LSS Yellow Belt session 4: Teams

A team is a collective effort of individuals that permits each individual to harness their own strengths, roles, and responsibilities.

For an effective team meeting, the team must follow a set of protocols such as establishing a team agenda, recording minutes of the meetings, strict meeting times, and enforcing a meeting attendance.

To maintain members on track, the team may establish their own goals, objectives, scope, and boundaries.

A team is composed of five to seven members, each with their own set of skills and talents.

It includes subject matter experts, stakeholders, and even outsiders.

A subject matter expert sometimes remains as an extended team member. A stakeholder represents the team and implements the team’s ideas. An outsider assists the team to address issues by being not too close to the process and raise questions.

Types of Teams

Virtual Teams

This team grants its members to meet and share data virtually due to the development of communication tools and the Internet. It has its own set of benefits such as reduced costs in administration and logistics, but the essence of nonverbal communication is lost.

Continuous Improvement Teams

This team has an obvious goal specified by the management. The members are from the same process and have their own appointed leader.

Self-Managed Teams

This team comprises independent team members who plan, direct, and operate a set of rules and methods to do a common goal. In the process, the team accomplishes team harmony.

Cross-Functional Teams

This team involves representatives from different functions whose priorities differ from each other. This team has better efficiency and results as it has more knowledge and experience.

It is important for the team to realize its own dynamics and performance for a project to succeed.

According to B.W. Tuckman, the stages of development, which the team should observe to avoid failure, are:

Stage1: Forming

This is the stage where the team is new and immature. The members are getting to know each other and not much work is done.

Stage 2: Storming

This is the stage where the team members share their own ideas. Ideas may conflict with one another that could cause disagreements, thus slowing down the team’s progress.

Stage 3: Norming

This is the stage where the team members resolve their conflicts and function as a team with a common goal.

Stage 4: Performing

This is the stage where the team is effective, a synergy exists within the team, and an enormous amount of work gets executed.

Stage 5: Transitioning (Adjourning)

This is the stage where the team gets disbanded and members may change if the project requires extra scope or progress.

This is a typical evolution of team stages. Other significant factors to a team’s success are team maturity, the difficulty of the project, and team leadership.

The company should not forget or take for granted a team’s success. There are many ways where it can recognize the team’s efforts such as thank-you notes, bulletin boards, and so forth.

Team leadership is necessary for the team’s success. It varies from the maturity of the team to the stage the team is at:

Stage 1: Forming

In this stage, the leadership style is directing as the leader welcomes the members and explains the roles, responsibilities, and goals of the team.

Stage 2: Storming

In this stage, the leadership style is coaching as the leader pursues to supervise the team and employs conflict resolution approaches to avoid further damage to the team.

Stage 3: Norming

In this stage, the leadership style is supporting, as the leader increases supportive behavior to encourage the team and boost the team’s morale.

Stage 4: Performing

In this stage, the leadership style is delegating, as the leader monitors the team’s goals and performance and watches any disruption the team may encounter.

If the company has an ‘acceptable’ norm, and the team does not agree with this norm, this norm acts as an enabler of the team’s negative dynamics.

Negative team dynamics results in a lack of morale, a negative impact on a team member’s motivation, increased stress, and many more.

Unaddressed negative team dynamics may result in the team’s goals to not be met, poor use of project resources or the project gets canceled.

The following table provides a list of common negative team dynamics.

Negative Dynamic	Symptoms	Probable Causes	Potential Countermeasures
Reluctant team members	Lack of participation. Displays disinterest	Intimidated by other members or team leader. Fear of losing the job or position by voicing out opinions	Team leaders support active participation and protect their own members
Floundering	The team works in an unsteady and faltering manner	Lack of team direction. Team members are overwhelmed. Postponing team decisions	Required directing at the initial stages. Visibly present team leadership. Reinforce management support and commitment
Rushing accomplishment	Incomplete and insufficient data collection and analysis	Unrealistic deadlines. Untrained members. Looking for short-term gains	Revise the deadline to a realistic one based on resources. Team leaders ask for the data and analysis, and its statistical significance. Ask for alternate solutions

Decision-Making Tools

Brainstorming

This is an activity that encourages divergent thinking in which all the team members must develop as many ideas as possible. There are two phases in a brainstorming session: the creative phase, and the evaluation phase.

In the creative phase, members generate ideas as much as they can.

In the evaluation phase, all generated ideas are evaluated for applicability and feasibility.

