All teams may develop, but over how much time and with how much pain? Team development can be done the hard or the easy way.
Teams that understand balance and their own strengths and weaknesses do it faster, with less pain and less risk of being stuck at any stage.
We’ve always liked the elegant simplicity of the Tuckman Model for tracking a team’s development, and the Belbin Model and its reports for measuring the behaviours within a team. Our people are often accredited in and understand plenty of other more complex tools, but we just don’t see them work as well.
We also find using Belbin to measure behaviour and to provide a language for discussing it openly within teams, a potent tool to help smooth and accelerate the path through Tuckman’s Form, Storm, Norm and Perform.
With a virtual forest of more complex models and tools out there, it’s the proven tools and foundations that work best we find and have far greater chance of uptake and ongoing benefit with teams.
If a model takes too long to explain to real workplace people, odds are they won’t make optimal use of it, if any at all. It may keep some consultants busy for longer, but real teams need tools they can understand easily and deploy rapidly.
We recommend avoiding overly complex tools, and definitely avoid the euphemisms and ‘LinkedIn’ speak, just embrace simple and proven approaches that get the best and fastest impact with teams.
Do the simple things well from the get go, and there is less need for interventions down the track. Team development doesn't need to be too hard.
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