Team Facilitation and Training Support Services
Human Resources and Organizational Effectiveness (HROE) Team
Revised 10/16/06
To: Team Leaders, Work Team Leaders, Cross-Functional Team Leaders and Management Review Team Members
As you prepare to lead and support your teams in working together to successfully accomplish your mission or charge we want you to be aware of the services that HROE (and our volunteer colleagues) can provide. We have prepared this initial overview of options available so that you can make informed choices from a menu of facilitated sessions and focused team training. Please share a copy of this with your team. These are just some approaches, tools and techniques of which we want you to be aware. We will work with you to design sessions according to your need.
To request facilitation or team training, please fill out the Request for Facilitation Form on the HROE website Forms page.
After submitting the form you will receive a call from HROE or the facilitator assigned to your support. S/he will conduct an assessment of your specialized needs with you and your team.
Our basic teambuilding elements are standard for many project teams that are just forming. (See Forming Teams and Basic Teambuilding, below.) Teams that have worked together over time might want something else – like teamwork assessment or trust building. Team members might assess, after basic teambuilding, that they need support in learning group problem solving skills, decision-making approaches or process improvement skills. Sessions can be inserted into the teams schedule close to when the skills are needed.
The Six Sigma Process Improvement Resource (PIR) Group is available to help all teams with, using the DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control) or the DMADV (Define, Measure, Analyze, Design, Verify) approaches to their work:
- writing clear and specific charges, identifying data and information that will help clarify the problem to be solved or clarify deliverables for the new product or service (Define)
- measure the process to determine current performance OR measure and determine customer needs and specifications (Measure)
- analyze and determine the root cause of defects OR analyze the process options to meet the customer needs (Analyze)
- change the process to eliminate defects (Improve) OR design the process, in detail, to meet customer expectations
- ensure the new process performance (Control) OR verify the design performance and ability to meet customer needs
After the sessions we will ask you to join with us in an “evidence-based” outcome assessment.
If you require an outside facilitator or special training that can best be provided by a facilitator/ trainer from Campus HR or a local consultant, we can explore that option and seek one-time funding for off-campus facilitator/trainers
Forming Teams (for Management Review Teams and Functional Teams)
The Library is constantly engaged in forming new teams to accomplish strategic work. Creating a clear charge for new teams and helping teams to reprioritize the workload when members are appointed to new teams are important processes involved in helping the team be successful.
- _____Charge Writing: Used by one team that is asking another team to accomplish work, the charge outlines the purpose, problem, suggested approach, timeline, reporting relationships, resources and expected outcomes. The revised Charge Template is at: Charge Template DMAIC. This charge can be used by any type of team. The 6S PIR Group assist in the facilitation of drafting a charge and save you time!
- _____Workload Analysis and Negotiation: As members are assigned to a team, they are to self-assess the impact of the new team assignment on their present assignments and workload, and, if necessary, negotiate with their functional or other teams a change in work assignments.
- _____Use of the Guidelines for Appointment to Library-Wide Cross-Functional Teams, Project Implementation Teams, Process Improvement and Restructuring Teams (The Orange Memo): As a team appoints another team, these guidelines are useful to clarify the Library’s agreements related to the appointment process. This can be found at Guidelines for Appointment to Library-Wide Cross-Functional Teams, Project Implementation Teams, Process Improvement and Restructuring Teams.
Basic Team Building—(3-4 hours depending on size of the team)
Once Teams are appointed it is essential they clearly understand their charge and learn as much about background and expectations from the Management Review Team. They benefit from learning about each others potential abilities and gain a foundation for positive relationships. They also need to develop agreements on their approach to work. Each team member is expected to write performance/learning goals related to the work of the team.
- _____Review and Questioning of the Charge, with the Management Review Team present: Clarifies the reasoning behind forming the team, expectations for outcome, and team accountability. Allows for questions of clarification and members’ shared understanding. Allows for substantive concerns and differing perspectives to be surfaced and dealt with collaboratively.
- _____Getting to Know One Another: Helps a team understand the skills and capabilities brought to the work of the team by each member. Builds social connections that assists the development of interpersonal relationships and strengthens team commitment and productivity.
- _____Team-ness-What is a team? Why teams?: Having a facilitated discussion or exercise on this topic can help members new to the Library to understand this mode of work as well as strengthen shared understanding of all team members what is expected of teams in the Library. Review of the importance of diversity and difference, commitment to a common goal, agreement to methods and steps for achieving the charge, and clarification about decision-making. Review of the 4 stages of team development, prepares the team for team “problems” and building opportunities.
