ISSUE 03 : 2005

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The Keys to Effective Team Building Ross Judd, Managing Director, Team Focus In previous newsletters I’ve asked the questions “What is Team Building?” and “How ‘real’ is Outdoor Team Building?” I am occasionally asked these questions when people are considering training programs. In both articles I have written about the need for clearly defined outcomes in order to make good purchasing decisions and create quality learning experiences. A lot of people will also tell you that you need a well facilitated debrief in order to gain the learning from the exercise. Obviously this is true, however, in my opinion it’s not the whole story. To truly deliver an outstanding learning experience greater distinctions are required at every stage of the program. Creating a true learning program starts well before the training event itself. Your ability to clearly identify and articulate the needs of the group is the first, and I believe most critical, stage of the process. Do you understand the specific learning that is required? Do you know what needs to change? Knowing this will help create the right outcomes for your workshop, outcomes which will drive your activity selection and focus your debrief. Once you have identified the learning needs and articulated your outcomes the next phase is to select the right activity. Different activities highlight different dynamics and processes. Where one activity might highlight problem solving processes another one would be used for clarity of outcome and decision making processes. Next comes the experiential itself. A quality facilitator can still influence the outcome by adjusting the exercise or their interaction with the group. Finally the debrief will have a significant impact on the quality of learning that you take from the exercise. However I would argue that with the right outcomes and activity selection, the debrief will almost take care of itself, simply because the learning is so obvious. So it takes much more than a debrief to make a good experiential learning experience. It takes a great understanding of the processes and dynamics involved and how to set them up through the exercise that you are about to deliver. At Team Focus we make a strong distinction between the task your participants will undertake and the process they need to go through to achieve it. We know that at the task level they are often doing something that involves planks, ropes, or other strange utensils and is therefore almost always unrelated to work. In other words they are not doing tasks with planks, ropes, buckets, wood, nails, or items like that at work. It’s at the process level that the experiential exercises create dramatic learning that is related to work. How did team processes like: communication; goal clarity; decision making; leadership; planning; analysis; information gathering; reviewing; evaluating; role clarity; even time keeping influence their outcome? These elements of team process make all the difference to team performance. Therefore to run a truly effective experiential you need to be clear about which processes you want to target and choose the right exercise to highlight them for you. Once you’ve done that the debrief will add value to a great exercise. This aspect of team processes is highlighted below by the AGSM research. Their research finds that clear processes are one of the key drivers of team effectiveness and that teams that have processes outperform teams that don’t. It makes sense then that experiential learning exercises with clear process learning outperform the ones without. The AGSM research also points out that certain activities add little value in developing teams. Things like ropes courses and abseiling simply don’t involve team processes, in fact they are almost individual exercises. It all comes back to your clarity of purpose and outcome leading to the right activity selection, which will then lead to a very powerful and transformational learning experience. At Team Focus we have been designing and delivering Experiential Learning for over 15 years. We can add true value to your conference or training program. I hope you enjoy this edition of InFocus and look forward to working with you in the future.

