October 2018

Ever wonder why the simplest situations end up in a chaotic, argumentative, unnecessarily confrontational situation? Never happens to your team…then don’t bother reading any further, you are already the Bomb!

Team dynamics are the unconscious, psychological factors that influence the direction of the behaviour and performance of a team.

A team gets better on its journey to becoming High Performance by working through various stages as described later by the Tuckman’s Model.

Let’s look at the stages that one should master as you become High Performance.

Step 1: Forming

The transformation from a group to a Team starts with everyone understanding how everyone else “clicks,” what we like and dislike, what we believe is good and bad, what we think is right or wrong, true or false, and so it goes on.  Alongside this, we need to understand just how sensitive are our beliefs in these matters.

This will be the first step to respecting others, which is an important phase in establishing both your own persona, Emotional Intelligence, and ultimately a team maturity.

Step 2: Storming

As the name suggests, this stage this is when we are confident to express ourselves on opinions and points of view, knowing that they may be different than others. The only way we can do this is if we know and trust our team members “response” and maturity levels.

If we don’t get the forming right, this storming phase usually ends up is chaos, dysfunctional outbursts and worse.

Step 3: Norming

Without conflict, we cannot grow, so the results of our storming will eventually end up with the team agreeing on some matters of importance. It is because we start to dump our emotive egos and allow clear logic and our link with our vision to guide proper decision making.

Norming allows us to benchmark standards of doing things so that everyone buys in and understands their worth.

Step 4: Performing

When we have a team of superheroes, that respect each other powers, and have clear guidelines as to how we should do stunts properly….hey presto…you get magic.

Here are a few strategies that can be followed to boost team dynamics:

• Listen carefully to the team dialogue

Listen to the conversations your team has, assess the level of assertiveness and whether people are tolerant or not. This will indicate whether you need to wind things back to stage 2 or 1 again.

• Introduce debrief sessions

After any activity, event or project, carry out a proper debriefing and review session to look into the good, the bad, and the ugly. If done properly, this will provide objective input to how the team assess both their competencies, understandings of the process and most importantly; the appropriateness of the behaviour or the team.

• Stress the importance that everyone on the team must talk and

When you see that a team is over-talking each other either through excitement or over assertiveness, introduce the ball process, whereby you have one squeegee ball, and only the person holding the ball can speak, the others must listen. You can, however, only expect to hold the ball for 30 seconds; this ensures team members think about what they are to say and not waffle for the sake of it.

Developing a well-oiled team is a journey…enjoy it or stay at home.

Beyond Teambuilding is committed to offering training on team dynamics to any team who may be experiencing problems in such areas. Allow us to transform your team dynamics from dreadful to dazzling with our training services.

Successful teams do what other teams are not prepared to do! Are you ready?

At the HiSide Group, our HiSide Training team make it happen.

Contact us for forward-thinking planning, dynamic team development programs to stimulate meaningful change.