- _____Development of and Agreement on Team Ground Rules/Norms: Critical to a team's success, ground rules and norms provide shared understandings of expectations for behavior, engagement, work assignments, absences and structure of meetings. All ground rules should include:
- Meeting/reporting schedule
- Effective meeting tools
- Participation protocols
- Conflict resolution approaches
- Decision Making processes
- Expectations re: follow-ups/AR’s
- Goal writing and peer review
- _____Using Interpersonal Skills to Enhance Teamwork: Discussing what skills promote teamwork and how they are successfully practiced can remind team members of the importance of utilizing these skills to make group work more efficient and effective. Skills include:
- Active Listening
- Supporting/Building
- Differing/Confronting
F) _____Role of Team Leader and Team Members: Outlining the roles results in:
- Clarification and assignment of work distribution
- Reinforcement of shared responsibility
- Expectation of full participation
- _____Performance and Learning Goal Writing: Each team is expected to support members in writing goals related to their work/participation on the team and discuss the process they will use to accommodate peer developmental reviews. Team members should also discuss, as a team, what they expect or need to learn as they work on this team.
Teambuilding—Assessment and Development of Trust among Members
Teamwork is challenging. Often teams discover that they are not utilizing their time efficiently or that they are experiencing problems working as a team. As these predictable stages of team development are reached it is important to identify causes and problem-solve together to ensure continued productive teamwork.
- ____Teamwork Assessment: Various assessments instruments are available to assess how team members assess the team process; intact teams can benefit from periodic assessments to ensure that all issues related to working as a team are addressed
- ____Trust-Building: Removing the Blocks to Participation and Teamwork: Techniques and models that assist or explain how trustworthiness and trust willingness can be developed within a team.
Group Problem Solving and Decision-Making
To enhance the potential for productivity and creativity in teamwork, utilizing group process approaches to their “assigned” work will enable them to be most efficient and effective. Shared accountability for the final products of the team call for the use of group techniques that can save time, increase the quality of decisions, and provide means for the team to communicate their progress and approaches to their work. Learning these “formal” approaches and options are critical to team success.
- _____Problem-Solving Steps: HROE and the 6 Sigma PIR Group can conduct sessions on using the DMAIC approach to problem solving. This is a structured process guiding teams to utilize data-based problem-solving similar to the basic one described below.
Reviewing and selecting the appropriate problem solving model helps a team plan its processes and clarify how it will approach achievement of its charge as well as reinforce the need to follow a process that covers at least the following basic steps:
- Define the problem using data
- Gather all data that will help measure the problem
- Analyze causes
- Develop alternative solutions and evaluate them
- Decide and pilot the solution that will achieve the desired impact or improvements
- Plan how to implement the solution so that it is sustained or ‘controlled’
B) ____Decision-Making Processes: When and Why to Use: Discussing the five possible decision-making styles and their appropriateness to different kinds of situations can help a team choose when to use each style. Each style has differing impact on the amount of time, the quality of the decision, and the acceptance of the decisions. A Criteria-Based Decision Matrix is recommended for assessing the cost/benefit of alternative decisions. A handout on Decision-making can be found at: Decision-Making. The five methods for making decisions include:
- leader w/o consultation
- leader w/consultation(separate)
- leader w/consultation (group)
- leader w/group consensus
- group w/o leader consensus
- _____Consensus Decision-Making Process: Why Use Consensus, What are the Steps?: For many team decisions, consensus is the most effective style. Understanding when and how to develop consensus among team members is critical to its effective use.
Process Improvement Projects
- _____Process Improvement Techniques: HROE and the 6 Sigma PIR Group can facilitate the DMAIC approach to problem solving. This is a structured process guiding teams to utilize data-based problem-solving similar to the basic one described below.
Process improvement is the research and study of current processes to discover what is contributing to problematic output, outcome, cycle time or quality. Outline of steps
- Map the process
- Gather data re: needs of customers and current process capability
- Analyze data to identify problems
- Discover causes of problems
- Develop possible solutions
- Evaluate solutions for impact
- Pilot selected solutions
- Evaluate success of solution
- Implement and train for new process
Service or Product Development Projects
- _____Design of New Products/Services: HROE and the 6 Sigma PIR Group can facilitate the DMADV approach to designing a new service or product. This structured approach should be used if a product or process is not in existence and one needs to be developed, or if the existing product or process exists and has been optimized (using either DMAIC or not) and still doesn't meet the level of customer or stakeholder specifications.
