Deliberately starting out to develop a team, rather than leaving it to chance, greatly enhances the likelihood of success.

Unless the leader is skilled in team development, it can be beneficial to work with a team and leadership development coach, who not only provides support and assistance to the leader and the team but also an independent objective point of view.

The underlying philosophy and the approaches should be aimed at developing greater awareness and skills to help everyone to be at their best individually and as a team.

This improved individual, team functioning and resiliency will directly result in more effective service and performance being delivered to the business.

It is typical for teams developed in this way to deliver greater levels of performance and results with fewer head counts than other teams where this attention has not been given.

10 team development steps taken to accomplish this can be summarised as follows:

• Get the whole team together regularly.
• Help them get to know each other as individuals beyond their roles.
• Collectively develop a clearly articulated Team Charter or acceptable “Ways of Working Together” Guidelines.
• Design ways of communicating to keep everyone informed and up to date with what each is doing-for cross sharing of knowledge and seamless support to the business.
• Provide support and training to help individuals understand each other and their different styles of working and to develop effective communication, team working, coaching and feedback, and collective problem solving skills.
• Balance development attention on all key factors of high performance teams. (See end note 1)
• Assist team members to be more open to hearing others’ points of view and to be less reactive to the challenges around them.
• Develop and clearly articulate a team vision, values, and team and individual goals and responsibilities-with single point accountabilities.
• Have a regular tracking process to keep track of projects and timelines. The legal department developed a line-by-line tracking document kept up to date by one of the support staff with a “traffic light” colour coding system for quick referencing of finished, in-process and late projects or action items.
• Have fun in the process!

Finally, team coaching presents greater degree of difficulty to one-on-one coaching by a factor of ten.Find a coach experienced and trained to develop teams.

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Author: Steve Sharpley Article Source: EzineArticles.com