As defined in Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary, a team is

“two or more draft animals harnessed to the same vehicle or implement.”

Okay, this may not be how you think of your team, but think about it–it’s a great description of what a successful team looks like. A group of individuals who, by working together, will achieve far more than one individual would working alone.

Empirical evidence supports this simple fact: working teams can accomplish more together than individuals acting separately. Team building through the combination and interaction of experience, abilities, knowledge, commitment, and creativity gives teams a powerful advantage for advancing business change.

Team Building and Building Teams Drives Success

As part of our series on Product Innovation (and our Catalyst Product Concept Management), we recommend the use of facilitated workshops that bring stakeholders, thought leaders, and implementors together with key designers and planners, under the guidance of professional facilitators. The network of individuals required in the analysis, design, and implementation of new products can be overwhelming. The guidance of trained professional facilitators in Catalyst, new product development, and voice-of-the-customer assures the highest integrity. We rely on a proven method that may be adapted to your organization when seeking to support your mission and objectives through product development or process improvement. If you have suggestions about how we can improve this or other Best Practices, please reply or contact us at (630) 954-5880, or by email at info@mgrushfacilitation.com.

Facilitators significantly contribute to organizational effectiveness when they support cohesive teams. The following provides some valuable tips on continuous team-building techniques.

Character of Teams

Teams have the characteristics of working toward a common goal, having shared experiences, and sharing work products for the good of the organization as a whole. Teams produce much more than a collection of individuals when assembled in meetings, sharing information, and following a common agenda.

Effective teams develop their own lexicon, memory, respect, and trust among members. Teams share responsibility, accountability, and glory for their shared output and behavior.

Teams may be built through their time together – or broken. We advocate a deliberate effort to build teams among the participants of your workshop, some obvious and others not-so-obvious.

Team Building

Successful team building can be facilitated despite the obvious challenges of separate priorities, individual goals, and variability of commitment among team members. Yet team building is rarely accomplished as the result of a single staged exercise.

Team building needs to be continuously supported by structuring appropriate events with open and safe exchange of individual biases, ideas, and constructive criticism.

Perform these team-building steps as appropriate:

• Deploy team-building activities throughout your workshop, especially early and upfront.
• Look for agreement beginning with shared mission, vision, and values, and then more detailed team and workshop goals, shared responsibility, and common success factors across products, departments, and business units.
• Plan on using breakout teams frequently, and then use them more often than planned.
• Have the participants perform a self-assessment of their effectiveness as a team at intervals, such as at the close of each day, and engage them in self-diagnosis and remedy.

Team building activities include:

• Staged activities aimed specifically at team building such as business simulations, icebreakers, warm-ups, and situational gaming.
• Activities in the course of the workshop, not apparent as team building activities, such as breakout sessions, combined homework/evening assignments (outside of the workshop), and joint analysis and presentations.
• Identify and reinforce common ground. Where two or more participants exhibit differing goals within the workshop, identify the common elements of their positions while concurrently recognizing their differences. Work to amplify the importance of their commonality to support organizational objectives, yet carefully probe for differences. Differences attributable to uncommon vocabulary or objectives imposed by others not attending the workshop, or even no longer with the organization.
• Most importantly, seeks to determine if challenges to team building are endemic to the culture that must implement the solution formed by the team. If so, share your observations and concerns with the executive sponsor(s) or product owner. The sponsor should structure appropriate action that needs to take place outside of your meetings and workshops.

Within MGRUSH, workshops represent much more than just a generic technique. Workshop design achieves a specific set of results and furthers the design and implementation of change in very specific ways.

Workshop Design and Focusing

The focusing stage of workshops develops a clear understanding of the mission, scope, and objectives of the workshop for all participants, and by extension, those indirectly supporting the workshop (such as sponsors, supporters, and other stakeholders).

Orientation and Focusing

The focusing stage occurs during orientation or early in the launch to:

• Introduce the project or product
• Launch the team
• Introduce the sponsor(s)
• Review and confirm the business purpose
• Confirm the mission, scope, and objective of the project or product
• Identify management priorities, concerns, opportunities, challenges, and constraints
• Identify and articulate the motivating concerns driving this project or product
• Affirm expectations about deliverables, performance, timing, work product, behavior, and other characteristics during development
• Identify additional workshop/project participants, sources (SME or Subject Matter Experts), and beneficiaries
• Management commitment — This is NOT to be obtained during the focusing stage of the workshop. Commitment is already obtained. Here the commitment is expressed and stressed to the workshop participants

Focusing preparation

Complete the following steps to launch team building prior to significant events, ceremonies, and workshops.

