How long do you usually spend on a team launch? An hour? Two hours? Is the launch a meeting to tell everybody what needs to be accomplished? If so, you’re thinking about it all wrong.
Launching a team can take anywhere from a day to a month…with incredibly valuable work being accomplished during that time. My previous post was about chartering a team; answering the key questions that a team needs to be in agreement on.
A team is not launched until the sponsor, team leader, and team members can shake hands on the charter.
Developing and agreeing on the details of the project plan as part of the launch process allows team members to decide what are realistic, albeit challenging, goals that they are willing to commit to. By doing this, they are much more confident about negotiating and making commitments to project goals. Because they have truly negotiated what they believe can be accomplished to meet important needs of the organization, they are willing to support each other and work extremely hard to fulfill their commitments.
The alternative, which we see all too often, is the forced march--teams “agreeing” to mandated goals that they do not believe they can accomplish. When they fail to achieve the results, they feel that they have only confirmed their original belief that the goals were unrealistic.
In the process of chartering the team, you need to work with the team members to develop their capacity to build agreements, listen to each other, and to speak out effectively. Building “soft” skills is not effective when done in a vacuum. Providing tools that team members can immediately apply as they struggle to get points of view across and develop common goals and approaches is the best way to embed these skills.
A team is launched when they have committed to the goals and know how to engage in constructive conflict.
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