Unit 3: Building Strong Teams
Welcome to the unit on building strong teams. In this unit, you will learn the key characteristics of highly functioning teams, the five dysfunctions that threaten the effectiveness of a team, how you can be more effective in leading meetings and building teams, and how you can make difficult conversations more productive. We will discuss how the skills of team building apply in your workplace and how to diagnose the functioning of a team.
Learning Objectives
Upon completion of this unit, you will be able to:
- Explain the five stages of group development;
- Identify potential threats to effective team work;
- Distinguish between task and relationship functions in group facilitation;
- Relate Covey's Habit 6 (Synergize) to key content on team building;
- Diagnose the functioning of a team; and
- Analyze, propose, and discuss strategies for strengthening teams.
Practice
We encourage you to have a paper journal and pen with you to complete written activities and self-reflection assignments and activities. Alternatively, you may also find it useful to use Microsoft Word to complete written activities and self-reflection assignments.
Learning Activities
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Video: Welcome (1 min)
Welcome to the unit on Building Strong Teams. Chances are you have spent a great deal of your professional life working in or with teams. Effective teamwork is often essential to our jobs and the achievement of results. Effective teams can produce results that far surpass what individual team members could have accomplished working alone. Ineffective teams, however, can be a source of frustration and significantly impede or delay progress towards a goal. Working with teams successfully requires preparation, specific knowledge and skills, and a great deal of self‐awareness.
Watch this short introduction from guest lecturer Liz Stevens (USA) to get started.
Instructions: Tap the video to play.
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Video: Defining Teams (5 min)
Our working definition of a “team” is a group of people with complementary skills who work together cooperatively to achieve a common goal. There are both benefits and drawbacks to working in teams. Teams can be motivating – working with others can give us the energy and inspiration to get the job done. With this comes a sense of ownership and shared responsibility. Another great benefit of working in teams is that the workload can be delegated effectively, making a large task more manageable. To add to the list, teamwork can be a great opportunity for professional development. When working in teams, members have the opportunity to learn from one another and develop new skills.
Teamwork can also be a source of frustration for many people, particularly if you are working on a tight deadline. It can be very time consuming and require a lot of flexibility and change. Individual members may have different work styles, expectations, and schedules that may prevent the group from moving forward. Roles of individual members in a team can sometimes cause confusion and impede progress.
Watch the following short video, narrated by Liz Stevens (USA) where she defines the term “team” and discusses some of the benefits and drawbacks of working in a team in more detail.
Instructions: Tap the video to play.
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Video: Team Players (2 min)
You just heard from Liz Stevens (USA) about the benefits and drawbacks of teams. Now let’s take a moment to watch four videos from the Everyday Leadership series that focus on teambuilding and the power of teamwork. The first video is called Team Players, with Sam Phiri (Malawi).
Instructions: Tap the video to play.
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Video: Giving Credit (2 min)
The next video you will watch from the Everyday Leadership series is called Giving Credit, with Celine Usiku (Namibia).
Instructions: Tap the video to play.
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Video: Reaching a Compromise (2 min)
The third video from the Everyday Leadership series that you will watch is called Reaching a Compromise, with Alice Maida (Malawi).
Instructions: Tap the video to play.
After you watch the video, in your journal, write your response to the following question, then tap the Compare Answer button to reveal additional information.
- What strategies did Dr. Maida (Reaching a Compromise video) use in order to reach a compromise with the district health care workers under her?
She listened to and acknowledged the problems and complaints they raised. She invited all points of view. She communicated honestly about potential solutions. She engaged in mutual problem solving with the group. She was willing to meet them halfway. She showed empathy and understanding for the concerns they raised. She was willing to advocate for and back up the people who worked for her. In other words, she modeled effective teamwork.
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Video: The Team You're Given (2 min)
The fourth Everyday Leadership video, called The Team You’re Given, with Dr. Ndwapi Ndwapi, MD (Botswana), discusses the importance of learning to live with the team you are given.
Instructions: Tap the video to play.
After you watch the video, in your journal, write your response to the following question, then tap the Compare Answer button to reveal additional information.