• Identify participants
• Notify participants of their involvement and contributing roles
• Confirm the availability of participants
• Reserve facilities, equipment, and refreshments
• Learn about workshop participants’ subject matter expertise
• Review techniques, work products, tools, issues, and challenges
• Create materials to be used during the workshop (or a version of previously created materials)
• Prepare likely assignments for breakout sessions
• Draft likely assignments for home/evening work
• Prepare “seed content” for discussions (to be used if the participants are slow to share their points of view, concepts, or insights)
• Prepare and review (with sponsors, and organizers) the workshop agenda; revise it as necessary

Focusing implementation

Complete the following steps that support team building during the workshop.

• Perform the warm-up/startup activities
  • Welcome the participants
  • Confirm workshop purpose, scope, and deliverables
  • Review workshop agenda
  • Review workshop/project “ ground rules”
• Confirm workshop/project mission, scope, and objectives
• Set expectations for deliverables and work product objectives
• Obtain commitment, identify principles, values, and organization policies
• Develop and articulate the case for action
• Identify supporting participants
• Document material presented, covered, analyzed, discussed, decisions reached and tabled, and open issues
• Wrap-up session and daily activities
• Close workshop

Focusing work products

The focusing workshops should also validate or produce work products, including:

Workshop:

• Mission statement
• Business purpose statement (may be pre-prepared)
• The case for action or charter
• Team principles, values, and (applicable) policies (that govern team behavior)
• Statement of “success” – what it looks like
• Critical success factors
• Risk factors and risk management approaches

Project or product plan

• Statement of work
• Project organization chart
• Project GANTT chart or sprint sequence
• Staffing and support plan
• SME identification
• Team member profiles

Next Steps

• Assignments
• Open issues
• Meeting schedule and agenda

Supporting In-formation

This activity identifies and articulates the motivating concerns that create the need for this project or product, such as (these are not exclusive of each other):

• Market threats
• Cost position, trends
• Customer needs and personas
• Financial, and market performance shortcomings
• Growth and stability (or lack of)
• Strategic position
• Position company for sale, increased valuation
• Repair history of too few new products
• Improve culture and morale

In the context of the motivating concerns, focusing and launch articulates the impact of action and inaction. Work product should include:

• State likely outcomes if the company/organization proceeds on its current path
• Reveal probably outcomes due to actions of customers, competitors, others
• State value/impact of an improvement in product concept management
• State value/impact of no action regarding product concept management

Best Practices / Lessons Learned

The organization and team may benefit from a scan of other practices, ambitiously seeking “best practices” from which they might model or derive “lessons learned.” This scan identifies or articulates activities of other units within the organization and its competitors or others that can be modeled for their product concept management activity. The content of the “best practices / lessons learned” session will likely include:

• Current PCM (Product Concept Management or Catalyst) practices
• History of PCM efforts
• PCM and NPI (new product ideation) efforts of other organizations

In the context of the best practices/lessons learned, this workshop activity articulates the organizational knowledge about PCM and new product ideation. We often think of PCM as a process that encourages plurality and most often includes

(a) the new product ideation activity and

(b) the business case evaluation

but is most distinguished as being sandwiched between these two more visible activities. Orientation and focusing activities articulate and permit comparison of past, current, and developmental efforts at PCM by other parts of the organization, its competitors, suppliers, and other third parties.

Work product should include:

• Organizational units having new product ideation processes, experience, process flow, and lessons learned
• Product or process surrogates or business units have had, have, or are developing PCM, its reason for being, experience, process flow, and lessons learned
• Organizational units having business case development processes (often the first stage of a Stage-gate-like product development process), and description of the process, its reason for being, experience, process flow, and lessons learned

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Don’t ruin your career by hosting bad meetings. Sign up for a workshop or send this to someone who should. MGRUSH workshops focus on meeting design and practice. Each person practices tools, methods, and activities daily during the week. Therefore, while some call this immersion, we call it the road to building high-value facilitation skills.

Our workshops also provide a superb way to earn up to 40 SEUs from the Scrum Alliance, 40 CDUs from IIBA, 40 Continuous Learning Points (CLPs) based on Federal Acquisition Certification Continuous Professional Learning Requirements using Training and Education activities, 40 Professional Development Units (PDUs) from SAVE International, as well as 4.0 CEUs for other professions. (See workshop and Reference Manual descriptions for details.)

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In conclusion, we dare you to embrace the will, wisdom, and activities that amplify a facilitative leader. #facilitationtraining #MEETING DESIGN