Building and Managing your team ppt

Management of personnel conflict techniques hand out

Lecture content

Mission

Developing a mission statement of your project is the first step to create understanding and unity of your team.

Answer the following questions:

• What is the work we were brought together to do?
• Why can this work best be done as a team?
• What will be different as a result of our working together?
• What will our work create for our organization, our team and ourselves?
• What will a successful outcome look like for our team? How will we know we’ve completed our task?
• How will we measure our success in an on-going way?
  Define Goals: SMART
• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant
• Time defined

Roles and Responsibilities

Job types needed for your project, create three job titles.

Heading information. This should include job title, pay grade or range, reporting relationship (by position, not individual), hours or shifts, and the likelihood of overtime or weekend work.

Summary objective of the job. List the general responsibilities and descriptions of key tasks and their purpose, relationships with customers, coworkers, and others, and the results expected of incumbent employees.

Qualifications. State the education, experience, training, and technical skills necessary for entry into this job.

Job duties and responsibilities. Only two features of job responsibility are important: identifying tasks that comprise about 90 to 95 percent of the work done and listing tasks in order of the time consumed (or, sometimes, in order of importance).

Milestones progress markers (flags) but, by definition, are independent of time (have zero durations) therefore no work or consumption of resources is associated with them.

Timelines-a sequence of related events arranged in chronological order and displayed along a line (usually drawn left to right or top to bottom)

Deadlines-date or time when a defined task must be finished.

Ground Rules for meetings

• How you communicate DURING team meetings (Are interruptions OK? Should the Facilitator call on you before you speak? What about side conversations?)
• How you communicate BETWEEN team meetings (How quickly should you respond to emails? Are there suggested length limits on emails or memos? How do you keep everyone on the team informed of your progress?)
• What constitutes respectful behavior towards other team members?

Some sample ground rules include:

• Be respectful of others — don’t bad-mouth team members within the team or outside the team
• Share your own experiences and opinions; avoid “they say” statements
• One speaker at a time
• Keep discussions focused on topic at hand
• Honor time limits – start and end on time

Decision Making

Will decisions be made by:

• Leadership
• Consensus: where everyone can agree to support the final decision?
• Democracy by vote: where everyone can agree to support the final decision
• Will the team leader get input but make the final decision?

Effective Teamwork

Using ground rules as a starting point, teams need to develop practices for open communication. Examples include:

• Communication:
  Listen respectfully and respond with positive interest to ideas from team members.
  If an idea is confusing or seems unconventional or odd to you, ask for more information to understand the idea better. (Saying, “Can you tell me more?”is a great way to continue a conversation.)
• Help create an environment that encourages team members to share all ideas – even the “half-baked” ones.
  Most great ideas are built by teams building on an initial thought. Sometimes it’s the “crazy” ideas that really spark the team’s creativity. Treating every idea as important keeps team members from holding back some “half-baked” thought that could be just what the team needed.
• Don’t hide conflicts; try to surface differences and use them to create better results that all team members can support.

Mutual Accountability

Each member of a team is responsible for the success of the team as a whole. This is the interdependence that makes teams stronger than the sum of their parts. Working together towards specific tangible results is the best way to start creating mutual accountability. Recognize and celebrate small accomplishments and successes of individuals and milestones (large and small) for the team as a whole. By acknowledging successes, team members can develop an increasing trust in their teammates and the team as a whole.

1. Responsibility
2. Recognize and celebrate small accomplishments and successes of individuals and milestones (large and small) for the team as a whole.
3. Interdependence

Reflection

• Appropriate self-evaluation

Self-evaluations can be as simple as a team discussion: “Looking at X, what things worked well and what would we like to improve next time?” or they can be deep and reflective (e.g., “How can we deal with conflict more effectively?”). Regardless of the method or tool used, the real benefit of self-evaluation comes from the team discussion about their assessments of the team.

• It is be helpful for team members to “stop action” at regular intervals and check out how the team is working.

Feedback is the key to assuring any team is staying on track, but more importantly that it is improving each day.   Feedback should be proactive and constant.   Many leaders are prone to wait until a problem occurs before they give feedback.

• Be proactive with the learned feedback

Feedback is simply the art of great communication.  It should be something that is part of one’s natural dialogue.  Feedback can be both formal and informal.    In fact, if it becomes too structured and stiff, it becomes difficult for the feedback to be authentic and impactful.

With proactive feedback comes acknowledgement and reward.  People love recognition, but are most appreciative of respect.   Take the time to give your teammates the proper accolades they have earned and deserve.   I have seen too many leaders take performance for granted because they don’t believe that one should be rewarded for “doing their job.”

Acknowledge and Reward

At a time when people want to feel as if they are making a difference, be a thoughtful leader and reassure your team that you are paying attention to their efforts.   Being genuine in your recognition and respect goes a long way towards building loyalty and trust.

Observation (Final Thoughts)

• Take the time to know your team.
• Be aware ongoing tasks and their deadlines
• Pay special attention to dependency linkages.
• Reward your team

Assignment

Go to the production team page and do the in-class group assignment.