Beyond Team Building

7DESIGNING EFFECTIVE TEAM-BUILDING PROGRAMS

Now that we have examined each of the 5Cs and described how they can be applied to improve team performance, we'll focus on how organizations can become “team-oriented” by applying the 5C model. In this chapter we discuss how organizations can put together team development programs to improve the performance of their teams. The goal of any organization-wide team development program is to help the teams in the organization engage in a continual process of self-examination to gain awareness of those conditions—context, composition, competencies, change management, and collaborative leadership—that keep them from functioning effectively.

In Chapter 5, we identified a number of symptoms of unhealthy teams. Having gathered data about such problems, teams must learn how to use the data to make decisions and take actions that will change the team context, composition, competencies, change management or leadership in ways that will lead to better performance. As mentioned previously, team-oriented organizations see effective teamwork as a key organizational success factor. Thus, orchestrating the development of effective teams is viewed as an ongoing process, not a one-time activity.

As we noted in Chapter 5, a team development generally begins with a block of time, usually two or three days, during which the team learns how to engage in its own review, analysis, action planning, and decision making, then starts taking action. Following the ...