Teamwork Skills

Jumpstarting Newly Formed Teams

Newly formed teams express excitement and anxiety about beginning to work with their new colleagues. The novelty of the situation builds an environment of enthusiasm, often overshadowing the hard work it will take to become a high performing team. Just like other successful teams, work teams must practice. Unfortunately, most organizations do not have the resources or experience to jumpstart these new teams.

Based on our experience working with new teams, we offer the following guidelines.

• Present the vision of the process that would be needed to build a high performance team.
• Build physical and emotional safety as building blocks for the foundation.
• Ensure a basic understanding of stages of group development and the roles of leadership in each stage.
• Clearly articulate and align organizational goals with individual goals.
• Develop a system to share best practices and monitor progress.
• Establish a point of reference for group development through activities, metaphors, or real work experiences.
• Use levels of agreement to build a commitment to excellence.

Adventure Associates’ Team Excellence Workshop can be customized to help a new team practice planning, goal-setting, decision-making, making commitments, communicating effectively, sharing best practices, and monitoring progress toward becoming a high performing team.

In this workshop, we find it appropriate to incorporate components from a number of our corporate training workshops such as Sending and Receiving Messages, or the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.