team building

What is accelerate team building?

accelerate work with your managers and team leaders to help them develop and reinforce a sustainable high performing culture with their teams, through a tailored programme including such activities as:

• Developing a Team and Individual Mission Statement. By definition, your mission is the team’s and individuals reason for existing within the organisation. This helps to provide a sense of meaningfulness and clarity.
• Goal Achievement - clarity and visability over performance against goals. Setting and measuring goals keeps the team focused and provides immediate feedback. If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it..
• Team Empowerment - giving employees the knowledge and authority to handle routine problems independently.
• Open, honest, effective communication. The team cannot grow and maximize its effectiveness if people are not open and truthful. Remember, communication is a two-way street. Team members should be expected to not only share opinions and ideas, but also be open to feedback
• Positive roles and norms. Team members must feel that they are working for and with each other by recognizing and sharing their skills and knowledge.

accelerate work with team leaders to help them establish guidelines and expectations with their team. This typically progress though four stages:

1. Forming: The team sets goals, identifies members’strengths, and discusses the limits within which it will operate. In successful teams, each member will come to feel during this phase that they are becoming part of the team, and that their particular talents or skills are needed and valued. During this phase, they must answer for themselves:

• Why am I participating on the team?
• What will I personally gain from participating?
• What do I specifically have to offer the team?

2. Storming: Is the most difficult to get through, it is characterized by conflict and disagreement as personalities emerge. Factions form, personalities may clash, and poor communication can occur. During this stage, the group might set unrealistic goals because it cannot reach good compromises.

3. Norming: Conflict has been resolved and harmony emerges. In this new spirit of friendliness, openness and cooperation, members begin to feel secure in expressing their views. The most significant improvement is that people start listening to each other. They determine how effective communication can be maintained even when disagreements occur, and they establish work methods that are recognized by the whole team. Team members agree on who has the power, who is the leader, and what team members’ roles are.

4. Performing:When a team is able to perform its work effectively and productively, it has reached the fourth stage, perform, and is a real team. Members are honest with one another and act as a cohesive unit. The team’s effectiveness, which began at a level slightly below the sum of the individuals’ and then dropped to its lowest point during the storm stage, should now be much higher than it was before the team process began. This elevated performance level is the main justification for teams.

Harness your psychometric assessment results

accelerate team building programmes can incorporate personality or team assessments to facilitate self-awareness and awareness of others to improve team dynamics, communication and interpersonal relationships. These results can be used to shed light on chatacteristics such as:

• Team Style
• Leadership Style
• Communication Style
• Influencing Style
• Subordinate Style

Consolidating results

Team building activities are stimulating problem-solving tasks designed to leverage theory and help group members develop their capacity to work effectively together. An important part of team building exercises is participants' reflection and discussion about the activity, how they approached the situation, and possible points of learning.

• Play a Business Game: The team works together in a challenging in-door game that highlights leadership issues, team working and communication. The learning is directly transferable to real world situations.
• or take on an outdoor team challenge: Based at an outdoor venue such, the team can engage in team activities that involves ropes, planks, water and games that build trust, communication and thinking “out of the box ”.

Measuring effectiveness

The team building activity provides an ideal opportunity to test and assess the team’s perceived effectiveness in practice and provide a baseline measure for ongoing development.

Action planning/personal on-boarding plan

Action planning is a recommended way of creating accountability at a team and individual level to build on and accelerate the momentum gained during team building. Individual team members should walk away with an action plan that details:

• thier personal mission and goals
• what they will personally do to build on their own and the teams strengths
• what they will personally do to manage their own and the teams development areas

Follow up one-on-one coaching can be arranged to support individuals to perform at their best.