Align your team and create support with Teamliner
When people are invited to participate in the development of their own targets and rules, moving forward with change and innovation becomes a lot easier
Every team manager knows that trust doesn’t fall out of the sky. Trust grows out of striving towards the same goals, defining common expectations, clearly designing each and everyone’s roles, and last but not least sticking to commitments. Logic, right? And still these crucial conditions often are not discussed or invisible and as a result, a lot of teams work habitually and without clear guidelines.
“A team is more than a group of people who work together. A team is a group of people who trust each other” (Simon Sinek, author and speaker)
Those rusted habits do not change easily but have to be addressed consciously. For that it is crucial that the manager does not answer all the questions himself or dictate team principles. Instead he has to create space for dialogue and facilitate the process. Of course you can suggest certain elements as manager, but make sure that the others are able to think and speak first.
To support this process we developed TeamLiner®, an effective and certainly practical instrument for managers and process managers to:
- start up a new team, for example in case of a change or innovation<
- align the members of an existing team when clear rules are needed or a new membere joins in
- redirect the team process when there are ambiguities or conflicts concerning cooperation
TeamLiner®, an effective and certainly practical instrument for managers and process managers
When developing this process, it is best to have the team members reflect on the team and its leading principles upfront. After that, during the creative session with the team, which will take anywhere between half a day and two days, the focus will be, first of all, on the constructive dialogue about some basic questions about the team itself:
- How do the central values of the organization apply to our team? How to make them more concrete?
- What are our current strengths and capabilities?
- Which obstacles are we facing on our way to realize our goals?
- How to improve our communication and ensure clear decision making?
- How to handle conflicts?
These are only some examples of questions to be asked, but it depends on the specific situation of the team and the aim of the team session.
The next exercise is about getting inspired by top teams and from there take out some elements that might be important for your team.
By the end of the day, teamliner will be complete and the team will have some concrete tools to move forward. But with that, the job is not done. It is important to take into consideration the way to follow up on agreements, and how to make this visible and debatable. An integration in daily operations and meetings is therefore an important and necessary step in the process.
By working as a team to reflect and create your team principles together, you create a huge amount of support from the start. When people are invited to participate in the development of their own targets and rules, moving forward with change and innovation becomes a lot easier.
