Judd N. Adams
Management Training, Consulting & Project Facilitation
Ideas -- Insight -- Transformation

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TEAM BUILDING

A team is a group of people who depend upon one another to accomplish their tasks.  Most organizations consist of many teams whose members do not fully understand their interrelationships, performance standards, and work styles.  Almost all teams can improve their performance by applying conscious attention to these relationships and developing an explicit plan for making improvement.  See, for example, The Laboratory and Radiation Services Team Building project.

OBJECTIVES

1.   Understand the elements of effective team work:

  • Five dimensions of Peak Performing Teams  -- Charles Garfield.

  • Characteristics of an effective work system, since performance is primarily (80%), dependent upon work systems not individual performance.

  • The importance of norms; managing the stages of team development - forming, storming, norming and performing. 

  • Balancing task and process roles and eliminating unproductive behaviors. 

  • Characteristics of effective leadership and effective followership.

  • Explicit, strategically chosen problem-solving and decision-making procedures and criteria.

2.   Understand the effect of individual differences on team work:

  • Need for achievement, affiliation and power -- David McClelland 

  • Personal Style -- Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) 

  • Work Style (based on MBTI) –  Judd Adams

  • Conflict Style -- Thomas Killman Conflict Mode

3.    Understand personal and team strengths and weaknesses through “Outward Bound” type activities, or other diagnostic exercises, in the following areas:

  • Leadership and teamwork.

  • Communication skills, especially listening for content and feelings.

  • Problem-solving and decision-making skills.

  • Conflict management and harmony building skills.

4.   Develop greater trust and confidence in one another and an expectation of success.

5.   Create a strategy for improving team effectiveness: 

  • Establish team norms.  

  • Determine what the team collectively needs to do to improve. 

  • Develop a personal improvement plan .

 The "Outward Bound” type activities (or alternative exercises) are the “laboratory” portion of the workshop.  They provide participants an opportunity to practice the relevant skills and discover their strengths and weakness.  For the instructor, observations of participants doing the exercises provides guidance in selecting “lecture” material.

 RESOURCE MATERIALS

  • Please Understand Me: Character and Temperament Types (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, MBTI), David Keirsey and Marilyn Bates

  •   Introduction to Type in Organizations (MBTI), Sandra Krebs Hirsch and Jean M.  Kummerow

  • Peak Performers: The New Heroes of American Business, Charles Garfield

  • TeamWork: What Must Go Right/What Can Go Wrong, Carl Larson and M. J. Lafasto

  • W. Edwards Deming -- work systems.

  • “Outward Bound” type exercises.

This is typically a two-day workshop, held away from the office, such as a mountain resort.

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If you are a manager or employee who wants to sponsor this workshop e-mail me at
juddadams@att.net or call me at 303 494-4241. 
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November 28, 2002