How can a new team get into productive operation as quickly as possible?

New teams are mostly held back by ineffecient processes. 'How we should do things' is commonly forgotten in the rush to address 'what must we do?'.

Explore possibilities: Starting up a new Team
When a team is formed, either to tackle a specific project, or perhaps after a reorganisation, it will come to full effectiveness much more quickly if it takes some time out to consider its role and operating principles. It may need to build trust between team members, and develop a style of leadership that members will respond to. The initial business goals need definition, as well as mechanisms to communicate with stakeholders, be they internal customers or the staff of a new unit. This is fairly easy to achieve and can give the team a real boost.

What can you do to improve things?
Take time to do a 'team startup'. This could be a expanded meeting, or an off-site residential event - it depends how much time you have to spare and how imoprtant the tasks of this particular team are.

The key questions to address are:

• What do the team leader and team members expect from one another?
• What do we do well as a team, in respect of key process skills - defining our objectives, listening, time discipline, consensus building, generating ideas, and so on?
• What do we not do so well in these areas? How can we develop some 'groundrules' around these?
• What are the key objectives, or deliverables, expected of us as a team?

The event would ideally be a mixture of carefully structured feedback, ideas sessions, and perhaps some team exercises to diagnose team behaviors, as well as allowing people to enjoy working together.

Case Studies: Starting up a new team

Many new management groups were established following a corporate merger. They had, in addition to forging trust and collaboration between members of the leadership teams, to manage a newly joined workforce, used to different cultures, different locations, different methods of management and communication. Leaders had to cope with great uncertainty over how to approach managing a team of highly experienced professionals, most of which had been in the running for the leaders' jobs. We took many of these teams undertook a one-day startup session. From this they managed to establish a clear agreement to the teams' initial objectives, exchange feedback about what they expected of one another and build a commitment to useful behaviours that would enable them to perform effectively.