Successful Team Management (Part II)

In Part I, we discussed the stages of team development and how consultants can help groups determine their purpose and direction. This part deals with enhancing groups' skills in achieving their purpose.

Decision Making

In my experience in consulting and leadership, reaching a decision through consensus can be most difficult, but, in my opinion, worth the trouble. The business world seems to program employees with a "win-lose" mentality. Group members can often, without intervention, polarize into camps based on this paradigm, and never reach consensus. Some ways consultants can help groups reach a decision making point are:

The Thumbs-Up Method: All group members are asked to vote when a decision point appears to be approaching. Members are asked to vote with a "thumbs-up" if they can live with the decision, even if it is not their first choice. If they cannot bring themselves to live with the decision, they must vote with a "thumbs-down." The group has not reached a decision if all parties cannot vote affirmatively.

Pro and Con Evaluations: In this scenario, a group leader assists in posting all pros and cons in a given decision as given by group members. This process can happen in person, in writing, or via electronic means. Then the group meets to evaluate and score the pros and cons on a scale of 1 to 10. The totals are then tallied, and the group can make a decision based on the scores. This process helps prioritize the positives and negatives of any given course of action, and brings more logic and less emotion to the table.

Communication

How can a group leader manage conflict between two or more headstrong individuals with differing views? Often these types of conflict can plunge a group into frustration and inaction. In my experience, these steps have proven effective in resolving these differences.

1. Meet individually and privately with the group members in the conflict. Seek to understand their position and feelings. Try to narrow the focus of the conflict: is it over ideas, implementation, or personalities? Often, just the process of getting the concerns out in the open with the group leader will be enough to defuse the hostility.

2. Use open-ended questions in your facilitation. Forcing positions with questions such as "Don't you agree that...?" or "Will you support this option?" often put people into uncomfortable corners. Instead, use questions that give freedom to participants to express their concerns for the whole group. You might consider themes such as "How do you feel about...?" or "What are the pros and cons of this course of action?"

3. Develop and explore a worst-case scenario. Examine the risks associated with a given decision and its implementation. As this process occurs, participants often come to understand objections that seemed unreasonable before.

Team Leadership

While one of the recent buzzwords of management is "self-directed teams," the truth is that teams eventually need someone to emerge as a leader. Some ways for formal or informal leaders to steer group work include:

1. Focus on roles. Help the group members understand the various roles of group members (creativity, organization, strategy and reality-checkers) and to see that each role is important. There is a place for every member.

2. Demonstrate how team effort builds on prior efforts. If all members are important to the group process, a leader or facilitator must help the team members understand their interrelationships.

3. Use good listening skills. Follow the recommendation of Steven Covey to "seek first to understand, then to be understood." Only when a member is satisfied that he or she has been understood in his or her intended context will the member feel valued and involved.

Conclusion

The principle of synergy is the idea that groups together functioning properly can accomplish more than the sum of the efforts of the individual members. Synergistic groups should be the aim of every consultant, and by using many of the tools outlined in this article, synergy can be an achievable goal.

Successful Team Management (Part I)

Many years ago, I was asked to be chairman of a team which was tasked with developing a proposal which would be controversial. The results were something less than ideal. I learned through sad experience in this setting the importance of understanding team process and the stages of team development.

Much of the work which management consultants do involves working in teams, or supporting teams used by our clients. A basic understanding of team development and how successful teams succeed is critical to success as a management consultant. This article addresses the processes of successful teams and also discusses helping teams set proper purpose and direction.

In the mid-1960s research done by Bruce Tuckman of the Naval Medical Research Institute explored group dynamics and explained how teams develop and mature. Tuckman's research led him to conclude that groups develop through four stages. He identified in the stages as forming, storming, norming, and performing.

Forming is the stage in which the group first comes together and begins to become a team. The behavior of team members, prompted by a their feelings of excitement, anxiety, and dependence, raise issues which must be resolved if the team is to become productive. This is a stage of turmoil , and therefore teams at this stage usually do not make much progress on their task.

In storming, the second stage of team development, team members begin to realize the amount of work that will be required and often start to panic. They begin to see the disparity between the their initial hopes and the reality of the work ahead. Successful conflict resolution techniques are needed in this stage to help the team resolve its differences.

Stage 3, identified as norming, helps members get used to working together. They start helping each other rather than competing. Most of the conflict begun in stage two has been resolved. During this stage, the task of the team leader is to help the team adjust to its newfound identity and develop members' self-confidence.

