Team Building
Pauline’s Team Story – Background
Pauline manages a team of five, formed three months ago with a six month lead-in time to carry out an internal audit of her company’s IT system. She met with the team recently to discover that very little activity had occurred and nobody could say why the first goal of classifying equipment had not been met. Some apathy is evident too. Pauling asked CDS to help solve the problem and ensure that the deadline is met on schedule.
Our Intervention
On being consulted, CDS profiled each team member and provided one to one individual feedbacks. A group team session took place which identified each team role, along with the overall team role.
We discovered a number of issues:
- Team not being formed adequately, so that team functions were not properly embedded. Pauline’s development issue here is improving ‘selection, start-up and set-up of teams’
- Lack of strengths in 3 main team functions – A Team development issue which created an awareness of individual strengths and gaps in the overall team strengths. The issue here was to acknowledge the deficiencies and to re-engineer
- Team roles clustered around the ‘co-operation’ and ‘teamworking’ functions. This was a team development issue to either develop 3 secondary roles, consider new part-time members, and or coaching.
- Lack of practice actually working together. Organisational Development – team must be allowed ‘storm’ (acclimatise to each other in managed setting) after initial formation.
Outcome
Each team member realised his/her team strengths and weaknesses and thus greater cooperation and energy ensued.
Development activities showed the team working dynamically in a safe setting, and through games, activities, discussions and role play, the team profiles were examined for different team goals.
Three fundamental roles were missing – leading, innovation and accomplishment. An agreed action plan was developed so these were either fostered or factored in.
Countering the gaps efficiently could only occur after they had been identified and accepted out of the group session, not imposed by others.
The overall outcome was a well balanced functioning team meeting its deadlines.