Access the essential membership for Modern Managers
Aim
If your team is not completing their tasks effectively and team members don’t seem to be cooperating well with each other, there’s no need to despair. It’s well recognized that all teams go through rough patches, and it’s part of their natural progression towards becoming an effective team. You can do something about it, though.
This exercise will help you and your team to identify what stage you are at by completing a questionnaire analyzing different aspects of teamwork. It will also allow you and your team to discuss what actions you can take to progress to the stage of maximum performance. You may wish to run this exercise if you feel that your team could be performing better, and you would like to identify specifically how you can improve. Alternatively, you may simply wish to use it to take stock of what stage the team is at. It will take around 50 minutes to complete.
Learning Objectives
Team members will be able to…
- Understand the key stages of team development and the characteristics of each of them
- Recognize the stage that they have currently reached
- Make plans to take positive action in order to resolve any problems and help the team to progress to the stage of optimum performance
Suggested Resources
- Questionnaire - download using the button at the bottom of the page
- Flipchart and marker pen
What to Do (20 Minutes)
- Introduce the exercise and explain the learning objectives.
- It would be a good idea to introduce the stages of team development to the team.
- Distribute a questionnaire to each participant to complete individually. When finished, participants should count up their individual scores.
Review Activity (20 Minutes)
1. Use the flipchart to collate all scores.
- Mainly a’s: The team is at the ‘forming’ stage
- Mainly b’s: The team is at the ‘storming’ stage
- Mainly c’s: The team is at the ‘norming’ stage
- Mainly d’s: The team is at the ‘performing’ stage
2. Lead the team into a discussion on the stage of development that they are at. You may wish to consider the following:
- Is this the stage that you expected the team to be at?
- Are there any areas (see the headings from the questionnaire) in which the team has progressed further than others, or are there any areas in which the team is lagging behind?
- Do any particular issues or problems stick out?
- What could be the reasons for these?
- Is there any way that we can resolve these problems?
It is important to note that some team members may be concerned if the team is identified as being in the less effective stages, such as ‘forming’ or ‘storming’. Deal with this by stressing the positive aspects of the team performance as well as the negative, and by encouraging the team to take positive action to progress to the next stages. Highlight that the less effective initial stages are just part of the natural progression of team development that all teams must go through before reaching optimum performance.
Apply Learning (10 Minutes)
Finally, lead the team into a discussion on what they can do to achieve optimum performance in each of the areas outlined in the questionnaire and in any other areas. Agree on all actions, write them on the flipchart, and encourage the team to take responsibility for implementing them together. Also, ask participants to note down one or two personal actions that they will take.
Download questionnaire
