An effective team is a team that can work together properly and professionally. They meet all their deadlines and do this by good communication with each other, working as a team, helping one another, inputting all ideas and theories to make one decision. A team consisting of members with high skills and knowledge will become more effective and meet all deadlines and achieve all goals and objectives. A group is simply a collection of individuals without a shared goal or commitment to each other. In contrast, a high-performance team is deeply committed to the team and to the goals set.For a team to become effective it needs to go through a number of key stages. Tuckman’s Theory This method of developing an effective team is the theory of Bruce Tuckman and was first proposed by him in 1965 and has been used to help teams grow, face up to challenges, tackle problems, find solutions and plan and deliver work.
1 – Forming: Here a number of individuals are gathered together, they have no clear sense of purpose. The team meets and learns about the opportunity, challenges, agrees on goals and begins to tackle the tasks. The group slowly begins to develop some form of agreement about issues that arise and need addressing.The teams slowly starts to interact more by sharing ideas but still is not perfect for a real team as there are no real clear plans to take the team forward. However, internal conflicts start to be managed constructively. In some cases storming can be resolved quickly. In others, the team never leaves this stage.
The maturity of some team members usually determines whether the team will ever move out of this stage.Here the group begins to share more ideas and start to take up the characteristics of a team and leadership patterns start to formulate.Team members often work through this stage by agreeing on rules, values, professional behaviour, shared methods, working tools and even taboos.
Members start to conform to a given set of ideas and decisions start to take place. 4 – Performing: A clear, organised pattern is established, based on mutual respect, the sharing of ideas and the drawing out of plans and proposals from all members of the team. All members therefore contribute in the best possible way to the team process and implementations of action plans starts to take place. Team members become independent and by this time they are motivated and knowledgeable.The final stage consists of the team reviewing and evaluating what they have achieved and then they may break up as the task has been successfully completed. If not they may go on and identify new approaches in ways of working together and tackling new problems.
If a team were to work under Tuckmans theory they will build an effective team because as they follow each stage in order they will be able to progress and develop on the teams to become effective. Eventually all team members will be able to understand each other and work together as one to meet their deadlines and achieve their goals and objectives.Recruitment ; Selection Recruitment – This process involves mainly identifying what the new team members should have by looking at the skills and competences that will be required in the team. This is known as a job analysis and a person specification can be made up from this laying out the qualifications and qualities needed in that new team member. Selection – This stage involves selecting the right team member that the firm would feel has potential to make the team with certain contributions that they might have.Selection identifies mainly the wide range of personality traits that a potential may have, these could be things such as communication skills, listening skills, the encouragement they may have on the group, motivation and contribution to the team.
After selection there are a lot of stages the new team members go through to become effective. These are: Training – In training there are two approaches to train the people in team working these are experiential learning and counselling. Experiential learning involves the members to carry out real tasks and learn at the same time, the tasks could also be simulated.Task which are involved are tasks which can be completed successfully with the team skills that are needed. Sometimes this could involve analysing case studies but mainly it is the tasks that are used. After the task is completed the team would analyse what they have done and what they have learnt from that exercise it is normally done with guidance.
Counselling method on the other hand is more appropriate when it comes to management teams. The trainer plays two roles, one being a consultant and the other being an advisor. The trainer works with both the team and its individual members.Coaching – For line managers and supervisors this is a valuable skill and can cover a long time span but can also be limited to a single session, coaching can be public meaning that groups of people can be coached. Mentoring – The relationship of mentoring is less concerned with day-to-day work than with longer-term issues such as working relationships and career paths.
It is a long relationship if intermittent as it is conducted in confidence in a one-to-one basis. Both of these methods can be used to encourage team members and provide targets for them to achieve that are manageable, rewarding and motivating at the same time.Motivation – As part of supervising and managing teams, motivation is an important role as they have to make sure that the team members feel part of the team, and that they are given the right training and development to ensure that they can contribute what they have learnt into the team. Following this will make an effective team as team members are chosen to specific requirements and then are trained and developed individually or in a group to improve on their team working skills.This also helps them to broaden on other skills such as communication and listening as well as their own personal skills and implement that into the team. Belbin’s Theory Over a long period of time Berlin investigated mixed management teams and he came to conclusion that any team member can play one or more roles. He devised a self perception inventory which is used by individual team members to determine what roles they are strong at and what they are weak at. These roles each have a positive and negative aspect which the members will have to recognise.