- Based on the interviews of the leaders you just watched, what are some of the skills or approaches a leader can take to promote effective teamwork?
Compare Answer: In your response did you think about the following? All four of the leaders you listened to talked about the importance of active listening. They also discussed the importance of soliciting and displaying respect for other individuals. Other team building concepts that were addressed included acknowledgment and praise for the contributions of team members, as well as letting team member take the credit and shine.
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Activity: Bruce Tuckman’s Stages of Team Development (15 min)
Teams do not always produce results immediately after they are formed. Effective teams require good facilitation to perform successfully. Positive group dynamics take time to be established and to become part of a process that supports effective teamwork. Bruce Tuckman is an educational psychologist in the United States and he created a model of team development stages that addresses the process of team formation and development through five critical stages. These stages can help you understand some of the issues your teams experience and how you can take action to help guide your team to a different stage to improve the functioning of your team.
Instructions: Tap all elements on the diagram below to reveal additional information about each team development stage. After you view all stages, you will have an opportunity to test your knowledge on Tuckman’s model.
Forming
The first stage Tuckman talks about is called Forming. This is what happens when the team first comes together or when there is been a big change in membership on the team. This is the tentative phase where people are watching and trying to figure out how it all works on the team. There is excitement, and people have high expectations of the group. There is also anxiety and uncertainty about how things will go and how they will fit into the group.
Storming
The second stage that Tuckman talks about is called Storming. In this phase, conflict is common as team members struggle to figure out who is in charge and how to define their own role in the group. There may be frustration and disappointment, but there is also curiosity and anxiety about how the team will respond to the conflict.
Norming
In the third stage, called Norming, the group begins to become more cohesive. Norms and expectations are set for how the team operates together. There is an acceptance of each other and a greater focus on the goals and objectives of the team.
Performing
In the fourth stage, called performing, the team is fully functional, people are satisfied with the team’s progress, and they are attached to the group and its members. There is a high commitment to the work and to solving problems together.
Transforming
The final stage is Transforming, where teams will either change or dissolve. This might happen because the group task is done, because the organization itself is changing, or because the membership of the team changes.
Note: While the Tuckman model of group development is presented as a linear model, it is not really a linear process. Teams cycle through these stages over and over again, depending on the makeup of the team and what is happening both in the internal and external environment. Groups can be in one stage and return to an earlier one if new members join the group. The model is meant to give you a framework for better understanding the teams you work with.
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Quiz: Stages of Team Development (15 min)
Assess your knowledge about the key stages of team development by answering three multiple-choice questions.
Instructions: Tap the correct answer, then tap the Feedback button to reveal the correct answers and read additional information.
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Activity: Five Dysfunctions of a Team (15 min)
We learned about the different team development stages but what happens when there are problems on the teams that you work on?
The five dysfunctions of team that we’re about to discuss come from a book by Patrick Lencioni, who is a management consultant in the United States and the author of eight books on teamwork. This book is called The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. The dysfunctions are absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability and inattention to results. All of these dysfunctions build on top of each other, as you can see from this pyramid and they are interdependent.
Instructions: Tap each layer of the pyramid to reveal information about each dysfunction. Tap the numbered layers first (beginning with 1 – inattention to results) before tapping the top of the pyramid (what is it that we want).
5. Absence of Trust
This dysfunction allows for low standards and poor performance to become the status quo. An underperforming team such as this drains the energy of its members. Failure to hold one another accountable creates an environment where the fifth dysfunction can thrive. Inattention to Results occurs when team members put their individual needs, such as ego, career development, or need for personal recognition above the collective goals of the team that they’re on. In these groups, people are more concerned about how the team can help them than how they can help the team. Team goals become less important, and they don’t get met.
What is it that we do want? We want highly functioning teams that are built on a foundation of trust – where people trust one another enough to show both their strengths and their weaknesses; where they can debate ideas and come up with innovative solutions; where they help to create the goals and approaches of the team and, thus, commit to decisions and plans of action; where they hold one another accountable; and where they focus on the achievement of results. Let’s look at some tools we can use to help develop these types of teams.
