Purpose

Teams exist to produce results, measurable results of value to the organization's customers. In addition to producing a result, team members can pursue three other purposes. Healthy teams always devote some energy to each of the four purposes. The relative balance between the four varies from team to team.

1. Results—To improve a process, solve a problem or achieve a goal.

2. Culture—To change the organization's culture by rigorously using the desired culture in each meeting.

3. Professional Growth—To provide individual learning about the organization, problem solving, teamwork and process improvement.

4. Personal Growth—To learn more about yourself.

A well crafted purpose will be:

• Clear
• Focused
• Important
• Meaningful
• Agreed

The special purposes of a Problem Solving Team (PST) are:

• To clearly define the problem or opportunity
• To clearly define the causes
• To design and test a solution

The special purposes of a Process Improvement Team (PIT) are:

• To improve customer service for both internal and external customers
• To reduce costs

The special purposes of a Process Redesign Team are:

• To determine key performance variables of strategically critical processes

• To surface and challenge underlying assumptions of strategically critical processes.

• To rethink and redesign processes for dramatically improved performance.

How To Guidelines for Teams

At the start of each meeting post on the wall and be sure everyone is clear and agreed on:

• The overall purpose of the team.
• The specific purpose of this meeting.
• The agenda for this meeting.

Clarifying the Team's Purpose

A clear purpose gets a new team off to a good start. Time taken to clarify the assignment at the start is well spent, BUT new teams should beware of bogging down in meeting after meeting to clarify the assignment. Sometimes the team must forge ahead with an imperfectly defined task. Forging ahead will often lead to new information which can help to further clarify the purpose.

If your team was created by an executive council, or your boss, the background for the team's task should be contained in a completed Task Team Assignment Sheet. When a team begins, flesh out the Assignment Sheet, if it is incomplete. When an inexperienced team starts, it will often take several meetings before the overall purpose and task clarify. At least one person who designed the task should attend the first meetings to assure a clear assignment. If no Assignment Sheet has been completed, the facilitator should draft one, distribute it to the team and review it with the team at the first meeting.

Critical Team Roles

Teams must fill critical roles:

• Facilitator
• Administrator
• Resources
• Decider
• Coach

The more difficult, complex, or sensitive the agenda, the more benefit in:

• having a skilled facilitator
• having a team coach
• separating the decider and facilitator roles
• having a separate administrator

Build A Learning Climate

A learning climate enables a team. It allows a team to see and agree on the data, the problem, and what improvements to make. As the learning climate declines, the beach ball effect grows. The beach ball represents poor communication and understanding.

Every difficult, complex, sensitive issue is like a gigantic beach ball, creating distance between the people involved. Each person sees a different color, and believes he sees the whole truth.

Typical beach ball issues:

• Unresolved problems
• unimproved processes
• poor quality
• high costs

Beach ball size is due to the:

• complexity of problem
• experience of people
• styles of people
• interests of people

Shrinking the Beach Ball Requires a Learning Climate

Honesty

Honesty requires proactive, complete communication in all areas that impact the team, openly sharing your ideas and concerns, facts and feelings:

• made directly to the team
• avoiding gossiping or complaining to third parties
• going beyond the safe or easy contributions
• moving beyond your comfort zone
• being ten percent more honest
• not letting niceness block truth telling
• proactively supporting others to share their truth
• remembering you can never lie, and still avoid the truth

Without information progress comes hard and slow.

How to build honesty:

• Announce
  Clearly announce honestly as a ground rule of the team's climate. At the beginning of each meeting, the decider restates the goal. The administrator posts the ground rules at every meeting.

• Model
  The facilitator and the decider model being ten percent more honest. As they do this, exploring their of their own vulnerability and comfort zone, they will create an environment where others can follow.

• Address Retribution
  When someone speaks honestly and retribution occurs, people will not repeat the attempt. The facilitator and the decider muse encourage honesty, and listen when someone puts forward new information, rather than punishing and blaming.

• An Experiment with Honesty
  Ask team members: How many of you want complete, honest information from your subordinates? In general, most, if not all, hands will go up when you ask this question. If not, probe with: What happens to you if your subordinates give you incomplete, inaccurate, or late data about what's really happening? In most cases, it becomes apparent that complete, timely, honest information from subordinates in essential to manage well.

Then ask: How many of you believe your boss wants complete, honest information? Usually, far fewer hands go up.

