13. Building Team Trust
Trust is the bedrock of everything else. If the team doesn’t have trust, then it is experiencing crushing drains of efficiency, quality, and energy. In this module, the team will create its own “trust model” and identify the behaviors that can kill or enhance trust. They will conclude with a shared understanding of what trust looks like in this team, and a plan of action for increasing it.
Your team will:
Examine the importance of trust in successful teams.
Identify the key elements of team trust.
Assess this team’s level of trust.
Discuss how the team will increase trust.
14. Giving and Receiving Feedback
“How are you doing?” In a team, that’s not a polite salutation, but part of a shared commitment to give and receive feedback. Whether it is “corrective” or “reinforcing,” feedback is necessary to the team’s culture, processes, tasks, and relationships. Learners will have an opportunity to share their feedback with one another and build valuable skills that they can continue to exercise.
Your team will:
Explore the importance of feedback – both corrective and reinforcing – to the healthy functioning of your team.
Identify qualities of effective feedback.
Establish how this team intends to make delivering and receiving feedback a constant part of its work.
Practice giving and receiving feedback as it relates to processes, team tasks and team relationships.
15. Sharing Leadership
When it comes to team work, who takes the lead? The answer is, “everyone!” A team is an incubator for leadership skills, and this fun, highly interactive module will give each team member a plan for developing their own unique leadership.
Your team will:
Identify shared leadership behaviors for this team.
Exercise your own unique leadership.
Make plans for further sharing your leadership, and expanding your own repertoire of leader behaviors.
16. Sparking Team Creativity
Your team is full of creative people. Don’t believe it? Then work through this module as a team. You’ll discover that creativity is not a magical thing reserved for a gifted few. Instead, it’s a discipline and a process that any team can exercise at any time. Next time the team needs to generate new opportunities and new ways of thinking, make this module a part of the work agenda. You won’t believe the creative brilliance that you produce!
Your team will:
Explore a disciplined process for exercising creative thinking (even if members don’t consider themselves “creative!”)
Consider the different roles and individual strengths that different team members bring to the creative process.
Work through a four-part model that leads team members through the creative process – from defining an opportunity, to brainstorming creative solutions, to making plans for building the idea, and ultimately to ensuring its effective implementation.
17. Managing Change
Change happens. Like it or not, change will be a continual part of the team’s reality. Rather than forever reacting to unforeseen events, the team will practice a multi-lens approach to confronting a real-world change it faces. Members will deal with their own reactions to the change, analyze the nature of the change, explore the many unanticipated ripple effects… and, of course, develop a plan of action.
Your team will:
Deal collectively with a change that is currently affecting the team.
Explore and identify individual reactions to the change.
Analyze the nature of the change.
Identify the implications of the change.
Create a shared plan of action for navigating effectively through the change.
18. Leveraging Team Learning
What does teamwork have to do with learning? You may be surprised. Learning is very much a team activity, in which each member has different roles and strengths. This module offers some fascinating ways for members to think about their learning styles, and then coordinate them for powerful and ongoing learning.
Your team will:
Explore Kolb’s Learning Cycle for deeper understanding into how people learn from experience.
Consider your own individual learning styles and preferences.
Plan future learning activities that leverage and honor the learning preferences of each team member.