Tips for developing effective Team-Working Skills:

Being in groups is part of everyday life and many of us will belong to a wide range of groups, for example: family groups, social groups, sports groups, committees, etc.

This article concentrates on groups that have been specially formed to fulfill some purpose, or groups that are a drawing together of people with shared experience. This type of group is often also referred to as a team.

It defines groups and explains some of the issues and challenges of working in a group. It explains the Group Life-Cycle, and how groups can change over time.

This article builds on those, and sets out some of the specific skills that you may need when working in a group or a team.

Key Team Roles:

  • Shaper – drives work forward and gets things done, has a clear idea of the desired direction of travel;
  • Implementer – also gets things done, looking for ways to turn talk into action and generate practical activity;
  • Completer-Finisher – focuses on completing tasks, and tidying up all the loose ends;
  • Coordinator – manage the group dynamics, often in a leadership role;
  • Team Worker – helps the team to work effectively by supporting personal relationships;
  • Resource Investigator – gathers external resources and information to help the team;
  • Plant – generates ideas and creative solutions, not all of them practical;
  • Monitor-Evaluator – good at critically assessing ideas and proposals, and at making decisions; and
  • Specialist – brings expert knowledge to the group, not always necessary to effective functioning.
Key Process-Focused Team Skills:

Process-focused skills tend to be about people, and about building rapport within the group and making it work cohesively and effectively. Those who take on process-focused group roles tend to have very good interpersonal skills, and in particular: 

  • Communication Skills 
Good Coordinators, Team-Workers and Resource Investigators are good at Verbal Communication, Listening, and Questioning. They work hard to ensure that the group communicates well, helping to make sure that there are no misunderstandings or unexpressed difficulties between team members. 

  • Ability to Build Rapport
These people are also good at developing a sense of harmony within the group. They help to build rapport with others, creating a coherent team. 

  • Persuasion and Influencing Skills 
One of the key areas of process skills is in persuading and influencing. If the group is to come to a shared decision, for example, several members may need to be persuaded of the merits of a particular course of action. 

  • Facilitation Skills 
Managing a process is basically about facilitating it, or making it easier. Good facilitation skills are therefore vital in team-working, although they are often wrongly seen as crucial only for managing workshops. 

  • Feedback Skills 
Giving and receiving feedback well is essential in any team-working situation. Being able to give clear and effective feedback to others is vital to keep the group process running effectively, and to plan. It also helps to ensure that you do not get irritated and angry with the way that others are behaving. It follows that you also need to be able to receive feedback gracefully, and then act on it calmly. 

  • Skills in Chairing Meetings 
Group work often involves meetings, whether those are committee meetings or much bigger and more formal meetings. Skilled Coordinators often have highly developed skills in chairing meetings, and use them in small and large groups alike. 

  • Conflict resolution 
Finally, you have to recognize that there may be situations when you need to deal with difficult people or situations, or even resolve a conflict.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Avoiding Common Managerial Mistakes:

When you first take on a management or leadership role, you will probably have to learn a number of new skills.  What is often overlooked, however, is that you also have to avoid a number of common management pitfalls.  These pitfalls often catch out new managers, but with a little careful thinking and organization, many can be avoided.  This page outlines some of the most common management mistakes, and explains how you can take action to avoid them. This knowledge should help you to become a more effective manager, and develop your skills over time.  1. Failure to Delegate  New managers—and, indeed, many established managers—fail to delegate work effectively.  The end result is that they are overworked, and their team members are underworked and bored. A sure sign of this error is a manager who is staying late in an otherwise empty office every night, often coupled with high turnover among the team.  This happens for two...
Read more

15 lessons every successful entrepreneur follows:

Here is the list out the 15 things that will make you a successful entrepreneur. Read on... Marketing cannot create entrepreneurs; it is the market that creates them by accepting the good and rejecting the bad. While there are huge number of start-ups and companies that take the leap, most of them fall short of achieving the desired success. According to a recent study done by IBM & Oxford Economics, 90 per cent of Indian start-ups fail within the first five years. Building a sustainable company is harder than most people can imagine. Entrepreneurship is defying logic, building dreams and achieving the impossible. The journey is a humbling experience even for the best ones. Setbacks are inevitable, how entrepreneurs handle them decides their fate.   The successful ones have the passion to do whatever it takes to cross the line. They put their wholehearted efforts into accomplishing things that move the world forward. While there is no magic formula to...
Read more

10 signs that your co-workers secretly hate you:

Be it taking credit for a business idea or chewing food in an irritating manner, sometimes we do not realise that we are pestering our co-workers because of these annoying behaviour. In our personal lives, it becomes really easy for us to be with our kind of people. But at the workplace, this becomes really difficult as it can create a larger problem. Doing a great job can earn you your co-workers respect but it isn't enough. You also have to be liked, or at least not actively disliked. Independent revealed some subtle signs that your co-workers secretly hate you but there can be chances that you may just be misreading their body language or tone. Here are the signs that can tell you that your co-workers secretly hate you: You are being avoided. If you pay heed to the actions of your co-worker, they can be seen avoiding you by the stairs when they see you waiting for the elevator or they wait until you return from the break ...
Read more