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Team Processes: Form the Team
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Becoming a Team Groups and teams typically pass through several typical stages of development, popularly known as "forming, storming, norming and performing."  These stages occur as a collection of individual human leans to function as a collaborative team. A team that does a good job of "forming" will generally find that the "storming" stage is brief and easily managed.   Save yourself some grief by managing the first stage effectively.  Establish a team identity before trying to jump into "doing" the task. Be especially careful to do it right when time is short and your group need to reach optimal operating efficiency quickly. Whatever time you "save" by short-circuiting this stage will be lost in triplicate in the storms of conflict later on! Step One: Define the membership Research has found the optimal group size for face-to-face decision-making to be five people: large enough to have some collective knowledge but small enough that folks can really "know" each other as people.  It's difficult to be open and honest with strangers!   Sometimes the demands of a project require that many more people be involved in doing the work, but communication is often arranged so that decision-making or collaborative work is done in subgroups of only 4-6. Regardless of the actual size of the group or its geographic distribution, it is crucial that everyone on the team knows who else is ON the team, what their areas of expertise or responsibility are, and how to contact them. Tool: The Team Roster Be sure to attend the first meeting of any new team, and find out who is on the team.  Learn each person's name, department and email. Generally, the first document created by a a team will be its roster, a list of members with their contact information. (Click here for a roster form that you can submit to your instructor.) Step Two: Determine Primary Roles If the team has been formed in order to accomplish a task, the reason for each person's membership will define that person's primary role in the group.  The IT specialist will be in charge of IT aspects of the task, for instance, while the representative from Human Resources will bring job analysis expertise to the group.  When a group has self-organized to accomplish a task, an important step is to decide what resources are needed to accomplish the task and decide how the team members will divide up those primary roles. (READ MORE).   Everyone identified?  Return to the Team Instructions and go on to Step Two