Course Outcomes

This team-building program will:

  • Provide a clear picture of the team’s present state.
  • Help groups create or confirm their mission, vision, values, and goals.
  • Explain effective and ineffective team behavior, and offer a forum for deciding norms.
  • Suggest tools for considering ideas, addressing conflict, and deciding a course of actions.

Course Overview

Just because you call a group of people a team, that doesn’t mean they function as a cohesive unit. This program is designed for new teams and teams that need to reset or reboot. The workshop assesses the current state and provides a forum for articulating the team’s purpose, values, vision, and goals. During this course, participants will also learn strategies for engaging group members, assigning roles, encouraging robust discussions, and addressing conflict. The program is highly interactive and best suited to groups that want to focus their members and decide on ways of interacting with each other.

* This program includes a 100-question pre-session survey.

Program Objectives

At this program’s conclusion, participants should be able to:

  • Describe their team’s present state.
  • Conduct a gap analysis.
  • Identify any quick wins.
  • Explain how their team’s purpose fits into the larger organization’s mission.
  • Describe different types of team members and the value they bring to a group.
  • Assign task ownership.
  • Use a range of tools to surface ideas and navigate conflict.
  • Craft a team charter.

The following outline highlights some of the course’s key learning points. As part of your training program, we will modify content as needed to meet your business objectives. Upon request, we will provide you with a copy of the participant materials prior to the session(s).

Workshop Outline

Determining Current Conditions: Assessing the Team’s Present

This program begins with a review of the results of a pre-work assignment that assessed a team’s health in 20 different focus areas. From goals and empowerment to communication and trust, during this activity, we will look at the conditions that most often exist in high-functioning teams and how the team currently rates its performance in each of those areas. Next, the group will review 12 characteristics of effective teams. During the remainder of the program, we will introduce tools to begin creating the conditions needed for success.

Team Purpose: Knowing Where You Fit

The workshop continues with a discussion about the team’s purpose and the importance of understanding the group’s overall goals and how the team fits into the organization’s greater mission. Next, the team will perform a gap analysis where members will identify the current state, the desired future state, positive forces that could move the team from the present to the future, and negative forces that could prevent the team from realizing its vision. Following that activity, the group will discuss specific actions they can take to take advantage of any quick wins that became apparent in the gap analysis exercise.

More Than a Poster: Vision, Mission, Values, and Objectives

Mission, vision, and values exercises have been used and abused for years. A group gets together and creates a bunch of words that eventually find their way to a poster nobody reads and more importantly, nobody lives by. Instead, the poster hangs ignored in a conference room, and the ideas it expresses gather dust. This part of the course talks about mission, vision, values, and objectives and the importance of keeping them front and center. During this part of the program, group members will use their work from the previous segment along with any existing material to craft or confirm the team’s mission, vision, values, and objectives. Next, we will talk about strategies for keeping the target front and center.

Communicators, Collaborators, Contributors, and Challengers: Understanding the Players

The next part of this program looks at team members and the various player types that are typically found on teams. Based on Glenn Parker’s work, this module explores communicators, collaborators, contributors, and challengers. During this workshop segment, participants will consider the strengths and potential weaknesses of each player type. They will also identify their primary player style and stretching opportunities. Following that discussion, we will consider the attributes shared by ineffective team players and strategies for avoiding destructive activities.

Encouraging Discussion and Preparing for Conflict: Tools You Can Use

On one end of the team spectrum are groups that never disagree. Their members are often “yes” people who avoid conflict and eventually suffer from an absence of diverse opinion. On the other end of the continuum are teams that do nothing but bicker and argue. Those groups are plagued by a different kind of dysfunction that is equally destructive. Learning to navigate conflict and separate issues from people are essential skills for teams to master. This seminar segment looks at tools for surfacing ideas, ranking options, and determining the level of support each person has for a decision. This part of the program also addresses the importance of assigning roles and the value of using a RASCI matrix or similar tool to manage task ownership.

Team Charter: Confirming the Course

Team charter documents clarify a team’s direction and outline how and why the team will complete its work. In this final part of the program, participants will consider several examples of team charters and work to craft one of their own.

By the conclusion of this course, participants should have an understanding of what successful teams do and a foundation in place to start working as a cohesive group.