Building and Developing Teams

Organisations around the world universally agree that the creation, development and effective leadership of teams is central to their ongoing ability to innovate, compete and ultimately succeed in meeting the needs of their customers, employees and shareholders.

Central to building effective and high performance teams is a fast and practical team building strategy and process.  This is something that a small proportion of team leaders know innately how to do.  Others, through experience and coaching on team building, have learned how to do it.  Sometimes a facilitator is used for team building – some of these people are highly skilled at conducting team building workshops.

Team building often follows a predictable pattern, sometimes referred to as the FSNP – or Form, Storm, Norm and Perform process.  A team is initially Formed to achieve a particular objective, then the members Storm around trying to work out what they are trying to do, who has what skills, what preferences for what activities – during this stage there is often much confusion and very little in the way of results.  At this stage the leader will help the team agree some Norms or rules about how they will operate together and finally the team moves to the last stage, namely Performance.

However most workplace teams are already in existence and have an ongoing life-cycle where their leader may change, their team members certainly change and an ongoing process of change in technology, tools, and priorities impact the team.