Building Teams

In today's world, more and more work is being done by teams. Teamwork and team-building are important concerns, whenever you expect small groups of people to work together collaboratively toward a common goal or outcome. Effective teams have mutual and shared accountability for their team's goal; their results may bear on the evaluation of the individuals and the team as a whole. In order to be effective, teams must also be able to their collaboration, effective communication, and positive interactions over a sustained period of time.

When you are responsible for building or guiding teams, you can apply VIEW in several ways. VIEW can provide a common language or vocabulary for exchanging information about the similarities and difference among team members. This will help the team members to recognize and respect differences, rather than viewing others with differing preferences as "odd", "wrong", or "ineffective". Team members need to understand that "differences are not deficits". Group members can also sustain their team's working relationship when they are able to celebrate each other's strengths and use their differences to complement each other. Knowledge of VIEW results will help teams to be aware of shared strengths, of the unique contributions each member can make to the team's performance, and of potential difficulties that might be faced by teams in which there is little or no diversity of style. Using VIEW can help you to give team members constructive ways to understand and respect their differences and put them to good use.

Example

A team working together to implement a new project was working very hard to gain consensus and to build momentum in planning and carrying out specific short-term actions to help their project attain much-needed success. Every so often they would reach a point at which they seemed to split into isolated groups or factions that were moving in opposite directions. The team members all responded to VIEW and reviewed their results. All team members voluntarily shared their individual results with each other, and they noticed that there were two sub-groups whose scores were completely opposite each other's on all three dimensions. This helped them to understand why they were experiencing frustration. Some coaching followed the group feedback exercise, and helped the team members to accept all the members for who they were, how they might collaborate more effectively to their overall success. Their subsequent meetings went much better as a result. The group was able to reach consensus much faster and ended up with plenty of buy-in for short-term actions. They were also able to develop several additional ideas for longer-term actions and initiatives.