The latest research puts common assumptions about teamwork on trial. Authors: Catherine Collins (PHD Student & Research Fellow) and Professor Sharon Parker There is currently a research program at AGSM to investigate what drives team effectiveness over a team’s lifespan. Four preliminary findings and the associated practical implications were outlined in the 2004 newsletters. In summary, Finding 1: Teams don’t all develop in the same way, even when they are in the same environment, with the same resources and levels of support. Finding2: It is not always a case of ‘the good teams get better and the bad teams get worse’. Finding 3: Having team members who are experienced in teamwork doesn’t necessarily make for a successful team. Finding 4: Team processes are more important determinants of team success than personality as they are more amenable to change. In this newsletter we will explore findings from an organisational initiative that sought to improve team effectiveness. Finding 5. Initiatives to enhance team effectiveness require members to process independent feedback in a supportive environment, which also empowers and holds the team responsible for improving their effectiveness.  To enhance teamwork, managers of organisations traditionally provide the team with more resources (e.g. more members, larger budgets), change the membership of the team (i.e., on the assumption that the mix of personalities and experience is not right) or send employees to training sessions to learn about the latest theory and / or improve teamwork skills (e.g., retreats or courses on targeted topics such as conflict resolution). There are a number of benefits and downfalls with each of these approaches. For example, just focusing on getting the right team composition at the outset is advantageous because having the right mix of skills will assist the team in attaining the team outcome. Furthermore, selecting team members who do not have ‘personality clashes’ assists the team to work more harmoniously. However, getting the team off to a good start is not enough; good teams can decline over time if they are not supported (see research finding 2). Likewise, selecting the right mix of personalities is limited because organisations often are working with established teams, and one cannot ‘change’ the personality of an individual or re-mix the teams. In addition to the benefits and downfalls specific to each team effectiveness initiative, there is a common assumption underlying their implementation by managers – effectiveness will similarly improve for all teams. Remember research finding 1? Our research highlights that teams do not all develop in the same way, even when they are in the same environment, with the same resources and levels of support. It is therefore unlikely that implementing ‘blanket’ initiatives, such as those listed earlier, will be successful because teams will be at different stages. Rather organisations would be better off investing in a program where teams are able to tailor the type of initiative to their particular needs. Another assumption of many team effectiveness initiatives (e.g., training) is that concepts and skills learnt which do not relate to the teams’ day-to-day tasks and processes will transfer back to the workplace. Examples include abseiling and ropes courses. There is some evidence that these initiatives assist in building morale (though not always). However there is little evidence that these types of initiatives have a sustainable impact on improving the team processes critical in the workplace. Thus we advocate that there are two principles that managers need to acknowledge and implement when seeking to support teams. Focus on how the team members work together on processes and tasks in the workplace, and also Teams need to be able to tailor team initiatives to meet the needs of their stage of development and team effectiveness. A number of team effectiveness initiatives could be built on these two principles. At AGSM we have been reviewing one team initiative that builds on these principles and our research findings more generally (e.g., the four preliminary findings outlined above). To briefly summarise, the initiative we have been reviewing focuses on workplace processes and tasks by providing them with specific quantitative feedback on malleable team processes (e.g., role clarity, participative decision making) that impact the bottom line outcomes (e.g., team performance and viability). The teams reflected on this feedback with mentors, who assist them to develop and follow-through on a customised action plan to build on their strengths and development opportunities. Teams receive quantitative feedback at least twice, so they are able to identify whether their action plans are influencing their behaviours. Our research with 192 study teams suggests that team initiatives such as this can improve team effectiveness. When we observed teams without the quantitative feedback and mentoring, 17% reported high team satisfaction and 29% indicated team motivation (refer to graph below). These team outcomes improved significantly for the teams observed in the subsequent three years, all of who were engaged in the team initiative just outlined. For example, in the first year that the team initiative was implemented, 46% of teams reported high team satisfaction and 61% with high motivation. Similar to most organisational change initiatives, the team initiative we have been tracking has taken some time to become established. Between the first and third year of implementing it, processes for the feedback were improved, as too was the training for the mentors who supported to the teams. These changes are reflected in the successive increases in team satisfaction and motivation in the graph below. These findings suggest that the team initiative we tracked significantly improved team satisfaction and motivation. Of course, it is important to recognise that, whilst there are many strengths of our research design, it is just possible that the improvements we have seen in team effectiveness are due to factors other than the team initiative we tracked.  Further research is currently being conducted to explore whether such alternative explanations are plausible. In conclusion, our research tracking a team initiative highlights three important implications for managers seeking to improve team effectiveness. Teams need to: Receive rigorous and independent feedback on malleable team processes that are linked to important team outcomes. Be provided with a supportive environment in which information can be processed with the assistance other people (e.g., mentors, coaches, managers). Be empowered and held accountable for improving their team effectiveness by receiving feedback over time. Professor Sharon Parker and Catherine Collins are currently looking for organisations to collaborate with to further their research on teamwork, ‘proactive’ employees and organisational change. The research would require a minimum of 200 employees or 30 teams. If you would like to be involved, please contact Sharon Parker on (02) 9931-9316 or at sharonp@agsm.edu.au. Further information about the research may be found at www2.agsm.edu.au