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Effective Teams

A team is a group of people in which the members assume specialized roles in doing work and maintaining the cohesiveness and morals of the group.

An Effective Team Has

• Resources needed to fulfill necessary roles and functions

• Ability to use these resources at the appropriate times and levels

• Capacity to plan, organize, make decisions, solve problems, and implement actions to reach it's goals

Characteristics of an Effective Team

• Clear understanding of purposes and goals

• High degree of communication between members

• Effective decision-making methods

• Flexible in procedures

• Balance between group productivity and individual needs

• Balance between rationally and emotionally based behavior

• Leadership shared among members

• Not dominated by any one member of clique

• Use of members' unique resources and experience

• High degree of cohesiveness

• Objective in examining own processes and effectiveness

Principles of Team Design

• Members of a team can contribute in two ways to the achievement of objectives:

  • They can perform well in a functional role in drawing on their professional or technical knowledge as the situation demands

  • They also have a potentially valuable team role to perform. a team role describes a pattern of behavior characteristic of the way in which one team member interacts with others in facilitating the progress of the team or in simply maintaining the team itself.

• Each team needs an optimum balance in both functional roles and team roles. The ideal blend will depend on the goals and tasks the team faces.

• The effectiveness of a team will be promoted by the extent to which members correctly recognize and adjust themselves to the relative strengths within the team both in expertise and ability to engage in specific team roles.

• A team can deploy it's technical resources to best advantage only when it has the requisite range of team roles to ensure efficient teamwork.

Team Design

• Members contribute in two ways

  • Functional Role

  • Team Role

• Effectiveness depends on

  • Optimum balance of functional and team roles

  • Requisite range of roles

Effective Team Roles

• Initiator - Instills a sense of purpose and motivates team members to do work assignments

• Moderator - Orchestrates members resources and involves them in the team's work

• Creator - Generates alterative approaches to solving problems and making decisions

• Innovator - Brings outside resources to the team's attention and creates fresh perspectives

• Mediator - Foresees and helps resolves conflicts in interests, feelings and values between members

• Organizer - Coordinates physical, financial, and human resources into workable plans

• Evaluator - Develops and applies quality standards of performance and effectiveness

• Completer - Follows through on details and work assignments to insure completion of team's tasks

The members of effective teams share these roles and use each role at the appropriate phase of the team's work.

Consensus Seeking

Striving to reach substantial agreement in a team

• Not majority rules

• Not unanimity

• Everyone at least partially agrees with each decision

Consensus Seeking Ground Rules

• Everyone contributes

• Everyone listens

• Conflicts between ideas welcomed

• Avoid arguing to "win"

• Avoid voting, averaging and random choice

• Use logic and the most relevant information available

• Everyone is responsible for decision processes and results