The lack of role clarity frequently receives top billing as an impediment to team success. We have discovered that teams fail to resolve role issues because they lack a simple, straight forward process.
This workshop focuses on identifying responsibilities within the team and achieving role clarity. It contains several segments that can be tailored to specific team needs.
Identifying the “real” work of the team and charting responsibility
The very existence of the team creates “new” work that is unique to the team, e.g., team administration, facilitation, etc. What are these tasks and who will be responsible for them?
In this workshop, the team will follow a formatted discussion outline that will help identify and define key team tasks. The focus in this particular segment is on the common work needed by the team, and will result in the identification of the skills, gifts, and experiences, in addition to the functional expertise, that each member brings to the team.
Defining Position or Process Roles
In this workshop the team will explore roles from both positional and process perspectives. When we take the positional approach, the focus is on a single primary role, even though the roles of supporting players might be reflected for activities in which roles intersect or overlap. When process is the organizing theme for role definition, all of the steps or activities of the process are identified and listed and the roles of everyone involved in the process are spelled out.
Task Linkage and Integration
Although team members generally know their individual jobs, they are often unclear as to how these jobs affect one another and fit into the larger team effort. On a team of diverse skills, the critical question is: “Who does what?” In such an environment, individual team members must focus more and more on key linkages between their jobs and those of the other members to ensure a seamless interface of the work. This understanding will enable the task to flow through the specialized functions of the team to meet and exceed customer requirements.
Several discussion exercises guide this exploration of roles and identification of key linkages:
As with all team training modules, this particular workshop is tailored to meet the specific needs of individual teams, organizations, and their customers. It can take the form of a three hour workshop in which teams learn the basic principles and processes of team role definition and/or tailored to a full day working session in which team apply these principles to their team as they design, clarify, and commit to individual team member roles.
In this workshop, participants will: