Hold Team Discussions On How Well The Team Is Working
July 10, 2009
The box ‘Questions about team working’ provides a list of questions about the effectiveness of teams. How many of the questions can you and your team members answer with a yes? How many can you answer not only with a yes but also with the observation that you do it really well?
Questions About Team Working
- Does your team have a few clear objectives?
- Do all team members, including the support people, have opportunities to contribute to objective setting?
- Is there support for each other in tough times?
- Is there an open expression of true beliefs and opinions rather than holding back or resorting to euphemisms?
- Are conflicts aired and solved?
- Is there a regular review of team performance for learning rather than blaming?
- Is there a high level of trust among team members?
- Are communications between team members good?
- Are communications with others outside the team good?
- Is sufficient time given to planning the future?
- Are team meetings both time efficient and genuinely open?
- Are all team members listened to rather than just the strong personalities?
- Do team members help each other to develop skills?
- Are team members good at generating ideas when together?
- Do team members strive to reach a genuine consensus before taking action?
- Does the team avoid ‘groupthink’ during team discussions? (‘Groupthink’ is a mode of thinking that people engage in when their striving for unanimity overrides their motivation to appraise options, sufficiently and realistically, before deciding what to do.)
- Do team members give each other honest feedback?
- Is there a broad mix of skills and personal attributes?
- Do team members accept collective responsibility for decisions? (Collective responsibility is accepting the team’s decision and giving full support to its implementation even if there were reservations during the discussion and decision-making stages.)
Most of the questions posed in the box are easily understood. There may be some uncertainty about consensus, ‘groupthink’ and collective responsibility. These concepts are explored more fully a little later.
When teams meet together it is usually so that the participants can tackle issues that relate to their professional work or business matters that they believe require collective attention. It is relatively rare to find professional service team colleagues meeting to reflect on how well they work together. If you believe that there is a strong link between the means and the achievements of collaborative effort then it makes sense, from time to time, to assess teamworking processes. Agood starting point is for team members to provide their individual responses to questions like those posed in the box. The answers can be discussed and if there is a good measure of agreement on the need for improvements then the team can produce some simple action points for putting things right. After three months or so the team can return to the questions and check that the intended changes have been brought into effect. Periodic assessments of how well the team members are working together are a good way of improving team performance. They need not take up much time. Yet the small investment of effort involved often pays off handsomely not only in more harmonious working relationships but also in hard business results.