Members must be open to all possibilities thus no criticisms, distractions, or shutting down an idea, are permitted. In brainstorming, it is important to note that there are no bad ideas.

Basic guidelines for the creativity phase include no waiting, wild ideas being welcomed, and ‘hitchhike’ is recommended where members construct on previous ideas.

It is better that a facilitator guides the evaluation phase.

He / She must organize the ideas into groups or categories and ensure members are not overly critical to an idea.

The facilitator should ensure that idea-stopping responses are not being said by any team members as it degrades confidence.

Examples of idea-stopping responses:

“It’s not practical.”
“It’s too expensive.”
“Too advanced for us.”
“Too ambitious. Let’s get back to reality.”

It is important for the problem to be clearly defined. If the team members are unfamiliar with the problem, it is advisable to maintain the scope open so a wide range of ideas will be generated.

In a structured brainstorming session, the leader starts the activity by doing a round-robin discussion about the subject matter.

Every member is permitted one idea at a time. The idea owner may permit rephrasing of his/her idea for the individual recording all the ideas. All ideas are written on a whiteboard or flipchart.

A sample of a defined-scope brainstorming: How can the ASQ program increase its member attendance at meetings? This a sample problem rephrased as a question.

The program chair may act as the facilitator. In a focused manner, the question was raised. The following list consists of the ideas generated by the members, in a round-robin style discussion:

Invite distinguished speakers
Present current and diverse topics
Provide value for time and money
Turn the program interactive
Survey the members for interesting topics
Rotate program locations
Conduct more programs
Have the meeting for free and effective
Offer snacks and networking time
Include weather forecasts in the meetings
Inform members of all the ongoing and planned activities
Conduct fewer meetings
Make the meeting virtual
Offer carpool services
Invite student members
Make new members feel welcome
Have a feedback
Preserve the website updated and accessible
Announce new professional members
Record the meetings and make it available online

This collection of ideas is then subjected to a review of redundancy and feasibility. A second round of brainstorming session is possible, but it is risky as members may get too critical or bored.

The next step to take is the group either: perform multi-voting where the ideas get short-listed; or produce a tailored cause-and-effect diagram where the ideas are grouped to categories (personnel, machine, material, methods, measurement, environment).

Nominal Group Technique (NGT)

A kind of activity like a brainstorming except it has limited vocal interaction.

Its primary purpose is to serve equal opportunity to all members and ease peer pressure.

The members are given time to think and silently generate ideas. These ideas are then posted on the whiteboard. No verbal interactions granted.

For sensitive issues, the facilitator may collect the ideas written in a piece of paper and paste them into the whiteboard himself/herself to render anonymity.

Multi-voting

This activity goes well with NGT and can tabulate brainstorming results. After the ideas are consolidated or numbered, the members are asked to focus on the top five or ten solutions with a major influence on the problem.

They must select the important ideas that address the problem and implement them in an order of priority.

Going back to the previous example of the ASQ section program meetings, each member chooses the five most important ideas and considers the organization’s point of view.

The following ideas have been selected and have been categorized into five themes:

Value: Invite distinguished speakers and present current topics
Logistics: Rotate meeting locations
Affordability: Make the meeting free and provide snacks
Outreach: Invite student members
Communication: Send emails per month and update the website

The members employed a ranking approach where they ranked ideas from one to five, one being the most important.

The members may also use a weighted approach where they split one hundred points among the ideas.

In both approaches, the outcome may be different or the same. If there are ties, another round of voting must be performed.

Team meetings are important and effective to the project’s success. Yet, there are reasons meetings are not productive, such as:

Too many presentation slides
Attendees constantly checking emails and messages
Sending meeting notices on a brief notice
Attendees are unprepared

A survey performed by Microsoft revealed that employees consider seventeen hours of the weekly total hours to be unproductive and sixty-nine percent of the working population feels meetings are not productive.

A disciplined approach must be taken to ensure meetings are productive and not useless. An effective meeting includes:

Agenda – An itemized list of the meeting subject, items to be discussed, presenters, and time allotment. A scope may also be presented to avoid scope creep during the meeting.
Meeting logistics – refers to the meeting room, meeting infrastructure and capabilities
Meeting minutes – An important aspect of project continuity which refers to the record of the meeting.
This is essential to ensure that key decisions and actions of the team are documented and to keep the members accountable and responsible.
Project status report – A report created by the team leader to inform all members of the project status, upcoming milestones, risks, and mitigation plans.