Teamwork

The Quality Toolbook > Teamwork

Team development | Team roles | Team meetings | Successful teams

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Much improvement work in organizations needs the collaboration of many people, both as formal teams and in larger, less formal groups. Managing improvement projects thus requires a good grasp of human psychology as well as a sound understanding of the tools described in the main body of this text.

A group of people working together may have varying degrees of success in achieving their aims, and any lack of success in a project may be due to a number of factors that are not always clear. For example, a prestige project, staffed by well-trained experts with plentiful resources to hand, may be eclipsed by another smaller group of workers who achieve outstanding improvements through seemingly nothing more than lunchtime meetings and a few key process changes. Often, the difference lies not so much with the resources and skills available, but in the way the team works together, rather than as a group of individuals.

This chapter looks at some of the key points of how groups of people interact, and the factors that need to be taken into account to make teams successful, including:

• Team development: How teams emerge from groups of people
• Team roles: The formal and informal roles people take in improvement teams.
• Team meetings: Elements of making team meetings successful.
• Successful teams: The secrets of making improvement teams work.