Groups & Teams Overview
Setting Team Goals and Providing Team Feedback
Setting Goals and Providing Feedback
The team’s interpersonal communication contributes to its success and the quality of what it produces. Periodic self-assessments should consider the team’s progress, how it has gotten there, and where it is headed to allow the team to gauge its effectiveness and take steps to improve its performance.
To assess performance, a team may seek feedback from group members to identify the team’s strengths and weaknesses. Use feedback to perform a gap analysis. Once areas for improvement are identified, team members and others (such as managers) should develop a plan to close performance gaps.
Poor communication and conflict will disrupt a team’s performance, possibly caused by personality clashes between members. Another type of team assessment involves diagnostic tests (such as True Colors) to identify the dominant personality traits of each member. Understanding personality differences among team members can help change how they interact with each other.
Accountability in Teams
Accountability is acknowledging and assuming responsibility for actions, products, and decisions. In teams, accountability means that all members share responsibility for their collective output and their goals’ success. Since teamwork is organized at the collective level rather than on a per-person basis, its results are the sum of each member’s efforts. Organizations often use team-based rewards to hold teams accountable for their work.
Accountability for team members also implies that individuals have a responsibility to each other to complete tasks and contribute to the group effort. One benefit of teamwork is the mutual support and assistance that team members can provide each other. A sense of accountability to the team incentivizes individuals to provide help when needed. Since team tasks are interdependent, the quality of one person’s work affects that of the others. Teams use norms and other social pressure to hold one another accountable.
For teams to be fully accountable, they need to have the resources, skills, and authority to do what they will be held responsible for their goals. If leaders expect teams to accept the blame for failing to achieve an assigned goal, they should ensure teams have the tools and authority. For this reason, the choices made about goal-setting, team composition, and process design directly affect the degree of responsibility a team can assume for its performance.
Choosing Team Size, Roles, and Individual Strengths
Team size and composition affect team processes and outcomes. The optimal size and composition of teams depend on the scope of the team’s goals. With too few people, a team will not have the resources and skills to complete its tasks. Too many members can make communication and coordination difficult and lead to poor team performance.
Research shows that teams perform best with between five and nine members. Dr. Meredith Belbin conducted extensive research on teams, suggesting that the optimum team size is eight roles plus a specialist as needed. Belbin’s webpage describes the roles necessary for a team to thrive. Fewer than five members resulted in decreased perspectives and diminished creativity—membership over twelve increased conflict and more significant potential of subgroups forming that can disrupt team cohesion.
The mix of knowledge and expertise on a team is also essential. Individuals should be selected for teams so the group has all the expertise needed to achieve its goals. For this reason, cross-functional teams may be larger than groups formed to work on less complex activities. Similarly, a task force that makes recommendations in a short time frame would benefit from fewer members.
Teams benefit from similarities in the background among members, which may reduce conflict and miscommunication. Having fewer differences can also reduce a team’s time to become an influential working group since there is less need to adjust individual work styles. Diverse teams often produce better products due to their differing perspectives. Team members with different skill sets also reduce redundancies and allow more efficient assignment of people to various teams.
Team Building
Team-building activities require the participation of all team members. These often occur when a team is first created and can include activities such as assigning the team a brief exercise to begin the collaboration process. Sometimes organizations use more intensive and time-consuming activities such as off-site, day-long retreats, including interpersonal bonding exercises, simulations, personality and communication style assessments, and group dynamics games. The human resources department may coordinate team building, though sometimes companies hire consultants or trainers to facilitate those activities.
A team can also benefit from team building after its work has begun. Sometimes teams recognize that members are missing abilities that make collaboration easier, such as problem-solving or conflict-resolution skills. Training sessions that address these deficiencies build the team’s ability to work together. Social norms may develop after people have worked together that interfere with a team’s performance. Individuals might be afraid to challenge decisions. A discussion among team members creates an opportunity to address factors standing in the way of collaboration.
Source https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-management/chapter/building-successful-teams/ March 3, 2021
Team-Building Exercises
There are several reasons for organizations to use team-building exercises. Most activities focus on building trust and dependence, improving communications, fostering connections, strengthening problem-solving skills, and enhancing decision-making. Ultimately, team-building activities should be fun and challenging, fostering behaviors to improve overall productivity. Below you’ll find a list of several simple and inexpensive team-building exercises.
- Make connections – A good game for new teams to make connections with each other is Two Truths and a Lie. This game requires the team to go around the table and tell three personal items about themselves. Two items should be accurate, and one item must be a lie. The object is for the team members to guess which item is the lie.
- Improve communication – One way to improve communication within a team is to play a classic game of Pictionary. Divide the team into groups of two or three people. Each person should take turns drawing while others guess what is being drawn.
