Successful teams are most consultants' lifeblood... without them, even your best recommendations go nowhere. Besides launching a team well and enrolling support from the right people, it is critical that you establish an environment that creates strong working relationships between team members.
It ain’t about ropes courses…. developing strong working relationships on a team is not something you do by holding an event. It starts with the chartering process we discussed in a previous post in this series — the process of building agreements about what the team will accomplish, negotiating with the leader, the sponsor and each other, and working together to begin to deliver products sets the stage. Making commitments to clear goals that you have been part of setting establishes the foundation for working together. Once the team is launched, I focus on several things. Today I will talk about team self assessment.
Techniques such as the Before / After Action Reviews used by the military or a simple Plus / Delta (what worked that we should continue to do and what should we change) is a powerful tool for the team to use to continuously self assess, become comfortable giving each other feedback and learn to pay attention to and apply the feedback. What makes it work? There are three things:
- Start with clear written desired outcomes for each meeting. This is a key part of successful meeting design. Team members feel good about working together when they accomplish things. Having clear goals and well run meetings helps them focus on what they need to accomplish. It also sets them up to analyze what worked and what did not work at the end of their meetings.
- Facilitate the debrief process so that the team digs into root cause of why something worked well or did not. Don’t just accept the surface statement response when someone says “such and such worked well”. Ask them “Why?” or “Say more”. Get them to explain what it was that team members did that caused a positive or negative result. Remember, we want to identify what we can do, do differently or stop doing, to improve. Even more important, bring the results of the debrief back to the next meeting and have them review what helped and what they said they want to do differently at this meeting.
- Periodically (maybe every 4 - 6 weeks) schedule an hour with the team to review all the plus / deltas or after action learnings from the prior period. Help the team identify trends: where they are making progress and where they may still be getting stuck. Where they made progress, help them identify how they did that. Is there a good lesson learned there to share with other teams? Where they are still stuck, have them identify the cost of not solving this and dig deeper to understand what is getting in the way of solving it.
It ain’t about no ropes course.... What else have you found helps build strong relationships on teams?
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