2. Avoidance of Accoundability
The failure to build trust is damaging because it sets the tone for the second dysfunction, Fear of Conflict. Teams that lack trust are less capable of engaging in unfiltered and passionate debate about ideas. Instead, they have failed discussions and make only guarded comments. They cannot disagree without individuals taking the disagreement personally. There can be artificial harmony where people appear to agree, but underlying that surface appearance is unwillingness to debate and explore ideas. Conflict can be a constructive force on a team when it forces issues into the open. Conflict can increase involvement of team members and help to generate creative solutions. It is a very necessary and desirable part of highly functioning teams.
3. Lack of Commitment
A lack of healthy conflict is a problem because it ensures the third dysfunction of teams, which is a Lack of Commitment. When people are distrustful and afraid to disagree, they are rarely committed to the team. Again, they may pretend to agree during meetings, but are really just avoiding conflict. They may undermine the work of the team by how they talk about the team outside of team meetings. If team members did not buy into the goals and activities of the team, little progress can be made on the work at hand.
4. Fear of Conflict
When you have a lack of real commitment and buy-in, team members develop an Avoidance of Accountability, the fourth dysfunction. In a committed team, peer pressure is one way that work gets done and people are held accountable. Without committing to a clear plan of action, even the most focused and motivated people on a team will hesitate to hold their colleagues accountable. Actions such as missed deadlines or mediocre products are the result. This is a team where members do not prepare for meetings, where they do not complete assignments, and where low-quality work is produced.
1. Inattention to Results
The first dysfunction is Absence of Trust among team members. Distrust makes it very difficult to build a strong foundation for a functioning team. In this type of team, people are guarded; people do not respond to questions or share opinions freely and they speak carefully. When team members are truly comfortable with one another--and when they respect each other and what the other members bring to the team--they can focus their energy completely on the job at hand without worrying about the need to protect themselves.
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Video: Tools to Build Trust (14 min)
The purpose of working well in teams and building effective teams is that it allows us to experience "synergy". This is the concept, discussed by Stephen Covey, that describes the situation where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Teams are important because with others we can achieve goals we cannot achieve alone. Synergy can lead to extraordinary results.
As discussed in the previous section on the 5 dysfunctions of a team, the foundation of a highly functioning team is trust. This creates an environment where you can have healthy conflict, which leads to a growing commitment to the team and its goals among the members. With this high level of commitment, we have a strong sense of mutual accountability, and finally a focus on the achievement of results.
- Tools to build trust include: personal history exercises, 360-degree performance reviews, assessment of individual strengths and weaknesses, face-to-face meetings/working sessions, and showing vulnerability as a leader.
- Tools to encourage effective conflict include: establishing trust first, mining for conflict and model acceptance, reinforcing healthy debate, setting ground rules for conflict, and striving to understand each other.
- Tools for achieving commitment include: clear roles, priorities and expectations; ask “what exactly have we decided today?”; write best and worst case scenarios; and identifying a clear, single, common, unifying goal for the team.
- Tools for increasing accountability include: agreed upon standards; timelines and deadlines and a norm of accountability; clear expectations; effectiveness exercises; constructive feedback; and peer-to-peer accountability.
- Tools to focus on results include: modelling a focus on results, measurements for success, reward individuals based on team goals and collective success, and regular meetings to mine for lessons learned.
Watch the following short video, narrated by Liz Stevens (USA) where she shares tools to build trust among teams, identifies the group process, and correlates Stephen Covey’s Habit 6 (Synergy) to building strong teams.
Instructions: Tap the video to play. -
Case Study: Team Building (30 min)
Instructions: Think about the information that was shared with you on team building and teamwork so far to complete a short case study. Read the case scenario below, then respond to three questions about the case scenario. Please have your journal available to write your responses to the essay questions.
