Team Building training for Team Leaders

As a part of a Leadership program I have just completed four sessions on Team Building. Though I didn't do a detailed need analysis, I ended up with a very good design. My formal interactions with Unit heads definitely helped me but more than that my informal interaction with Team Leaders and Team members helped me a lot.

Today, most Team Leaders in IT and ITes / BPO organizations the Team Leaders are quite young and are not exposed to working groups from the beginning. Due to the nature of work they more or less work independently. This phenomenon was first mentioned by Peter F. Drucker in his writings. He was accurate enough to predict that majority of the workforce that was earlier mostly illiterate and carrying out low-skilled or semi-skilled work would get transformed into highly literate carrying out high-skill work. The amount of work a high skilled worker would carry out in groups would be very less. Also due to the nature of work, groups would meet only to discuss common points, otherwise they would predominantly be working alone carrying out the task assigned to them. In fact most of the IT/ITes associates (I'm replacing the word worker with associate to represent the entry level workforce) are supposed to log their work every day.

A well-performing associate graduates into a Team Leader within two to four years and is assigned the responsibility of handling a team. Thus his challenges begin.

The batch that I handled had a very good mix. Some of them have been handling groups from some time and have gone through some very good experiences, while others are just getting into a group responsibility position lately.

Beacuse of this good mix I could use the "Experiential Learning" method very effectively. Instead I driving the content I allowed it to get developed through the discussions and used few team models to summarize the experience and provide a structured learning.

Broadly the 4 sessions - two full days or four half days comprised of:

1. What Teams are? What forces act in favor and against of teams?
2. Team fitness model - What are the different fitness areas?
3. A movie to elicit stages of team development and team leader behavior
4. Tuckman's four/five stage team development model
5. Role of a Leader during the Team Development. How to move the team quickly to the Performing stage and what kind of behaviors/steps can be taken at each stage.
6. How to build High Performance Teams? Role of a Team Leader - As a team member, As a Manager and As a Leader
7. Characteristics of a high performance team and which stage you should make them happen as a Team Leader.

I have used discussions, presentations by participants, one self-assessment instrument, one consensus-decision making exercise, and a single slide ppt.

I felt very happy that it went off very well and it fulfilled all the requirements I would like to have for a successful training session - Very practical, drawing out experiences from participants, driving concepts through models, examining models from multi directions, identifying the linkages and compatibility of models and then finally bring out and solve real issues. Though i couldn't do much of real issue problem solving, I am confident that the participants will do the same and I'm going to be following up with them. Given the time constraint it was worth the time. I shall share the feedback given by the participants as I receive it.