Team Development is Learned & Not Taught

1. Organizational development advisors or facilitators may prefer to undergo a one-day training program to update their knowledge on a team development, after which they can provide in depth local support
2. Purchase a starter kit which includes a Facilitator manual and six (6) sets of modules (for six team members); additional modules are available for purchase.

• It is self administered; either led by a member of the team or an in-organizational facilitator.
• It is designed to be run in-house, involving the whole of the team under development
• Each module can be completed in around 90 minutes (longer for a larger team) thus minimizing time of work; modules can also be split to enable flexible delivery.
• Knowledge is applied straight away as the program is delivered over a period of six weeks (or more, if that is the choice of the team).

• You work as a team with a clear task focus and want to improve the way your work together, for the benefit of each other and your patients/clients.
• You are responsible for developing teams and have been searching for techniques that do so without taking them off site for any length of time.
• You are aware that you need to break into new ground and extend your facilitation and personal development skills
• You have tried 'traditional' chalk and talk sessions about team development and are now ready to adopt the challenges of a behavioral approach.

The ABCs of Championship Teams program focuses on four categories of questions or problem areas - issues- with which all teams must deal in order to get the job done.

Goal Issues - Do people understand and accept the team's core mission (its organizational mandate)? What are the team's priority objectives? How are the conflicts handled? Role Issues - What do team members expect of one another? Are these expectations made clear? How are they made acceptable? How are conflicts in expectations handled? Procedural Issues - How is information flow and the need for co-ordination handled? How are the problems solved, decisions made, conflicts resolved? Interpersonal Issues - How do team members feel about and treat each other? Are people's needs for recognition, support and respect adequately met?

A) Symptoms versus Problems
Interpersonal problems on teams ("We just can't get along!" "We've got a personality clash.") are, more often than not, symptoms or unresolved problems in one of the three other areas-goals, roles or procedures-rather than casual factors of poor team performance.

B) Hierarchy of Issues
There is a hierarchy or natural order in which a team ought to address its issues. Goal issues should be handled before role issues. Goal and role issues should be handled before procedural issues and all three-goals, roles and procedures-should be handled before interpersonal issues.

The power and validity of these two principles have been proven over the past decades of our and others' experiences with the program. Team members very quickly see the logic of addressing the question Who should be doing "what?" (a roles type question) only after they have agreed on the "what" (a goals type question) and so on through the hierarchy.

People do feel better about each other as a result of such task orientated team development because they learn how to better manage the issue areas that caused the symptoms in the first place. The recommended sequence of study of modules in the program follows directly from this hierarchy principle.