Team Tips

1. Team Tips Professor Anne Donnellon

2. Tips for Creating Team Commitment • Identify or create ways to align individual goals with team goals (e.g., offer unsolicited positive feedback on members’ contributions or make team environment an oasis of learning, fun or creativity) • Create team identity • Giving the team a name • Using humor and fun occasionally in team meetings • Reminding team often but subtly of shared goals and progress • Be a first-rate coordinator • Create agendas focused on critical decisions/actions • Communicate regularly between meetings with members • Get critical information and resources as quickly as possible (this sends a strong signal about your commitment and effectiveness) • Keep track of the timeline • Initiate discussion, analysis, and decisions about missed milestones • Confront and manage conflicts

3. Tips on Managing Meetings • Minimize information exchange during meetings  While necessary, find another way to do these exchanges • Use meetings for discussion, analysis, debate, and decision • Start with comment like “what do we need to get doneby the end of this meeting?” • Manage tangents by • Reminding the team of what it agreed it needed to do in meeting • Tracking what seems tangential to some but not all and at the end of the meeting, returning to these issues for team review

4. Tips for Structuring Teams Create specific roles (choose from below or create new ones). There is no reason people can’t do more than one role: • Meeting Facilitator • “Leader” or “Project Coordinator” • “Social planner” • Visuals guru • Timekeeper • Document manager • Liaison with faculty • Devil’s advocate • Chief integrator

5. Tips for Structuring Teams, continued • Assign roles thoughtfully – consider putting people into roles that give them opportunities to develop new capabilities or that require them to rise to the occasion or control their unproductive behavior, for example: • Who needs encouragement to speak? Assign them regular speaking roles, like meeting facilitator or devil’s advocate • Who needs encouragement to get his/her work done on time? Assign this person responsibility for charting production targets and actual performance. • Who is a driver-type? Assign him or her to facilitator or devil’s advocate role OR document manager

6. Tips for Structuring Teams, continued • Identify and develop key processes • Create and manage project timeline (be realistic but aggressive). •  Create visual production schedules with graphic evidence of success/failure on meeting production targets (individual and team-level) • One of the most neglected team processes tends to be integration– be sure you schedule regular meetings to integrate what you are all doing and learning and to decide how to proceed with your plan. • Get help if you need it, from a third party.

7. Top Ten Team Talk Tips • Use “we” (referring to the team) rather than “I” and “you” • Refer often to team goals & mutual interests (“we need”) • Use questions asking for information or opinion, not to challenge or discourage others • Don’t interrupt people who talk infrequently • Repeat when necessary: • “I don’t understand. Could you say it another way?” • “What are your reservations or concerns?” • “Could we stop for a moment (and revisit our objectives or examine our process)? “ • “Can you tell me WHY that’s important to you?” • “What are our options at this point?” • “What if we....?” Adapted from Donnellon, A. Team Talk The power of language in team dynamics. HBS Press, 1996.