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Structured Team Improvement

Henrik Larsen // Chief Consultant

The Benefits of Planning Structured Team Development.
As a consultant and coach, I often help companies improve their teams, and even though the process is fairly simple, there are some general obstacles and good reasons why you might fail the first time. Nevertheless, becoming aware of these pitfalls is a great start, which together with a planned and structured approach will help improve most teams. It is my hope that this post will help you do just that.

Strengthening teamwork and team spirit is not simple, and even more so when a team is geographically dispersed in different locations and without daily interaction. The general recipe is for them to do more work as a team, show them its benefits, and teach them a few skills – all as part of a long-term approach, which can be accelerated with purposely designed activities and tasks.

A team building day is just one activity in a long line of various coherent activities

Biggest Team Development Obstacle.

There can be many reasons why teamwork never goes from good to great, including everything from poor team setup and management, to missing goal alignment and trust, but more often than not, I see the right intentions failing as the team development is not planned as a structured long-term approach. We can all go for a run, and probably do quite good, but if we want to be great runners we will need a training or improvement plan, lots of practice and motivation, as well as continuous evaluation and adjustment.

Structured Team Change.

No matter what the desired change is, a structured approach will be the most effective. Make a plan for how to strengthen the team, and do not let it happen by random. Random activities and then hoping for improvement is nothing but exactly that – a hope!

Plan a year ahead and include not only your main team building and development activities but also the enforcing activities in between, as well as your success measures and team self-assessment goals. The below slide illustrates the overview of such a plan, which could be named a Team Building Plan or a Team Development Plan.

Example of long-term Team Building Plan

Comments to nearby planning example.

The mentioned Activities are all variations of experiential team building activities, chosen or designed with the team’s objectives and current stage in mind.
Assignments and pre-assignments are arranged to keep the members leaning and practicing teamwork, and to provide opportunities for them to see the elevated level of outcome achieved when they lift together.
Self-assessments helps to evaluate the team, its cooperation, according to its individual success measures and goals.
Team coaching helps the team deal with its obstacles of becoming an even greater team, and will often accelerate this greatly compared to having the team deal with their issues alone.
When mixing team building activities with different forms of team theory and tasks, we create a forum and a common language for the further improvements.

As with any plan it makes sense to include effectiveness evaluations of the plan itself. Does it work according to the intention, are there any changes and improvements to be made, or perhaps there is something to consider with the team composition?

With the above planning example in mind, it is time to identify the actual content of the plan.

Which Team Development Activities to Choose ^

There are so many great books and articles on team building readily available. In fact, so many that it may even be overwhelming to choose among the countless seemingly good ideas. Keeping the purpose of the team and its team building in mind, I usually rely on questions like the below to define the purpose and to choose content for the team development plan. Here are some random questions for you to consider with your team.

Is there a defined purpose of the team (reason for existence)?
What are the projects they are supposed to cooperate on in the coming year?
Are there any related KPIs that are common for all in the team, or perhaps a need for new ones?
Are we sure the team feels they have one common purpose, which also is their highest purpose?
How well is the team committed to this purpose? Are they conversant with the purpose?
Are there any burning platforms? Strong needs for attention? Strong motivators?
Is there a defined team building objective (improvement goal)?
If not, then work on the definition now!
What are the common skills and competencies that are either missing now or will be missing in the future?
What is the current development level, and are there any known challenges for this team?
Are there any specific issues that may hinder good teamwork and the team’s progress?
Are all the team roles covered or are any open and in need to be filled?
Do you ever evaluate your team or in any other way point out that strong teamwork is wanted?
What is your common understanding of a ‘strong team’ and ‘strong teamwork’?
Are there any rewards for good teamwork? (Or are only individual results rewarded?
Have you considered performance coaching for your team?
What common tasks could the team be working on in between team building sessions?
What are the team activity learnings and outcomes that you seek, and how do these link or translate to the working world of the team members?

Depending on the team and situation, involving the members in development planning will make for a good team activity and will foster beneficial buy-in.

Team Building Objective Verification ^

In the case that you have defined the team building objective without involving the team, it is now time to verify its correctness before your long-term development plan can be finalized. Also here, I design a set of questions to verify the chosen team building objective, which will be highly different depending on the objective. The questions might, for example, look as the below, which I would use as a base for a couple of short team member pre-interviews. Again, the questions might be very different depending on the actual team building objective.

Do you operate as a true team?
Do you feel as one team?
How often do you have the opportunity to help each other?
Have you been part of setting the goals you work to achieve?
How much trust is there on the team? [1-5 score]
Example to demonstrate your score?
Are team members willing to show vulnerability?
Is there trust in team confidentiality (discretion around things said in confidentiality)?
Do you have a Team Agreement (on how to behave in the team) or similar?
Written or verbally agreed?
How well do you remember its content?
Is it honored by all members?
(Design more questions aiming at your specific needs.)

Call to Action ^

Here are some ideas for immediate action.

Be one of the dedicated leaders who actually plans team development – start making the plan now!
How do you verify your team purpose and team building objective?
How about boosting your commitment by telling someone that you will finish this plan within three weeks?

Original Location : HWAO Consulting