Team participation tools

To cultivate optimum team participation, you must have a good handle on your goals and overall dynamic. As such, you should be prepared to answer the following questions If you want to achieve optimum team participation, you need to let your team members know what you expect, and what is expected from them.

With that in mind, you can lay the foundation for open participation and communication through the following strategies and tactics:. As a team leader, you job is to lead, and to get the team to function as a cohesive unit. Tip 1 - Avoid team domination. Your job is to lead, not to control.

Even if you have all the answers, let the team dynamic play out. Tip 2 - Uphold the ground rules Tip 4 - Be sensitive to contentious situations. Team conflicts are unavoidable, but at a team leader you can diffuse tense situations as needed with a few strategic words and actions. For example, depending on the circumstances, you may choose to handle a conflict head-on, or you can table a difficult issue for a later time, when emotions have subsided.

In any case, you should avoid isolated, off-side reactions to conflicts, and you should always be consistent in how you react to team conflict. If you're looking for a fast, easy way to achieve project planning success, you'll find it inside the Fast Track Project Toolkit. This unique, informative online course gives you everything you need to become a project leader and fast tracking expert.

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To learn more, visit us at Right Track Associates. Remember you are trying to motivate the individual to adopt the desired behavior. So you want him or her to leave the encounter feeling that success is possible and with a clear idea of what they need to work on.

Make sure you only give feedback in private, and if it is prompted by a specific incident, deliver it after. Experts generally recommend starting feedback on a positive note, appreciating a person for what they have done well. This allows the person receiving feedback to relax, and they usually become more receptive to criticism. If you are the person delivering the feedback, prepare your comments beforehand so you stay on topic and remain professional in the session.

Make sure you can cite examples to illustrate your feedback. Anticipate questions, explanations, or objections the individual might have and think through your responses in advance. Good feedback is specific and actionable, and you follow up to encourage people to make improvements in the areas highlighted.

Then the team member identifies their options for meeting the goal. The coach, or team leader, guides both of these assessments. To end the session, the coach has the team member find a way forward. He or she decides upon concrete steps to achieve the goal. The team member leaves with a plan to put this idea into action. After all, few people know you better than your teammates, who regularly observe your behavior firsthand. The process also reduces bias in the assessment process.

The assessment design means they are able to measure performance in a large number of competencies, including hard skills such as strategic orientation, goal setting, decision making, delegation, achieving results, collaboration, and political and organizational savvy, and soft skills such as positivity, respect, communication, integrity, courage, self-awareness, and concern for others.

Doing self evaluations can also be enlightening. You can download this form as a starting point. Word Smartsheet. Vision encapsulates what the team is striving to achieve. It motivates and guides a team to achieve its goals. You can think of performance management as the process by which organizations allocate, assign, and use their resources to meet the objectives outlined in their vision statement.

Commonly tracked KPIs for teams include customer satisfaction, project cost and schedule variance, missed deadlines, and process costs. This participation in developing team vision also enables management by objectives, a management technique introduced by Peter Drucker in It aims to increase employee motivation and buy-in by giving staff a say in setting organizational objectives.

These organizational objectives translate into personal objectives for each employee, and employees are encouraged and rewarded for meeting their personal objectives.

In the long run, success in meeting personal objectives is directly connected to success in meeting organizational objectives. This approach can be scaled down to translate team objectives into personal objectives. For teammates still getting to know each other, some degree of disconnect is likely. Experienced managers and team leaders typically build some time into the schedule for teams to hit their stride, but delays beyond this can be expensive, in terms of both time and money.

So team leaders need to be experienced in the basic principles of conflict resolution: listening closely and treating team members fairly and equitably; focusing on shared interests and attacking the problem, not the people; and encouraging clear, honest communication to find a way forward.

But team member development also requires improving in areas of weakness. Team members are inherently dissimilar; they bring different combinations of knowledge and experience.

One important tool in team member development is the training needs analysis , a method to determine who needs to be trained, what they need to be trained in, and how best to train them. It's worth discussing a couple of approaches for managing team members: Theory X and Theory Y , and the Blake-Mouton managerial grid.

They both address different ways of seeing, interacting with, and managing the world. Developed by social psychologist Douglas McGregor in the s, Theory X and Theory Y are shorthand for two contrasting ways of viewing a workforce. Theory X also views subordinates as inferior to managers in terms of both intellect and willingness to exert effort, which means they need constant oversight to work properly.

It views subordinates as intelligent and responsible in their own right, needing minimal supervision. While Theory-X-style managers enjoy a consistently higher quality of output, Theory-Y-style managers tend to have better relationships with members of their teams. Research suggests that the nature of work to be performed is the best determinant of which management style is more suitable. As a general rule, managers obtain better results by using Theory X to manage workers who perform repeatable tasks, such as workers in the manufacturing industry.

