Effective Team Building
Course record permalink
- Format — Workshop, one day
- Audience — Team leaders, managers, and intact teams
- Practice area — Leadership training
- Led by — Dr. Kevin Westbrook — background and credentials
A team is not a group of people who report to the same manager. Four things separate the two: goals the members hold in common, communication and conflict skills that survive disagreement, joint problem-solving rather than parallel work, and role clarity that stops the same task being done twice or not at all. This one-day workshop works through all four with the team in the room.
What the workshop covers permalink
- Goals that hold. Why a team that has not agreed on what it is trying to achieve will optimize for its own parts, and how to set common objectives that survive contact with the work.
- Communication and conflict. The habits that make a team stop raising problems early, and practical ways to keep disagreement productive rather than personal.
- Joint problem-solving. Moving from individual judgment to shared analysis, so the team searches for a solution together instead of defending positions.
- Role clarity. Who decides, who contributes, and who is informed — made explicit, because most teams assume it and most assumptions differ.
Who it suits permalink
Intact teams as well as their leaders, in one location or across sites. It is a full day because the work is done with the team rather than explained to them: the sessions are working time, not an off-site game day, and the agreements made in them are the ones the team is expected to keep. Leaders who want the coaching side in more depth pair it with Team Coaching, and teams with a conflict that has hardened often start with Difficult Conversations.
What a team leaves with permalink
Agreed objectives in writing, a working understanding of how this team handles disagreement, and roles each person can state without checking the org chart. The measure is the next meeting, not the day itself.