This exercise reveals that most of us want honestly, but we don't always want to treat others honestly. Honesty can be uncomfortable. It takes courage and we all fall short. It's easier to demand of others than of ourselves. Supporting honesty, requires continuous reinforcement from the decider, and an apparent lack of retribution.

Mutual Respect

Mutual respect requires seeking, understanding, and accepting another's truth.

Assume the other person tells the truth, then work to understand how and why they hold those views. When you disagree, don't say I disagree. This challenges the other person and defensive debating ensues, rather than integrating understanding. When the other person disagrees with you, don't defend, don't explain, don't sell. Switch gears. Ask questions to surface new information so you can gain new understanding and learn. Do not ask inquisitional questions to back the other person into a corner. The best questions help you understand the other person's viewpoint.

Notice when you defend a position because you're right, or want to win. Shift to inquiry, to learn. Ask Tell me more. Then, tell me even more... Instead of saying: Let me tell you.

The greater the differences between two people or groups, the greater the challenge to respect the other's views. Operate as if there is no objective truth, only your perception and that of the other person. If you believe or act as if you have the truth and the other person does not, mutual respect will be low.

Mutual respect particularly applies to understanding the needs of your customers, both external and internal. Without respect for external customers you cannot understand their needs deeply enough to gain a competitive edge. Without respect, you may be quick to reject what appear as irrational needs. Without internal respect, no foundation is built for respecting the external customers.

Without mutual respect, the truth will not be told and will not be heard. As mutual respect increases the organization becomes increasingly able to engage in productive conflict.

How to Build Mutual Respect and Honesty

You can both tell the truth and be respectful. Most of us have not seen this well modeled. When sharing your truth with others, do so with compassion. Guidelines for sharing the truth with respect:

1. Share data, not interpretation, conclusions, demands, or ultimatums. For example, sharing data: Your reports to me are one or two days late more than half the time. Sharing interpretation: You are not responsible.

2. You can enhance sharing data (which others will accept) rather than sharing interpretations (which others are less likely to accept) by making "I" rather than "you" statements. An "I" statement reports how "I" felt. For example, When you are late to meetings, I feel disappointed and demotivated rather than When you are late to meetings, you are irresponsible.

The Four Roles of Management:

PAEI: Presenting the four roles (producer, administrator, entrepreneur, and integrator PAEI), defining a good versus a great manager, and assessing the team's PAEI strength, helps build a conceptual framework for mutual respect.

The Beach Ball Effect: This analogy underscores how easy it is to disrespect what you cannot see.

Maintain Ground Rules Which Focus on Respect:

• Come prepared

• Come on time

• Attended all meetings, from beginning to end

• Eliminate external interruptions

• Break together

• No blaming, discounting, or attacking

• Formulate the problem before the selecting a solution

• Learn to listen without interruption

• Use strict rules if necessary: No one can interrupt the speaker except the facilitator. Pass right to next raised hand. No one speaks twice until all have spoken once.

• Institute respect fines: Install a fine system where anyone can signal a breached of mutual respect. If seconded, it sticks and the perpetrator pays a fine. Set significant fines: $5, $20, $50? Fines may be awarded to anyone who acts with respect or saved for the team's future use.

Require first names: Have each person call on their team mates by first name.

Be Responsible: Take full responsibility and respond, even in situations where you do not have full authority. When a problem arises, never blame. Search for your responsibility. As a team member, take responsibility for the team's success. As a manager or employee, take responsibility for the organization's success. Taking full responsibility can be quite uncomfortable, but that is not a reason to withdraw. As soon as you back away from 100% responsibility you have an out, an excuse, a reason, not to respond. You can become a victim, and blaming someone or something else. You have a reason not to act.

Participate: Participating mentally and physically. Mental participation is staying focused, conscious and present. Thinking about the task and the team. Physical participation requires interaction with the other team members. To build participation, announce that participation is desired. To create a participative process:

• Design and lead meetings to build in participation
• Use individual and team accumulation
• Call on the quiet people
• Warm?up and cool down, encouraging participation at the beginning and end of each meeting.

Basketball players and ballet dancers take time to warm up and cool down to enhance the quality of their performance and decrease the chance of an injury. The same principles apply to human interaction. Warming up gets the participants ready to work. Cooling down brings productive closure. Every meeting benefit from a warm up and a cool down. The more complex, sensitive, or difficult the meeting, the more in?depth the warm up and cool down should be. As a team moves from topic to topic within a meeting mini warm ups and cool downs will speed progress. Sometimes a discussion lingers on, simply because no one knows how to cool down, like dinner guests hovering at the door, over long before departing.

