Outline – Teams

Suggested Length: Three Days

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

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