WHAT MAKES A GREAT TEAM?

Reflection

What are the helpful attitudes, behaviours and norms that make the team effective? What are the hindering attitudes, behaviours and norms that hold the team back from its full potential?

My Rolle involves being a member of few overlapping teams within our organisation. It’s difficult to seperate out one team as the responsibilities are conflated.

Helpful behaviours that exist currently are a genuine desire to do good work and to participate in ongoing improvement.

Not so much an attitude issue, and more of a structural one. Roles within in the teams are described on paper in one way that rarely reflects the realities, and there are often member with very similar job descriptions and titles doing vastly different tasks. This often results in an unclear understanding of the goals that are trying to be achieved. Each team members is striving to achieve what they believe is the same goal without realising they way they describe it can be quite different to the rest of the team.

How do the projects of your team look through the lens of the content and process model? How effectively does your team balance the why, where to, what and how? Which aspects do you need to put more focus on to increase effectiveness?

We have definitely fallen victim to prioritising content of progress, and it tends to result in lots of stuff being created but only a some of it being of value to the team or the end goal. We need to establish a much clearer vision and direction before we begin creating. There is a tendency to describe ambitious and aspirational goals only to repeat thing we’re already comfortable with as it can feel risky putting too much effort into innovation when you’re not sure if  your envy on the same page are the rest of the team.

Think about an experience when your own behaviour hindered a team in some way. Did the behaviour stem from one of these basic needs? How so? Think about an experience when the behaviours of others hindered the team. Which underlying needs might have driven those behaviours?

I’ve probably been the person throwing in controversial, conflicting or aspirational ideas into situation that could have benefited from a more measured approach.

In the past I’ve in teams where members in control have shifted and changed goals without notice, usually in effort to make them align with their existing understanding rather than becoming familiar with a new approach or concept.

Think about your team in relation to the IMGD model. Which stage do you feel best represents your team at the moment? What would your team need to move forward toward the next stage?

Within My direct team, I would say we are at stage 2, there are definitely elements of stage 3 happening and there are elects of stage 1 happening. The team is quite large, 14 members which makes it difficult to full engage with each member and understand individually their understanding our shared vision.

Leveraging some of the more social aspects of working within our organisation could help build trust and empower members to feel more comfortable being more open.

How can you apply insights from this week’s learning kit in your day-to-day work with your team?

I’m very interested in deceasing the content and process model with a team, and to see if collectively we can identify where in our past projects we have suffered because of an imbalance.

I discussed the content process model with a team member from a previous project. We quickly agreed that model provided a better balance and would enable a more focused and consistent delivery of content. We could se how our previous projects had suffered due to a lack of process.