Analyze Teamwork:

1. When the team gets stuck, look for process solutions.
2. You have a lot of information on how to improve teams and their ability to solve problems and make decisions. Just use it!
3. Be aware of your reluctance to raise process issues. Know when you are reluctant. What caused the reluctance? What would help you be less reluctant? Be specific.

Five Minute Time Out: A Quick Way To Improve Meetings

Improving meetings requires awareness. When is the meeting going well and when not? Once a problem is identified, most teams have little trouble making improvements. One identification procedure is the Five Minute Time Out:

• Anyone can call Time Out. This can be done any time the meeting is going poorly in your opinion.

• Ask everyone to answer the three questions below, silently.

• Ask everyone to share his or her answers, round-robin style for question one. Allow people to share their response to question two and three, without response until everyone has spoken

• Have a brief discussion about improvements and decide what, specifically, will be done (not more than three) to improve the meeting. If you do this, check at the end of the meeting to see if it worked.

1. My assessment of this the meeting is:
   LOUSY SUPER 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
2. Why did you rate the meeting the way you did? _________________________________
3. What improvements might help? _____________________________________________

Democraship: A Cooperative Decision Making Process

Decision making precede problem solving. Democraship, one approach to decision making, combines the speed of strong leadership and the commitment of a democratic consensus. To combine leadership and democracy into Democraship, we distinguish three aspects in reaching a decision: making, taking and accepting.

Making the decision goes on as individuals on the team collect data, discuss, exchange information, and generally work the issue or challenge. We use the word making because, in fact, the team is fashioning, creating, and assembling a solution.

This decision making process is most successful if the relationship between team members is mutually influential, rather than authority or power based. The Decider is an equal while making the decision. The Decider shares relevant information and even express his ignorance like every one else.

Taking a decision occurs when the Decider says, This is the decision that I will take and approve. This fixes the authority and responsibility for the decision. The Decider uses the team as a medium for mutual education, to gain ideas and perspectives to help him take a more informed decision. He encourages a decision to me made which takes the concerns of others into account. This process builds respect, trust and commitment to the Decider's decision.

When taking of the decision, the Decider is first among equals. The Decider and only the Decider can take the decision. This means the Decider is taking full responsibility for the decision and its implementation. The Decider can and will be held accountable.

The acceptance of the decision by the team needs testing. Acceptance will be extraordinarily high if the decision was taken as a result of a well integrated decision?making process. If some significant number of the team members do not accept the decision that was taken by the Decider, the process of making the decision was insufficiently facilitated and little mutual learning occurred.

The purpose of this process is to combine the best benefits of a Democratic consensus, which seeks input from everyone, with the best benefits of strong leadership.

Suppose We Still Don't Agree?

Even with good facilitation and leadership, you may end up without one hundred percent agreement. For many decisions, operational consensus will be sufficient.

Operational Consensus sounds like this: I understand what you want to do. I would not do it. I feel that you understand my view, and I feel that you have given me a fair chance to influence you, but I have not been able to do so. Therefore, as a member of this organization and supporter of its purpose, I will enthusiastically support your decision, and not undermine it or bitch about it.

Voting

Pros	Cons
Quick	Fails to build commitment for implementation
Seems fair	Builds polarization, superficial agreement
	Fails to grapple deeply with issues, little learning

Voting should not be used to take decisions. Straw votes, however, can tell which way the wind blows, or who favors what, and can be very useful.

Individual and Team Accumulation

The individual and team accumulation technique separates individual thinking from the team dialogue, and builds honesty, openness, participation, and mutual respect. Each person privately records their thoughts, before sharing them. This encourages honesty by allowing each person time to clarify and articulate their own thoughts. Writing it down, makes it harder for the individual to dismiss his own ideas, as the team accumulates. During the team accumulation, avoid discussion about individual contributions to reduce challenging, punishing, or blaming. As these are eliminated, individuals feel safer to contribute their real thoughts.

The Process:

• Ask people to write down their ideas on a particular question, issue, or challenge of importance to the team. Ask people to place their pens down when then have finished. Allow enough time for about fifty percent of the group to complete the assignment.

• Ask someone to succinctly give you one idea and write it on a flip chart. Ask everyone else to cross off that idea on their list, if they have it.

• Ask everyone not to comment on the ideas, until they are all up on the flip chart.

• With the teams assistance, decide upon how to address the ideas posted.