Before an organization forms any type of work or project, they should consider what the team will need to be successful. To begin the successful team process, organizations need to consider the three R’s before forming their teams. If teams already exist, then organizations should re-evaluate their groups to determine which of the R’s they may still need to help the teams in their continued improvement. The three R’s are group rules and the member roles and responsibilities of each team.
Rules – When setting up teams, management needs to determine what rules will generally apply to all of them and then set individual requirements for each team as it is created. The individual team requirements should include objectives for the team, boundaries elated to decisions and expenses, and how performance may be measured. The team should set its own ground rules for meetings and guidelines for its treatment of members. The team and management together will develop measurable goals for the team and the team will then determine how to measure and reports goal progress.
Roles – There are many various job functions within a team and each should offer coaching options for development of individual members. These functions need to be given names as roles that individual or multiple team members may assume to accomplish necessary tasks. Then the roles should be discussed with management and a decision made on how to rotate these functions. Always keep on mind that group or individual training may need to be planned and scheduled as appropriate for each role, as well as for team-building.
Responsibilities – Teams will have multiple work processes or projects assigned to them. Management and the team will need to determine what group and individual competencies will be useful to help them to best accomplish their work. These responsibilities must be spelled out in formal job descriptions or in the role documentation that the team will create and maintain. This documentation will be used as reference by the team when getting and training new members in their responsibilities in order to help both the team and the business grow to accomplish their goals and objectives.
Consider the three R’s of group rules and the associated member roles and responsibilities to increase success with work or project teams. Do this before forming teams. If teams have already been formed, work with the existing teams to establish any of the three R’s that may be missing from their background to raise the their success rate too.
