OVERVIEW - Collaboration and Coordination for TeamWorks™

What has one team be productive and the next team be a problem? What are the dynamics of productive teams vs. problem teams? Is it a function of the team leader? The assignment? The personalities of the team members?

Our skills for working in teams are learned and developed on the playground. Our strategies for surviving and contributing in groups are formed in our elementary school years and are pretty much fixed by the time we reach our mid-teens. In addition to being unconscious, these young strategies are directed at cultures and dynamics of yester years. They cast forward habitual suspicions, expectations, attitudes and a kind of predictable future - probable successes and failures in work group situations. Through a hundred thousand year history, humans have gathered in tribes in service of a higher good. The dynamics of belonging, contributing, communicating, collaborating, and coordinating, and you have a complex equation, full of pitfalls, black holes, and lurking breakdowns. Add a generous dose of unconscious habitual behaviors to that environment and we end up with a potentially lethal mix.

But human beings are social animals. Belonging and contributing are as necessary as breathing and eating. How then can we provide a break from our past habits in groups? How can we provide a new paradigm for productive teams? How do we foster, structure and manage the necessary collaboration? How do we coordinate action and communicate to create clarity and certainty? These are the questions we answer in our team building program named TeamWorks.

TeamWorks teaches participants to recognize their habitual personal attitudes and expectations for teams – the history they bring to their team participation and the future it allows and more importantly doesn’t allow. In today’s business climates, teams are a necessary mode for doing work. TeamWorks provides a fresh look at the interpersonal and organizational advantages of teamwork and cooperation. Participants learn to identify and understand the dynamics of team development and the factors (core values, alignment, and trust, for instance) that make teams effective. This module offers both context and practices for formulating, managing, and participating, in successful teams. Exercises allow participants to discover rather than simply understand both what interferes with successful teams, and what supports and contributes to extraordinary teams. The workshop is both fun and powerful.

OBJECTIVES

  • Participants will learn what habits and attitudes they automatically bring to their team experiences, habits that pre-limit what’s possible for themselves and their teams.
  • Participants learn how their individual work habits impact their teams, how wasted time and unkept promises parlay out across their team, the practices of their team and the results the team can or cannot produce for the team’s customer(s).
  • Participants become conscious of long held human expectations of people in teams, held in tribal histories for tens of thousands of years, and how that rhetoric limits or allows outcomes for their teams.
  • Participants will be provided with a new paradigm for team productivity, a new model and whole new realm of what’s possible when working in a team environment grounded in alignment, trust, communication and a shared commitment to satisfying the core values of the team entity and fulfilling the concerns of the team’s customers.

As a result of the program, participants will learn to:

  • Participants will learn what to realistically expect (as compared to idealistically expect) and not expect from themselves and others when working in teams.
  • Analyze typical team bottlenecks and develop a conscious plan and set of agreements for how the team will operate in the fulfillment of its responsibility.
  • Learn a new structure and practices for accountability and communication for productive teams.
  • Design the systems and protocols to be used by their team for collaboration, coordinating action, and communicating with intention and respect in order to support the promises of the team and team members.
  • Develop a model for the technologies to be used among team members and the practices for their use.