Conversely, workers who undertake non-repeatable, creative, or intellectual tasks respond better to Theory Y. Being task or results focused means you prioritize task requirements and deadlines. The Blake-Mouton model plots these two orientations on different axes. Managers or leaders fall into different quadrants based on how they weigh people and results. This indicates their leadership style. Teams need people who complement each other, but they must coordinate their work.

Some aspects of effective collaboration, such as communication, tend to deepen naturally with time. Others, such as group cohesion, have to be actively worked on. The members of a successful team are all oriented toward achieving the same purpose, and they have the same idea for how to get there. If goals diverge further, tensions or even conflict may appear, costing the team more time and money.

Teams who fall victim to groupthink have little trouble developing consensuses, but this is only because they actively refuse to consider anything beyond a small subset of ideas and do not want to engage critically with unfamiliar or dissenting alternatives.

There are, however, team learning and negotiation techniques that can reduce the effects of groupthink. One of these is concept attainment, a teaching technique that can be used with groups of middle-school age and older. Concept attainment promotes understanding of concepts via observation, rather than using concrete definitions. For example, a concept-attainment-style lesson on different schools of art might show students several different art works and encourage them to form definitions for each school based on common characteristics.

The same can be done with groups of adult learners. The technique relies on the group building a consensus to define concepts, but it also reduces groupthink by removing the boundaries created when concepts are defined outright. This tends to make alternative definitions seem somehow wrong. Another technique for building consensus while minimizing groupthink is the Delphi method.

This technique was developed during the Cold War to project how technology might change warfare. But it can be used to develop consensus around any continuous variable. To begin the exercise, each member anonymously estimates a given variable. The group then reviews the anonymous estimates, and sets a baseline for the next round of estimates; the process is repeated until a consensus is reached. The fact that estimates are made anonymously and concurrently prevents groupthink, as each participant is not aware of the limits that other participants impose on their own estimates.

Earlier, we discussed how team assessments are based on theories of what makes teams work. This is why the Five Dysfunctions are represented as levels on a pyramid, with the absence of trust represented as the foundation of the pyramid. A lack of trust, says Lencioni, is the root of all dysfunctional behavior.

But since trust is an inherently personal relationship, how does one improve it throughout a team? This works especially well when a team is still young, but it can work with people who already know each other, too. Try having team members complete a personality instrument such as the MBTI or Everything DiSC Workplace, and then share their results with the team, with insight into how they think their personality type and natural traits influence their behavior.

Open-ended questions that encourage people to talk about themselves are the best choice here. For more on team-building questions, check out our comprehensive resource that includes example questions to try with your team.

And lastly, make sure your team members see each other face to face often. This can happen for a couple of reasons. Sometimes, team members may not be confident enough to challenge senior figures within the team, or they may keep clear of conflict out of desire to be accepted by everyone in the team.

At other times, the avoidance of conflict at a team level may be a function of a general reluctance to deal with conflict among a majority of team members. If results are shared with the team, these tools have the added benefit of enhancing mutual understanding of conflict styles, which can make things a little easier for everybody. To address a lack of productive conflict at the team level, set clear expectations for how team members are supposed to interact with one another: fairly, equitably, critically, and with an open ear.

You may also want to set rules for engagement; some teams, for example, allot people uninterrupted time to speak during discussion sessions. These things can help productive conflict emerge during meetings, which can otherwise be intimidating for those reluctant to engage in conflict.

If your team displays a general reluctance to deal with conflict, talk to the team leader about having someone to ask the tough questions and thrash out the decisions that team members are reluctant to make. This results in a lack of commitment to team decisions and team goals, which can cripple a team. This kind of commitment problem is best treated by addressing the underlying causes: lack of trust and reluctance to engage in conflict.

Lack of commitment can spring from other causes besides a lack of trust and productive conflict. Sometimes teams struggle to set goals for themselves, or the goals they set are unclear. When decisions are made in a meeting, review them at the end of the meeting, and make sure the communication is cascaded.

Lencioni explains the cascading communication tool as a way of having leaders communicate key messages to their staff, who do the same with their staffs and so on. Sometimes, a team makes decisions based on the views of a small majority. When this happens, you need to ensure that the whole team commits themselves to the decision — but how? But since a compromise does need to be reached, have the team set up a contingency plan that allows them to revisit the decision.

Articulating the worst-case scenario might also be a viable tactic here. Like a lack of commitment, the absence of accountability is a result of preceding dysfunctions.

That said, there are some things a team leader or supervisor can do to ensure the team practices accountability. Then, publish a set of behavioral standards which the team is expected to follow. Get each team meeting started with a lightning round , where team members quickly report on their progress since the last meeting. But you can also cultivate this directly. Also, make sure that a team's thematic goal is in clear alignment with organizational goals. You can also incentivize team performance by having compensation programs reward team-based achievements.

