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How to facilitate effective team development.

A key feature of our work with client’s is to help them with the building of effective teams. This ideally starts at the top of the organisation, with the senior team, but it can include teams at any level in the organisation and can be particularly powerful at the customer facing end of the business where the individual and team behaviours have the most direct impact on the real customers. In today’s article I will consider the approach and nature of some of the senior team building work that we have been involved with and later on I will look at the features of frontline team building and how this may differ in approach.

With senior teams the question of leadership and sponsorship is a key consideration.
• Who is the leader of the organisation?
• Are they and their team members fully on board with development of the team’s effectiveness?
• Are they personally involved and what sort of example are they setting to their senior team members and to the rest of the organisation?
• The leadership style, communication and actions of senior leaders in organisations usually sets the tone for leadership throughout the business.

The content of the business discussions and decisions that the senior team is working to address are key. Focusing on both the current reality of the business and its performance as well as a vision of the future are important aspects for the top team to debate and agree on. Development of agreed strategies and action plans to achieve a compelling vision, accompanied by clear responsibility for their ownership and implementation are important here if the words are to be followed through with real action. Many of the strategic and tactical actions that senior leaders need to take are interdependent on their colleagues and staff in other functions, which in turn leads to the need for open communication and supportive relationships between senior team members. This is important if the organisation is to free itself from a "silo mentallity".

The process and communications between the team leader and their senior team members often requires some attention in areas such as these:
• How are their meetings run?
• Who sets the agenda?
• Who leads each discussion?
• How much does each team member contribute to the discussions and decisions – especially those outside of their specialist area?
• How good are the senior team members relationships – how well do they support and challenge each other?
• How dominant or empowering is the team leader – do team members always agree with and defer to them or do they encourage and get back good questions and feedback?

A number of tools and techniques can be used to help this senior team development process, combining work on real business issues alongside communication, relationship, personality, leadership style and thinking style instruments. Some of the most effective tools that we use with senior teams are these:-
• Vision and strategy pictures
• Team barometer reviews
• Psychometric profiling
• Team building activities
• Competency assessment
• Team role profiling
• Domainal mapping
• Johari window and pairs feedback
• Syndicate discussions based on real work problems

These sorts of senior team work process activities can often be accompanied and supported by 1 to 1 coaching sessions and management development programmes to address key leadership or management competency or performance improvement needs.