Case Study: You are the commander of a small logistics unit that has been expanding for the last three years. The unit had eight personnel when you took over as commander and now has increased to 35. Your unit budget has increased from $300,000 to $15 million. You provide and train specialized teams to manage and collaborate on special projects within the Ministry of Defense and with logistics support units and military contractors. Before the expansion, your small staff was able to meet and make decisions quickly and communicate the logistics very effectively, but with expansion, the team has to coordinate with other units and contractors and the decisions are based on many layers of communication and protocols. Through the “chain of command,” there are presently several different groups that meet regularly. The commander and staff meet monthly, Generals (Directors) and Colonels (Deputy Directors) meet weekly, and specialized teams set their own meeting schedules. In addition to these meetings, a headquarters meeting is scheduled monthly or quarterly for a status update and full report. You begin to see the teams are getting stressed and frustrated because the decisions are being made very slowly. The staff have expressed that their input is not being considered when higher-level decisions are made, late. They are reporting to you that they are not receiving information from the directors or command staff in a consistent and timely manner. Team morale is down and “esprit de corps” or group spirit is lacking.
2. What are some of the causes of these challenges? Write a response in your journal, then tap the Compare Answer button to read feedback.
Compare your response with the following information. The types of issues mentioned in this case are common challenges when units or teams grow rapidly. As organizations or projects scale up, the small team atmosphere that characterized a small unit is lost due to increased size, unfamiliarity with new people, and new requirements for efficient decision making. Units sometimes find an increase in bureaucracy and a greater number of roles on the team, making it less possible for individuals to be involved in all decisions to the extent they once were. In the scenario above, it appears that command leadership has not caught up with the change in structure and the need to use different mechanisms to achieve the same level of buy in, input, and trust.
3. What could you, as a leader, do to address these new challenges to team cohesion? Write a response in your journal, then tap the Compare Answer button to read feedback.
Compare your response with the following information:
- To build trust: A leader should model openness and transparency during meetings and in written communication, including acknowledging the change in team size and dynamics. He/she should set agendas and expectations for meetings and develop meeting agendas to clearly spell out the purpose of each meeting, including any delegated authority that is given to participants or individuals for decision-making. The leader should develop mechanisms to regularly share information with the team and to solicit input up.
- To give opportunity for healthy debate: A leader should use suggestion forms so that troops feel they can give input, and he/she should be sure to share the suggestion results and demonstrate where and how the input was applied. A leader could also facilitate small group discussions at staff meetings and give assignments to specialized teams or sub-groups related to input needed by the leadership team. The leadership team should make time to attend specialized team meetings occasionally.
- To increase commitment: A leader could develop creative strategies to regularly share the organization or unit’s vision and mission, asking team members to contribute ideas for operationalizing the vision and mission. Strong leaders tell stories/give examples that show how specialized teams are achieving a goal. Team building retreats could be held.
- To increase accountability: A leader should model accountability for the leadership role, following through on commitments, communicating when commitments cannot be met and offering reasons why. They can develop creative ways to acknowledge how the teams and the organization are doing, and conduct monthly or quarterly reviews of work plans and budgets where staff present on achievements and challenges.
- To focus on results: A leader can share syntheses of reviews with all staff and headquarters and command reports and accolades. They can delegate external presentations to individuals and acknowledge and reward teams and individuals for achieving results on time and on budget.
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Optional: Group Discussion (15 min)
If you are taking this course with a partner or in a group setting, have a conversation about your leadership and management experience by discussing the following question:
In your experience, which of the five team dysfunctions described by Lencioni have you encountered most often in your career?
- What did you learn from this exercise?
- Will you do anything differently in the future in terms of working with or building a strong team at work as a result of it?
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Self-Reflection: Learning Action Plan (15 min)
Putting your learning into action is essential to knowledge transfer, applying the knowledge you gained in this unit, and retaining that information in the future.
Take a moment to reflect on what you’ve learned in this unit. After reflecting, in your journal, write:
- Four things you learned in the unit.
- Three things you will implement:
- Today;
- Six months from now; and
- One year from now.
- Two things that changed your perspective.
- One thing you will ask for more help with.
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Conclusion (5 min)
In this unit, you learned about building strong teams and characteristics of highly functioning teams. You were given a chance to diagnose the functioning of a team your part of now or were in the past. You heard from leaders in the field who shared personal experiences and wisdom on what it means to be a good leader and be part of a high performing team.