Lastly, remember that in most organizations, people shoulder a number of responsibilities besides their membership in a team. A general rule of thumb is to have people prioritize their responsibilities to the teams they lead over the teams they participate on. If lack of trust leads to fear of conflict and a variety of other problems, it follows that building trust would reduce fear of conflict and prevent the succeeding dysfunctions: lack of commitment, accountability, and poor results.

If the five dysfunctions are the root causes of problems with teams, the five behaviors help you avoid those problems. The five behaviors are simply the reverse of the dysfunctions: trust, productive conflict, commitment, accountability, and results. Just like the dysfunctions, each positive behavior breeds the next. By building trust, you lay the foundation for an effective team. There are several things to keep in mind when selecting an assessment for your team and your situation.

No single assessment works for all situations or teams. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses. Cost, as always, is a consideration.

But the most effective and sophisticated tools cost more and are usually part of a package that involves a consultant to oversee the assessment, explain the results and draft action plans. These engagements typically run into thousands of dollars.

Before selecting the assessment tool, isolate what you want to learn about your team. Are you looking to gauge the quality of team processes, such as communication or delegation? Always aim to address the biggest problems first.

In fact, shoot your team an email, or have them answer a few questions with a simple online survey to get their input on the type of assessment needed. Download Assessment Form Here. If the assessment is to be followed by a discussion, workshop, or group facilitation, run the assessment before you start working with the group, so you have the results to shape the rest of your program.

Make sure all team members participate. If you're facilitating the session, make sure you set a good example. Keep in mind that even within each broad assessment category, different assessments are designed for different purposes. Better still, bring in a professional to run the assessment. Lastly, remember that team assessments are simply an evaluation tool that cannot necessarily override the nuance and subjectivity involved in teamwork.

Trust your team. Personality and behavioral style assessments try to help individuals understand their behavior as a function of naturally emerging personality or style traits. Understanding your own behavior helps put your strengths into perspective, while allowing you to understand how your coworkers perceive you.

Your coworkers do the same, which creates a greater, team-wide understanding of why people behave the way they do.

Personality and behavioral style assessments are designed to be taken by everyone in a team or workplace as a way of understanding how coworkers can work together most effectively and minimize frustration. These tools are not suited to solving specific problems, but they provide a common language for people to understand workplace behaviors. Tips: Assessments of this type often produce lengthy personality reports - allow your team some time to digest them before debriefing.

When working with teams, raise the question of behavior style representation in your team. Does your team have a single dominant style? What does that mean for their work? Personality and behavioral style assessments can be tailored to highly specific skill assessments. Leadership assessments usually have two main aims: helping leaders understand the behaviors they exhibit their leadership style , and helping leaders understand how they are seen by the people around them.

These assessments usually look at such things as communication, creativity, decision making, planning, goal setting, progress monitoring, team communication, coaching, and operational knowledge. Some are degree assessments, gathering data from people at all levels of the organization who interact with the leader to create a holistic picture. Leadership assessments are designed to be used with people who have occupied leadership positions for long enough to have settled into a reasonably consistent leadership style.

Gather feedback discreetly and as always, discuss the results privately. Team assessments are based on diverse approaches. Think about your reason for conducting the assessment. Are you trying to help new team members understand each other better? Keep your information handy: Be ready to field questions in your meeting. While you might be able to answer most of them off the top of your head, you may need to depend on resources, too.

Before you begin the discussion, let people know that compromise will be part of the process. Negotiation is the art of give and take. A vote will invite everyone to participate in the meeting equally. Having an engaging meeting starts with considering the employee experience. How can you streamline meetings?

How can you encourage participation? How can you give your employees a voice? Booking your meeting room is only the beginning. Collaboration and engagement is only 5 steps away - what are you waiting for?

Overview Spaces Desks Guests. Introduce hybrid work. How to get your team to participate in meetings with 5 tactics of buy-in. The Robin Team.

One question runs through your mind: how can you encourage participation in a meeting? Be smart about how you schedule and prep the meeting to keep meeting participants focused and get their buy-in - especially for virtual meetings.

Organize your meetings to accommodate the hybrid workforce Plan to negotiate so people join in on the back and forth during team meetings. Drive to the final decision or outcome smoothly so meeting participants are on board. Be smart about how you prep the meeting to keep meeting participants focused and get their buy-in Time of day: Shoot for scheduling during mid-morning or mid-afternoon.

Use tools of engagement to spark people to participate in a meeting Have others contribute to the meeting content: By including others in deciding what will be discussed, they will take ownership of their part. Organize your meetings to accommodate hybrid work Invest in the right technology : Businesses should always be equipped to handle a mix of in-office and remote workers. Plan to discuss, not dictate Take on the least important issues first: Get people to participate in the meeting negotiations by priming them with minor topics early on.