Team Development
Build a Team That Can Actually Work Together
Strong individuals do not automatically create strong teams.
A team can be filled with smart, capable, committed people and still struggle with communication, trust, conflict, decision-making and accountability. People bring different personalities, expectations, working styles and assumptions about how others should behave. Without a way to understand and work through those differences, frustration builds and performance suffers.
Team development helps people move beyond simply working alongside one another to becoming a team that can communicate openly, make decisions, work through differences and take shared responsibility for results.
The goal is not simply better relationships. It is better team performance.
Start With What This Team Needs to Perform
Every team has different developmental needs.
A newly formed team needs more than introductions. It needs clarity about why the team exists, what it is accountable for, how members will work together, and what each person can expect from the others. Developing a clear team charter can establish the team’s purpose, roles, decision rights, behavioral expectations, ways of working, and commitments to communication and accountability from the outset.
A team going through change may need to revisit or rebuild that charter as responsibilities shift, trust is tested, or new members and expectations are introduced. An established team may need to address conflict, accountability, decision-making, or behaviors that are preventing it from performing at the next level.
Leaders also need to understand where the team is in its development and how their leadership needs to change as it evolves. Teams require more direction and structure at some stages, and greater autonomy, challenge, and shared accountability at others.
My work begins by understanding the team’s mandate, performance expectations, current dynamics, and stage of development. From there, we clarify or create the team charter, identify what the team needs from its leader and from one another, and focus development on what will make the greatest difference now while building the capacity the team will need next.
Understand the People Behind the Team Dynamics
Every team develops its own personality. It is shaped by the competencies, personality types and Striving Styles of the people who make it up, and by the particular mix of strengths, emotional needs and behavioural tendencies they bring to the work.
That combination affects how the team thinks, communicates, solves problems, makes decisions, responds to conflict and gets results. A team weighted toward action and decisiveness may move quickly but overlook important perspectives. A team rich in analytical capability may produce excellent thinking but struggle to move to action. Other teams may value harmony so strongly that difficult issues remain unspoken.
Using the MBTI and Striving Styles Personality System, we make the team’s collective strengths and potential blind spots visible. We look not only at individual personalities, but at what the combination of people creates at the team level, including capabilities the team has in abundance and those that may be missing or underdeveloped.
This helps team members stop personalizing differences and gives the leader a clearer picture of the team they actually have, what it naturally does well, and what needs to be developed for the team to perform at its best.
Work on the Team’s Real Challenges
Team development is most powerful when it is connected directly to the work the team is doing.
We do not spend the day completing exercises that have little connection to what happens when everyone returns to work. We use the team’s real challenges as the material for development.
A decision that keeps getting reopened may reveal unclear authority. A recurring conflict may expose different expectations or personality needs. Missed commitments may point to weak accountability. A leader who continually steps in may have unintentionally created a team that waits to be rescued.
I facilitate the team in examining what is happening, understanding why it is happening and agreeing on what needs to change.
Insight is only useful when it changes how the team communicates, decides, collaborates, and performs.
A Different Approach to Team Development
I do not come into a team with a generic workshop and assume that understanding everyone’s personality type will solve the problem.
My approach draws on decades of experience developing and facilitating leadership programs, coaching leaders, working with teams, and studying the personality and behavioral dynamics that shape performance.
That allows me to work at several levels at once. I can help the team understand personality differences while also identifying issues with leadership, expectations, decision-making, accountability and team development.
My facilitation is active. I teach when the team needs a framework. I challenge patterns that are getting in the way. I help people have conversations they may have been avoiding. I connect what we are learning about personality to what is actually happening in the room.
The objective is not simply a team that knows more about itself.
It is a team that knows how to work differently.
Development That Continues After the Session
A productive workshop can create insight and momentum, but teams change through what happens afterward.
New behaviours have to be practised. Working agreements need to be used when tensions rise. New approaches to meetings, decisions and accountability have to survive the pressure of everyday work. Leaders also have to resist returning to behaviours that keep the team dependent on them.
That is why team development can include follow-up facilitation, leader coaching and check-ins on the commitments the team has made.
We review what is working, where old patterns are returning and what the team needs to develop next.
The goal is to move from insight, to practice, to a stronger way of operating together.