The final stage is the performing stage, in which team members have developed a comfort level with each other and with their assignment. At this stage, they are an effective working unit, and the team begins to perform competently. In this stage, the main task of the leader is to help members develop group maintenance skills.

By understanding these four stages of team development, a consultant may assess how the team is functioning and what needs to happen in order for the team to be successful.

Purpose and direction

When team goals and are not clear, teams often get bogged down as individuals pull in different directions. Members may be unclear as to the team's mission, or they can be uncertain about the urgency attached to reaching a specific goal. Conversely, teams become so caught up in "getting along" that nothing is accomplished.

Odette Pollar, the founder of Time Management Systems, recommends four steps in helping groups solidify purpose and direction.

Step 1 is to summarize the progress of the group to date in a non-threatening, non-evaluative manner. In this way, group members will see the consultant's perception of their current status and be able to evaluate its accuracy.

In the second step, the consultant should ask for an assessment of the current situation. Pollar recommends the question, "We seem to be unable to reach clear decisions. What part has our team building process or our structure or played in this?"

The consultant should then determine the group's perceptions and review them with the group.

In step four, the consultant should suggest changes in group structure or process to improve the situation. These suggestions, as well as team's specific goals, should be written down. They should be distributed to members and posted throughout the following meetings to help focus the group.

No work done by consultant is more important than helping groups reach their potential. As management consultants sharpen their skills in this area, they will better serve their clients and their profession.

United They Fly, Divided They Fall

A relative of mine is an expert in physics, and has long appreciated the way that the principles of physics operate in nature. His attention was captured one day as he watched geese flying in formation as they migrated south. Flying in a V-formation, the geese seemed to move so effortlessly through the air, even with a headwind.

His curiosity was piqued, and he made a trip to a local aviary to learn more about migrating geese. While he learned enough to make some calculations about the efficiency of the V-formation, he also learned about the instinctive behavior of these geese and how they have learned to work as a team.

He discovered from the experts at the aviary that geese fly in a V-formation because as the bird in front flaps its wings, it creates an uplift for the bird behind, making his flight more efficient. In fact, he calculated that geese flying in the proper formation will expend 70% less energy flying the same distance as compared to a bird flying alone.

Thus, in this natural setting, geese have been conditioned to work as a team in order to work more efficiently. But what was most startling to him was the "rules" of V-formation flight that naturalists have observed over many years of observation and study, and the real life applications of those rules for the vastly inferior human teams to which we all belong.

Consider the following:

1. Given the laws of physics, whenever a geese falls out of formation, it experiences the natural resistence of the air currents that it avoids if it stays in formation. This is true also in human groups. In order for teams to be effective, each member must carry his or her own load. When a maverick leaves the formation of the group, it is usually the maverick that pays the price.

2. Whenever the goose that has been at the apex of the V begins to tire, he or she finds a place elsewhere in the V and allows another goose to fly in the lead. In human teams, leaders often tire or burnout. It is to the benefit of the entire group for the group to avoid burnout for any member, and rotating leadership, or at least spreading the workload around makes the team more efficient.

3. The naturalists my relative spoke with observed that most of honking of the geese occurred from the geese in the back of the V, while those up front focused more on flying and less on honking. You may be thinking that this sounds a lot like a team you know where the folks doing less of the work have more time to complain. But in the V formation, the lead geese tend to be encouraged by the honking, and it becomes a positive force. In human teams, we should look for opportunities to encourage the members of the team, especially those that are bearing the heaviset burdens. Members of effective teams support each other, in both obvious and more subtle ways.

4. Finally, my relative asked the naturalists what happens when a goose becomes incapable of staying the with the formation. What if one is wounded, sick or unable to keep its role in the team? The answer also startled my relative. When a goose fails to stay with the team, two other geese in the team leave the formation and follow the slower goose down. They remain with the goose until he is either able to fly again or until he dies, then they either begin their own formation or catch up with the group. Again, here is a lesson for human teams. Each member is important; each member knows that he will be supported in time of need. This attitude in a human team breeds loyalty and compassion, and knowing that one is a valued member of the team makes one more willing to give his own loyalty and compassion to the others.

Often, nature is stranger than fiction. But the lessons in teamwork from the world of nature in observing migrating geese offer some excellent recommendations for improving the functioning of teams in the workplace, in the home and in many other team settings.