Building Customer-focused Teams
1 Organizational considerations
- The self-adapting team structure as a strategy for managing change in organizations
- What experience and research have taught us about adaptive teams – what works and what doesn’t
- How adaptive team structures affect performance and productivity
- Securing commitment and support for the team approach – overcoming resistance and barriers
- The link between the adaptive team structure, information flow, and organizational learning
- The critical job of coordinating a network of loosely-coupled teams for improved results
2 Designing a more flexible team architecture
- Dynamic and complex change: the driving force for a new team architecture
- Challenges faced when designing and implementing an adaptive job/task structure and flow of work
- Shifting problem-solving authority to the team level
- Decomposing jobs: continually adapting work structures to meet changes in the environment
- How teams can adapt quickly to rapid change, unpredictable events, and emerging opportunities
- Improving inter-team connections and work processes
- Swarming: a team strategy for keeping contact with its environment and capitalizing on opportunities
3 Creating a culture to support adaptive teams
- Transforming the organization’s culture about accepting change and the need for new structures
- Managing the balance of consequences – creating a climate that encourages risk-taking, experimentation and learning from mistakes
- How to develop system policies and procedures that support adaptive teams
- Building greater trust between levels and functions
- Adaptability as an organizational norm and way of life
4 Managing team workflow processes and performance
- The adaptive team’s formula for success – doing the simple and fundamental things flawlessly
- Identifying key team and workflow processes – how it does what it does
- Establishing standards, criteria and indicators to assess a team’s progress and effectiveness
- Performance information – ensuring the continuous flow of an adaptive team’s lifeblood
- How to recognize clues to team trouble, dysfunction, and blockages
- Upgrading your team’s competencies to survive in a changing work environment
- Increasing the team’s capacity to innovate and improve quality
5 Managing social processes – group roles and dynamics
- Making a smooth transition to the roles and responsibilities found in adaptive teams
- Clarifying the roles, norms and values that impact your team’s performance
- Negotiating new team roles as things change in the work environment
- Building a foundation of trust and mutual support among team members
- Team dynamics and processes – knowing how to keep your team moving towards its intended goals
- Helping people become a cohesive part of your team
- How power is shared successfully in adaptive teams
6 Introduction to collaborative problem solving
- Determining when team involvement and collaboration can improve problem-solving
- Guidelines and techniques for effective team problem-solving – what works and what doesn’t
- Eliminating barriers to team problem solving
- Skills for building team consensus and commitment
7 Interpersonal relations in teams
- How to build collaborative relations within your team
- Interpersonal skills for working with diverse team members and customers
- Communicating effectively in rapid-change situations
- Overcoming barriers to team communications
- Working constructively when there are differences and disagreements
8 Facilitating team processes
- Facilitation skills that lead a team towards consensus and commitment towards a common goal
- How to increase involvement, self-initiative, and trust among team members
- Facilitation techniques for overcoming team blockages and difficult situations
- Helping the group find opportunities for team re-design and process innovation
9 Team meetings
- Meetings that are enjoyable, involving, motivating and productive – Yes, they’re possible!
- Do’s and Don’ts for conducting team meetings
- Why meetings go astray and what to do about it
- Planning tips from pre-meeting to follow-up