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- To ensure that all team members understand the reasoning behind the team formation
- To ensure that all team members are in agreement as to why we exist and how to best articulate it
- Establishes the team’s ‘destination’ or ‘TO BE’ point
- Helps prioritize what we spend our time on
- Helps us understand what skills and strengths we require to fulfill our team’s purpose and current gaps
- Identifies future training required to help us achieve our purpose
- Identifies who internally can coach and/or mentor others in achieving a level of competence
- Determines our ability to handle different tasks in light of an absent team member
- Ensures alignment on, and commitment to, how members are to treat and work with one another
- Defines what is acceptable and unacceptable behavior for the group
- Provides guidelines as to when a facilitator can appropriately intervene
- Identifies and distinguishes ‘external’ and ‘internal’ customers and the respective products/services that we provide them
- Determines where improvements can be made in product/service processes we provide
- Aligns all members on who it is that we serve
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:
- impact the whole team
- must be achieved to minimize the gap between where the team is ‘currently’ versus where it needs ‘to be’ to achieve its purpose
- Spells out team member responsibilities specifically related to team objectives
- Creates an action plan that sets into motion tasks that will enable the team to achieve its purpose
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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
- Establishes the team’s next meeting agenda
- Ties up loose ends still requiring closure (i.e. parking lot issues, meeting times and roles, etc.)
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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