The Process of Building Teams

In the next few weeks, we will introduce and discuss the challenges surrounding teams and explain how best to approach the subject in order to get the best response from each member.

Agreement of a Process in Building Teams

Any team building exercise should be conducted in the light of the foregoing observations. When building teams, a process should be constructed in terms of the requirements of the team, and will therefore not always include activities touching all four content areas. This means that there should be a consultation with members of the team prior to an agreement of a process for a team building exercise being reached.

Over and above this the process flow of the team building exercise should be as follows:

1. Definition of Criteria: This criteria is really common sense, and is easily solicited from team members at the start of a team building exercise. Sometimes it is not necessary to spend a lot of time on clarifying criteria because the team trusts the facilitator sufficiently for the facilitator to stipulate the criteria.

2. Diagnosis: What is the current state of the team in terms of the foregoing criteria? This diagnosis can be conducted both in terms of the overall state of the team and the contribution of individuals of the team. In seriously dysfunctional teams, this process could also include a prognostic exercise. In other words, the question to explore is: Should no intervention be undertaken, what would happen to the team on the basis of the above diagnosis?

3. Remediation: The remediation can also be designed to cover either what needs to be committed to by the team as a whole, or what should be done by the individual, or both. It is very important to complete the team building process on a note which the participants experience as an affirmation. In other words, it is sub optimal to finish the process on a set of to do lists that really confirm what team members have been getting wrong.

Now that we have outlined the process required at the initial stage of creating a team, we will discuss building the team in more detail in our next few blog posts.