Team Building Skills: Professional Development For HR And OD Staff

“How can I get my team to work together and stop the infighting?”  When a business partner asks for help, will your HR professionals know how to respond? Often the line manager is frustrated but doesn’t know what to do to get everyone focused and pulling together instead of pulling apart. Sometimes the manager shrugs off the issues as “just a personality conflict,” and occasionally a manager will decide she just doesn’t have the right people on the team. Meanwhile, productivity, quality, and customer service decline.

On the other hand, sometimes a well-functioning team decides it’s time for a tune up. We’ve observed that all human systems – interpersonal relationships, teams, and corporations – naturally deteriorate and need periodic rejuvenation.  Rather than wait until the team is beginning to crack at the seams, good team leaders schedule team building to get the team re-energized and re-focused.

Skilled intervention by an internal HR or OD professional can help the team leader in both these situations by planning, structuring, and facilitating an effective team building or team re-alignment process. We believe that team building is not just a “feel good” exercise, but a complex process of strategic alignment that requires skills, insight, sensitivity, toughness, resourcefulness and empathy.

Having a cadre of trained team building facilitators in house can provide significant benefits to your organization:

• Team productivity and effectiveness improved because issues are resolved early
• Teams aligned with corporate strategy and goals
• Teams and team leaders focused on accomplishing important business goals instead of on internal conflicts
• Strengthened partnerships between line business units and HR business partners
• Less dependence on outside consultants to work with business teams
• Team dysfunctions reduced

NOTE: This training is a good follow up to our Consultative Business Partner training.

Team Building Skills Training highlights:

• How to clarify roles and responsibilities and create a contract with the team leader
• How to diagnose the team situation: using interviews, surveys, personality profiles, and other instruments
• Identifying team dysfunctions
• The team building facilitator’s role – what it takes to be successful, why neutrality matters
• How to help the team get clear about goals, roles, and procedures
• How to help the team create and sign up to an operating agreement
• How to deal with the group dynamics, and help the team learn to use conflict constructively and creatively
• Tools and techniques for engaging the team in group problem solving
• How to help the team talk about difficult issues, and build trust and mutual respect
• How to help the team build in follow-up and accountability

Team Building Skills Methodology

Participants in Team Building Skills spend most of their workshop time in practices with coaching and feedback. They gain insight and skills through customized exercises and case studies. They bring their own real situations to use in the practice sessions.  Participants will also complete several surveys and personality instruments in order to learn how to use the data in teambuilding processes.

Team Building Skills Customized Solutions

To ensure that training is not just an “event,” but instead produces enduring results, we customize Team Building Skills to fit your unique situation, business strategy, culture, and people.  After discussion with you and other experts within your organization, we select the emphasis, specific skills to be developed, key learning points, exercises, and case studies for practice to create a solution tailored just for you.

Team Building Skills Applications

The following are some of the ways our clients have used custom versions of Team Building Skills:

• To enable HR professionals to become stronger business partners who focus on business results
• To help HR business partners to be sought after for their expertise and insights rather than avoided as irrelevant to or obstacles in the business process
• To help HR generalists to become more skilled at working with internal client business teams

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