- Eliminate stereotypes – An excellent activity to eliminate stereotypes is playing Who Am I? The game requires the team to develop professions and write them on individual pieces of paper. Some professions they come up with might include postal worker, chef, fashion designer, accountant, actor, or mechanic. Then, team members tape a specific profession on each person’s back. Afterward, each member should ask other members questions about what profession they might have on their back, gathering the answers as clues to this profession. Each person then has to guess which profession type is on his or her back.
- Enhance problem-solving – The game memory is a great way to enhance problem-solving within a group. The leader will assemble a structure from kids’ blocks in this game. S(he) will then divide people into groups of three to four. One person in each group takes a turn looking at the structure for 10 seconds before returning to the group and trying to recreate the structure. Each member is given 30 seconds to create the structure before the next person in the group is given a turn.
- Build trust – The obstacle course game is an exercise used to build trust and teamwork. In this game, use cones or chairs to set up an obstacle course in a large conference room or cafeteria room. Next, the team is broken into pairs, preferably partnering with people with trust issues. Blindfold one person in each pair, and then have the other person use verbal cues to lead the blindfolded person through the obstacle course.
In summary, teamwork is essential to organizations in every industry and every country. A team needs to be cohesive and work well together to be successful. In a famous quote by Babe Ruth, a well-known Hall of Fame baseball player, reiterates the significance of good teamwork by stating, “The way a team plays as a whole determines its success. You may have the greatest bunch of individual stars in the world, but if they don’t play together, the club won’t be worth a dime”. Team-building is crucial in establishing a strong, well-connected, motivated group that can accomplish team goals.
Summary
- Complex problems, rapidly changing technology, and the expanding global economy have amplified teamwork in the business environment.
- Teamwork helps employees feel connected, be more productive, and achieve greater happiness.
- Team-building is a continuous process that helps a team develop into a unified group.
- Characteristics of effective teams include clearly defined goals alongside high levels of motivation, communication, collaboration, commitment, innovation, trust, and respect.
- Dysfunctional teams exhibit conflict, confusion, poor communication, lack of problem-solving, participation, negative behavior, low creativity, low morale, high complaints, and decreased productivity.
- Team-building activities should be fun and challenging while fostering teamwork to improve productivity.
Source: Saylor Academy
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Last modified: Thursday, November 5, 2020, 6:17 PM
Stages of Team Development
The Forming–Storming–Norming–Bruce Tuckman first proposed a performing model of group development.
The Forming Stage
The first step in a team’s life is bringing together the members. In this stage, individuals define and assign tasks, establish a schedule, organize the team’s work, and other start-up matters. In addition to focusing on the scope of the team’s purpose and how to approach it, individuals in the formation stage also gather information and impressions about each other. Since people generally want to be accepted by others, they usually avoid conflict and disagreement during this period. Team members may begin to work on their tasks independently, not yet focused on their relationships with fellow team members.
The Storming Stage
Once their efforts are underway, team members need clarity about their activities and goals and explicit guidance about how they will work independently and collectively. This leads to a period known as storming—because it can involve brainstorming ideas and usually causes disruption. During the storming stage, members begin to share ideas, and team members open up to each other and confront others’ ideas and perspectives.
Because storming can be contentious, members who are averse to a conflict will find it unpleasant or even painful. Storming may distract from the work. In some cases storming (i.e., disagreements) can be resolved quickly. Other times a team never leaves this stage and becomes stuck and unable to do its work. Patience and consideration toward team members and their views go a long way toward avoiding this.
The Norming Stage
Successfully moving through the storming stage means a team has clarified its purpose and strategy to achieve its goals. It now transitions to a period focused on developing shared values and how team members will work together. Collaboration norms can address issues ranging from when to use specific modes of communication, such as e-mail versus telephone, to how meetings are run and what to do when conflicts arise. Norms become a way to simplify choices and facilitate collaboration since members have shared expectations about how work will get done.
The Performing Stage
Once norms are established and the team functions as a unit, it enters the performing stage. Members efficiently work together on interdependent tasks and can communicate and coordinate effectively. There are fewer time-consuming distractions based on interpersonal and group dynamics. For this reason, motivation is usually high and team members have confidence in their ability to attain goals.
While these four stages—forming, storming, norming, and performing—are distinct and generally sequential, they often blend into one another and even overlap. A team may pass through one phase only to return to it. For example, if a new member joins the team, there may be a second brief formation period while that person is integrated. A team may also need to return to an earlier stage if its performance declines. Team-building exercises are often done to help a team through its development process.
Source https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-management/chapter/building-successful-teams/ March 3, 2021
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