Our Nine-Step Team Formation Process

What is it?

A step-by-step process for aligning team members in purpose, objectives, roles and responsibilities and communication both within and outside of the team. It’s also a process that generates invaluable trust and a lot of excitement about working together.

What is its purpose?

Teams aren’t automatically formed because someone commands them into existence. Lots of teams have been told “Congratulations! You’re a team now!” without ever really becoming one. It’s no wonder that most teams who have never gone through a thorough team formation process laugh at the thought of calling themselves a team. That’s because building a team takes time and patience, plus following a prescribed set of steps.

What leads to good team formation is first the understanding that teams are not informal. They have a well-defined structure that needs to be discussed, agreed to and conscientiously managed. Team building is, therefore, a complex and important job for you, the team leader/manager.

Component One - Setting the Context for Teaming Component Two - Defining Individual Team Purpose/Goal Component Three - Defining Our Competencies Component Four - Defining Team Norms Component Five - Analyzing Our Internal and External Customers Component Six - Establish Specific Team Objectives

The objectives that result from this exercise are above and beyond specific work objectives that have been given to individual team members and/or sub-teams. The focus of this exercise is to identify the objectives that:

Component Seven - Identify Team Roles and Responsibilities (with respect to the defined high-priority objectives) Component Eight - Create a Communication Plan for the Team

• Creates two plans:
  • how the team members will communicate between themselves
  • how the team will communicate with stakeholders outside the team
  • Enables the team to identify and agree to how they will communicate their needs within and outside the team

Component Nine - Establish Next Steps

Click here to view Facilitation First’s exclusive Collaborative Client Process

When should you engage in Team Formation?

When a team is first formed or has existed for some time, but is now unproductive. All teams need to go through a structured team start-up activity in order to kick-off and align correctly. If a team is launched in an ad hoc manner and starts operating without a clear framework, confusion inevitably results.

This is typical of many groups who call themselves a ‘team’ but in fact have little alignment and common purpose. In these cases, the group needs to go back to the beginning and hold a comprehensive launch discussion.

More specifically, teams need to experience this process when:

• there’s a need to create a high level of cohesion and commitment to a common goal on improving a process(es), a product(s), service(s), etc.
• the tasks necessitate a consistent set of people working together over an extended period of time
• members need to closely link and coordinate their roles
• management sees how higher empowerment levels will improve overall team effectiveness and performance
• there’s support for teamwork in the organization (i.e. sponsorship in terms of putting resources into developing and sustaining a teaming culture)
• senior management is equally engaged in forming their group into a team or, at minimum, engaging in team-like behaviors
• there’s a belief by most team members and the team leader that ‘sacred cows’ need to be reviewed and dropped if they are not serving the team’s purpose
• it’s clear that the sum of team’s intelligence is greater than any one individual’s
• the need for consistent communication within the team is tantamount to its success