Team Development Summary

u08a1 Team Development Summary Session Two

The team consisted of Adam McCrea, Assistant Laboratory Manager; Leigh Greer, Customer Service Coordinator; Eric Hubrich, Senior Calibration Technician; and myself, Laboratory Manager. Team Learning was the learning discipline chosen for my team. Team learning is one of Senge’s five components of a learning organization. Being a learning organization is one effective way an organization can thoroughly manage change to gain a competitive advantage. First, the goal of team learning is to align team members “thoughts and energies.” By achieving alignment and learning together, a team will create synergy. Two important components of team learning are discussion and dialogue. Successful team learning will

I did this anticipating some team members may not comprehensively understand the difference between them without researching these topics as was the case with me. I thought this would be a good way to save time so the meeting would be more effective. During the team meeting, we (1) talked about discussion and dialogue to ensure all team members understood the difference between these two topics and why establishing dialogue is important, (2) talked about the importance of ground rules, and why ground rules are necessary to achieve a level of effective dialogue, and (3) discussed the twelve components of compassionate communication and how they help build trust, resolve conflict, and increase social intimacy within a

We initially found some team members didn’t really understand what the difference between discussion and dialog was, but we were able to gain a shared meaning through effective dialogue. We had several successful team development aspects such as (1) our team was able to understand the difference between discussion and dialogue, (2) our team gained a better understanding why ground rules are necessary to achieve effective dialogue, and (3) we gained a better understanding how the twelve components of compassionate communication can be a good tool to help build trust, resolve conflict, and help build a stronger relationship among members. The unsuccessful team development aspects were: (1) initially one of the team members was discourteous by talking over the other team members and didn’t allow them to effectively participate, but this was rectified by me bringing it to his attention that he was doing this and the fact that he needed to be respectful of his team mates; (2) we got off topic several times, which caused the meeting to last a lot longer than the one hour I had scheduled this meeting for, and (3) I did not create an agenda for this meeting.

Some team development experiences that could be done differently next time I am a facilitator are: creating an agenda, distributing the agenda before the meeting, and striving to do a better job staying on topic during the meeting keeping