. Team building is not done most effectively in the face of a crisis. Rather, regular intervention with good teams will help ensure they continue to run effectively. Many managers come to us to help newly-formed teams, created through reorganisation or new appointments, get off on the right foot.

The sorts of intervention we offer

One of the first things to establish is whether the group of people we are being asked to help is a genuine team or just a group that occasionally comes together for meetings. The acid test is whether their work is interdependent.

If it is, we will be pleased to have a strictly confidential conversation about the possible courses of action.

A common starting point is to talk to team members to gather some preliminary ideas about what is going wrong.

What we learn there determines just how we proceed. Here are a few of the many options

• Facilitated discussion
• Role clarification
• ‘Games’ –- we have an amazing selection of entertaining activities which convey clear messages
• Coaching for each individual
• Teaching e.g. about team theory
• Psychometric instruments
• ‘Whole System Events’ involving other internal and external stakeholders
• Giving and receiving feedback
• Using actors in team building exercises
• The Climate Lab – an excellent management simulation (available from Management Futures)
• Learning sets
• Goal setting
• Outdoor team events involving safe and ‘non macho’ team building
• Process simplification
• Training courses
• Meetings with other teams – joint problem solving
• Role playing
• Brainstorming
• Belbin team roles exercise

Contact Alan Rogers, Executive Director, for inquiries, details of fees or to arrange a no-commitment meeting with a coach. Tel: 020 7242 4030 or email: alan.rogers@managementfutures.co.uk.