Wellness Practices for Teams
by Kimball Fisher and Mareen Duncan Fisher

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Knowledge-based organizations often rely on teams to serve customers, innovate, and improve productivity. But creating and maintaining effective teams with maximum potential for learning can be a challenge. While teams can provide dramatic improvements over traditional work structures, they often fall short. And given the complex, interdependent nature of today's work, a team that fails to learn from experience can put the whole organization at risk.

How can leaders ensure healthy teams with high-leverage opportunities for creating and sharing knowledge? One way is to wait until teams are "sick" and then attempt to quickly diagnose and treat the problem. But a better approach is to focus on preventing breakdowns in the first place and building continuous learning practices into the team's structure. Nine prudent practices can help prevent many of the problems that are becoming endemic in team-based organizations.

1. Create a team charter. Getting off to a healthy start is one of the best preventative measures a team can take. The early establishment of a shared vision is integral to successful team functioning. Teams that struggle often attribute their ills to an unclear focus. The charter provides a sense of purpose, clarifies what the team is expected to do, focuses the energies and activities of team members, and provides a basis for setting goals, prioritizing work, and making decisions.

Although a company manager may facilitate the process, team members themselves develop the charter. Most charters include a statement of purpose, description of key customers, and results to be attained. Other elements, such as key partnerships, important deliverables and deadlines, or critical technologies, can be added as deemed useful and relevant.

2. Set goals and measure results. A key to team wellness is having a clear way to measure performance. A clear set of well-defined metrics allows the team to manage its progress and fulfill the purpose outlined in its charter. Without a set of measurable goals, teams can easily get distracted by issues not critical to the success of the work, the team, or the team's customers.

3. Develop operating guidelines. If expectations about behavior and interactions between team members are not clearly articulated and understood, the team is headed for trouble. Operating guidelines are a set of shared agreements that define how team members will interact; for example, "We will be prepared for meetings" or "We will treat each other with dignity and respect." Such guidelines provide a conscious alternative to unspoken norms such as "We will defer to management to make all key decisions" or "We will complain about other team members behind their backs instead of talking with them directly." Used properly, operating guidelines can be a powerful vehicle for self-regulation and team well-being.

4. Define team member roles and responsibilities. Clearly defining roles and responsibilities up front is crucial. Begin by jointly articulating what should be expected of all team members. Once in agreement on areas of common responsibility, move on to determining individual roles. Review the specific skills and expertise needed on the team given your charter, key projects, major areas of responsibility, and individual skills and strengths. It is also useful to identify the degree to which team members need to learn one another's roles for backup or development.

5. Develop feedback skills. Each team member's performance affects the work of the whole team. Timely and thoughtful feedback can greatly enhance both individual and team learning. But giving and receiving feedback about needs for improvement requires special skills (see "Feedback for Team Learning").

6. Learn to manage conflict. Teams create dynamics that present many opportunities for conflict. One human resources manager's observation applies to many organizations: "Ours is a very polite company, and it's considered impolite to raise uncomfortable issues. That has been one of our bigger struggles-learning to value differences. We need to emphasize the positive side of conflict."

That struggle, if managed effectively, can be a source of strength and creativity, allowing team members to examine their own mental models, ideas, and solutions, while learning from the contributions of others. But left unmanaged or unresolved, conflict can become destructive, eroding the confidence and trust crucial to a team's ability to work together. Teams should learn how to deal with conflict before it disables them.

7. Develop good group decision-making processes. Teams need to understand their role in the decision-making processes of the larger organization, learn different methods of decision-making, and, perhaps most important, learn to reach consensus on key decisions. If members do not clearly understand and practice the steps to reaching consensus, decision-making can be a frustrating, if not futile, effort.

8. Integrate new team members effectively. Any time a new member is introduced into a team, the dynamics change. Many of the growing pains associated with team learning and development will repeat themselves as the chemistry and makeup of the team are altered. An effective orientation process sets the footing for long-term success. In spite of its significance, however, orientation is too often limited to getting a tour of the workplace and being introduced to colleagues. The arrival of a new member is a major event for teams and their leaders. But planning and preparation will minimize the disruptive impact of a personnel change.

9. Develop a team training discipline. In attempting to establish shared vision, provide effective feedback, and resolve conflict, the team structure already engenders numerous informal training opportunities. Nevertheless, this unofficial training must be supplemented with formal skill development. And training doesn't always have to cost a lot of money. For example, Kodak makes training a part of everyone's job. The company employs no professional trainers, but makes managers and staff responsible for teaching others.

Your team training plan should include technical, business, and interpersonal skills, and should take advantage of a wide range of learning contexts, including mentoring, on-the-job training, special assignments, job rotation, and project debriefings, as well as classroom training.

In today's business environment, every organization will experience occasional hiccups. But leaders cannot afford to wait for trouble to develop and then respond; problems spread too quickly and affect too many parts of the organization. Giving work teams the tools to manage their own future is the way to keep the whole enterprise thriving.

Kimball Fisher and Mareen Duncan Fisher are coauthors of The Distributed Mind: Achieving High Performance Through the Collective Intelligence of Knowledge Work Teams (Amacom, 1997). This article appeared in the Fall 1998 (No. 10) issue of Leader to Leader and is excerpted with permission. Copyright 1998, The Drucker Foundation. Published by Jossey-Bass, Inc., Publishers, San Francisco, CA.