Effective teams and the high-performing organisation
Most people are hugely attracted to the idea of working in a team such as implied by the definition above. As an alternative, the idea of working in a group that practices internecine warfare, complete with traps laid for the unwary and back-stabbing at all available opportunities, is less popular! So why is there such a demand for team building?
Organisations and complexity
Many approaches to team building fail to tackle the issue of the organisational context within which teams are supposed to form and operate. Some organisations positively support effective team working - others have the exact opposite effect. Most fall somewhere in between the two extremes. Hence the need for management action to enable effective team working beyond that required to develop team leadership skills.
There is also the challenge of complexity - multiple characteristics of successful teams blend together in a subtle mix. Get any of these wrong, and the impact is always corrosive to the effectiveness of the team. Add in the many features of the organisational context that either enable or disable good team working, and the level of complexity goes up. This sort of complexity cannot be handled by any simple solution, including team-leadership training programmes.
What is needed is a process that begins with discovery of all team working issues, and works through analysis and interpretation through to broad developmental actions that apply to both team internal and organisational context issues. Coaching for all team members is more likely to be effective than training for the team leader alone.
Magus TeamBuilder - a complete solution
Quite apart from the benefits to team working itself, the concepts that apply to effective team working are good for all groups of employees. So, unless internecine warfare is the desired state, what is on the table is an approach for developing improved performance across the organisation.
Magus TeamBuilder was designed to cover all the bases of good team working, and combines discovery with analysis and interpretation. Magus TeamBuilder uses extensive research into how effective teams are developed and sustained. The complexity of the issues is dealt with by breaking down the overall model into discrete elements, and working through to underlying causes. Thus immediate issues are covered as well as root causes.
Magus TeamBuilder is appropriate for both permanent teams and ad hoc or project teams. It is both diagnostic and developmental. First, it assesses the major causes of ineffective team working, and then identifies appropriate developmental action to raise team performance.
Magus TeamBuilder uses web-based data collection, and takes summarised respondent scores and uses these as the input to an inference engine. This calculates the probability of the existence of a variety of underlying causes of difficulties in achieving effective team working. A diagnostic tool enables facilitated workshops of team members to identify and analyse underlying causes, all the way back to root causes, and the developmental action needed to address them.
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