- Define the project goals and customer (internal and external) deliverables
- Measure and determine customer needs and specifications
- Analyze the process options to meet the customer needs
- Design (detailed) the process to meet the customer needs
- Verify the design performance and ability to meet customer needs
Quality Tools for Analysis and Decision-Making:
Many of these “public reasoning” or “quality” tools can help a team work thru the steps in their project. This is a “beginning” list:
Planning Tools and Techniques
- _____Visioning: A process used to energize, clarify differing ideas and gain shared agreement on future outcomes for customers or stakeholders that will result from the work of a team.
- _____Conducting a Current Situation Analysis: Assessing the external forces that will affect a team’s focus, goals, processes and suppliers and the internal strengths and weaknesses of a team will help in the strategic planning process that results in a Team Strategic Framework.
- _____Gantt Charting of Project Steps: Helps the team understand the separate steps needed to complete the project, estimate time for and relationship among the steps, and assign responsibility for work on each step.
Brainstorming Techniques
- _____Brainstorming: Helps teams develop ideas, discover different views and alternatives—verbal brainstorming, nominal group technique, affinity diagramming are all method of brainstorming and capturing team thoughts.
Analytical Tools and Techniques
- _____Force Field Analysis: Used to identify forces/factors in place that work against a solution or goal; supports team analysis of positive forces that need reinforcement and negative barriers that need to be reduced or eliminated to implement the solution or achieve the goal.
- _____Cause-Effect or Fishbone Diagram: Allows a team to identify, explore, and graphically display in increasing detail, all of the possible causes related to a problem or condition to discover its root causes. Can also be used to identify what various resources or actions are needed to accomplish a goal.
- _____Inter-Relationship Digraph: Allows team to systematically identify, analyze and classify the cause and effect relationships that exist among all critical issues so that key drivers or outcomes can become the heart of an effective solution.
- _____Process Mapping: Helps the team understand the steps/tasks in the present work process from start (input) to finish (output) to examine what may be causing bottlenecks, waste, unnecessary steps, delays, underutilization of technology, variation, complexity and unacceptable service quality.
- _____Control Chart Development: A control chart is graphical tool for monitoring changes that occur within a process, by distinguishing variation that is inherent in the process(common cause) from variation that yield a change to the process(special cause). This change may be a single point or a series of points in time - each is a signal that something is different from what was previously observed and measured. Allows a team to monitor, control and improve process performance over time by studying variation in its processes and discovering the source of the variation in order to reduce it or understand the effect of variation on overall cycle time or quality.
- _____Pareto Analysis: The Pareto Principle states that 80% of the impact of the problem will show up in 20% of the causes. A bar chart that displays by frequency, in descending order, the most important defects or causes of problems. This chart-type is used to identify if the Pareto Principle is evident in the data. If the Pareto Principle is evident, about 20% of the categories on the far left will have about 80% of the impact on the problem. Allows a team to know where to focus its problem-solving efforts.
- _____Scatter Diagramming: A scatter diagram or scatter plot, is a basic graphic tool that illustrates the relationship between two variables. The dots on the scatter plot represent data points. Scatter diagrams are used with variable data to study possible relationships between two different variables; it does not indicate a cause and effect relationship. It helps a team to determine what happens to one variable when another variable changes value. Allows a team to visually determine whether a potential relationship exists between an input and an outcome.
- _____Tree Diagramming: Tree diagramming breaks down or stratifies ideas in progressively greater detail. The objective is to partition a big idea or problem into its smaller components, making the idea easier to understand, or the problem easier to solve. Allows a team to break any broad goal, graphically, into increasing levels of detailed actions that must or could be done to achieve the stated goals.
Decision-Making Tools
- _____Ease/Impact Analysis: A simple 2-criteria matrix used by a team to assess which of several solutions to implement first because of their greater effect on customers and ease of implementation.
- _____Plus/Delta Analysis: A method for assessing the upsides and downsides of proposed solutions or strategies. Also called a “T-Chart” or a list of Pros and Cons.
- _____Criteria-Based Decision Matrix: Allows the team to identify, clarify, and weight the criteria they will apply to come to a consensus decision. Displays the thinking of the members to ensure resolution of conflicting opinions and allows the team to present its decision with criterion-based reasoning.
HROE Data and Reports
HROE can provide data and reports of non-confidential employment date including ARL reports and local studies conducted by LFA and HROE, regarding compensation, employment and organizational effectiveness environmental scans. Direct links to these sources will be made available in the near future. In the meantime, please contact HROE regarding your needs.