This video explains how a project manager can help support team development, and how this can help a project’s success in turn.
- Building a team is all about channeling individual skills and energies towards a common goal. It's a process that takes time and teams evolve as the projects progress. This can be due to feedback from reviews or changes to plans and management styles. Before the team can start to develop, you need to make sure that you've chosen the right person for each role. This means understanding what characteristics are best suited to each role, as well as what the role technically entails. Dr. Meredith, Belbin developed a profiling tool that you can use to help you choose the right person for the right role according to their characteristics. The tool identifies nine team roles and their potential strengths and weaknesses. The roles are categorized into action orientated, thought orientated and people orientated. And Belbin suggests that having the right mix of roles in a team can be the key to success. Once you've built your team, the members can grow and develop as one. Psychologist Bruce Tuckman created a model that highlights five stages of team development; forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning. In the forming stage, the team members get to know one another and establish their individual identities. In the storming stage, conflicts arise as team members try to work out what they want in comparison to a group collective. As the project manager, you need to focus on resolving conflicts and lowering tensions, so the team can begin to work together. Some steps towards this include clarifying roles, embracing different cultures, outlooks and interests, and making sure that arguments are constructive and not destructive. In the norming stage, the team develops a way of working together to achieve its objectives. And this leads to the performing stage in which the team actually gets the job done. In this stage you should empower your team and delegate leadership so that you can focus on refining goals and offering support. You also need to make sure that your team doesn't slip into the habit of group think, which is when the team's closeness causes them to make decisions through consensus seeking. Although this might be comfortable, it limits creativity and can cause the team to stagnate. You need to encourage your team members to think outside of the box and support them in expressing their opinions. Finally, the team disbands in the adjourning stage, this is time to celebrate the success of the project, but also to plan the redeployment of the team and recognize the sense of loss and anxiety caused by the breakup. And that's it for this video. Remember teams can form and reform multiple times and conflict isn't always a bad thing. With careful facilitation, these situations can help your team grow and move forward even stronger than they were before.