THE 'STUCK' TEAM

Despite our best intentions, the teams we build can often plateau in terms of results and performance.   You know they're capable of more but they just can't seem to get there. Sometimes we might experience team members who, as individuals, are excellent but when working together somehow seem unable to get it together.   Most members of the team will have their own unique view of the team and its problems.   They will also perhaps have many thoughts on how it might be improved and made to work more effectively. Unconscious habit & experience will tell them that their team is only capable of so much and not any more.  

As some people say, "If you believe you can't ; you're right, and if you believe you can; you're also right."

Team leaders and managers may well at this point start to think about letting individual team members go and possibly even starting over again.

The solution can often be to take time out and reflect on the team issues and make the necessary adjustments through a team-building experience.

YOUR TEAM - INTO THE FUTURE

Your team ‘takes on a new life’.

Your team becomes more trusted and can be relied upon to rise to the task or challenge. 

Your team is also easier to lead.

Your primary task as team leader is to maintain and support the group in stepping forward into a new period of excellence.

THE CHANGE EXPERIENCE

Successful team-building workshops require adaptiveness, flexibility, a variety of learning experiences, plus a sense of support and safety. The development of ‘creativity’ and the ability to take risks needs to be balanced with the recognition that if team members are not used to this they may feel  rather vulnerable.  Team-building courses need to walk this very fine line between the need for safety and the requirement to accept risk.

Team building dynamic is a systemic process.    All interactions within the team dynamic create responses.  Those who make the most noise will clearly be perceived to have the most influence.  But even a nil reaction is still a response, which means that all actions influence, even those that do not appear to elicit a response.  So those who appear not to be 'making much noise' may still hold a substantial influence over the group and what it can achieve.  These subliminal dynamics can be examined through team building experiences.

Interacting in a team can often feel chaotic & contradictory.  The business may require both personal individual ‘excellence’ and yet have the need for ‘team performance’ where everyone has a role to play and no-one person has the monopoly on ‘genius’.   The difficulty for everyone involved is the ‘either/or’ requirement for each of these conditions.    Other contradictions can arise.  How can you have ‘freedom’ when ‘direction’ is required?  Can ‘error’ be compatible with ‘success’?   Can ‘order’ coexist with ‘chaos’?

The team-building process recognises these tensions and embraces them rather than discarding, ignoring or marginalizing them as if they are not supposed to be part of the 'harmonious' group experience.  Each player in the team-building experience will develop an awareness of potentially contradictory tensions and their value and actively welcome their experience as sources of interest and creative spark.  

Team leadership then becomes the experience of facilitating the group safely through chaos to achieve its goals.