Skip to main content

Building a team

How does one build a team? And ensures that it performs? We all know Tuckmans four stages of teams - Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing. 

But ever so often, you will find that in teams that there are some who do not contribute as much as they should. Or as much as they had all committed to at the outset when they were selected or self selected into the team. In my view, what works in building effective things are these things:

Get commitment from the team early on about the goal and what they will do in order to make it happen. At this stage, it is necessary to give people a choice about whether they want to be part of the goal at all. If not, find options for them to support the main team with what they can do - if there is scope to do that.

Once that goal level commitment is established, get the tactical level commitment - if it means showing up each day without making excuses and so on and so forth. At this stage, again, it is important for all the team members to agree on a code of sorts. Again, those who cannot give their commitments need to be asked to decide - commit or leave.

And then once again, weed out non performers early. Carrying passengers is good for trains, not for teams. Every team needs as many engines as it possibly can. And when I say engines, I mean, commitment engines because there are times when every ounce of energy is required.

Often, we make mistakes here. In weeding out non performers. In calling out issues early. And replacing passengers with engines. Because we want to be nice. Because they were nominated. Because of a million reasons to cop out than call out issues...Because, we want to be seen as nice guys..etc. etc.

But if you are the team captain, you need a laser sharp focus on the goal and unless every team member contributes that is never going to happen. Lesson learnt...
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Be Civil. Make nice!

Popular posts from this blog

The man who saved Pumpelsdrop

This was a story we had in college if I am not mistaken. Perhaps it was in school, but a delightful story it was. The story goes somewhat like this ( reproduced from here ), but the college version we had was slightly different from this.  I t was a dull, gloomy and a depressing morning in a town named Pumpelsdrop in northern England. The Great Depression had brought all the businesses to a standstill. The bored automobile dealer was spending time alone, as usual. But, this seems to be an unusual morning as an odd entity (customer) appeared on the horizon. A man in a bright suit walks up to the dealer and says, "I need to buy a Rolls Royce Phantom II. We have a business conference coming up and I need to impress my customers". Then proceeds to pay 10% of the deal with a single check for 2000 pounds. The rest he says will pay when he takes the delivery.   The auto dealer was stunned. He was delighted to hear that someone is holding a business conference of some kind and
Post a Comment
Read more

The Mintzberg triangle

At a recent training, someone spoke about the Mintzberg triangle. I located it here . Image from that page reproduced here. The page linked above has a better explanation of diagram above, but what intrigued me was that the triangle exists for practically anything. The facilitator referred to this in the context of facilitation. Of how facilitation has science, craft and art to it. That is so true,  I thought. Worth a thought! Need to read of Mintzberg though...
Post a Comment
Read more

Gamified Presentation Skills

Creating a tool or a game or an aid for presentation skills has been on my mind for a long time now. As someone who has developed, designed and delivered many versions of presentation skills and slide making skills, this has been a question in my mind. And I thought of something fairly obvious - a deck of cards (Yes, I am a huge fan of card and board games) to help people as they work on their presentation. But when I looked this up, there seemed to be a few products that serve this need. And so it went. There did not seem to be any new value addition that I could bring. And a few weeks ago, I attended a session where we had to evaluate a speaker and there was no feedback for the speaker. The insight for me was that many a time giving feedback is 'difficult' I suppose. The issue with feedback is - that most often the only way to do it at the 'Point of Presentation' is with paper - And many a time, people just cursorily fill out the sheets with any random number
Post a Comment
Read more