EXERCISE 13.1

Flexibility

The Highly Flexible Team

Purpose

To help team members clarify their workflow process, including what the specific roles, contributions, and interfaces of each member are.

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60 minutes

The combined flexibility of all the members delivers a critical strength and durability to teamwork. Conversely, if this is an area for which improvement is necessary, lack of flexibility can actually be a serious bottleneck. Your team can learn how well it performs in flexibility from your team identity and positive mood scores in the TESI. Teams follow an eight-step process to explore their current process in detail to gain the information for places where flexibility can be added.

Outcomes

Audience

Facilitator Competencies image

Advanced

Materials

Time Matrix

Activity Estimated Time
Discuss and work through the eight-step process with an intact team 60 minutes
Total Time 60 minutes

Instructions

1. Follow the steps in The Highly Flexible Team Handout. Your discussion will be much more successful if you remind team members or group participants to always engage each other with respect and to speak more descriptively than evaluatively through Step 7. In Step 8 more evaluative kinds of comments can then be made productively. Note: If you have time constraints, you could have the team focus on one key aspect of its work instead of all the key demands they face.

2. Remember to order or make reservations for the pizza! You may choose to let participants know or use pizza as a surprise reward for their hard work.

THE HIGHLY FLEXIBLE TEAM HANDOUT image

Flexibility is the skill that helps us adapt to change we cannot predict or control; it is also what allows us to accommodate the needs of other people, even when they may encroach on our own. Too much flexibility means we end up doing other people’s work; too little flexibility means we may live in a familiar if not comfortable rut and that may make it frustrating for others to interact with us, especially in times of change.

A major component of team flexibility comes from everyone understanding and appreciating the roles of all the team’s members. With a firm basis of understanding the roles and responsibilities, the team then has the information it needs to build in flexible practices. The following exercise is designed to facilitate team flexibility with a new level of awareness by consciously exploring what is generally only assumed about team roles and functions. Everyone on the team needs to be present for this to work!

1. With all team members including the leader present, begin the exercise by choosing two people to alternate as scribes. First, create a statement that comprehensively explains key actions your team is responsible for. Everyone has to sign off on this statement, which should be simplified as much is possible without losing necessary details.

2. Now that you have explicitly described just what it is your team does, get a feel for the specific sequence of the process. Discuss items such as where your work assignments come from. Do they come directly from your final customer or from another team within your organization? How are the expectations/requirements for success presented? Does the team or leader have any input? If not, should this change? Can it?

3. Once the work has been assigned, who needs to do what first? Every team member may start working on some aspect right away, but how do the different processes and tasks fit together?

4. Now that you have developed a general outline of the process your team uses, each team member is to describe in detail what it is he/she does. If the process is clear-cut and sequential, then follow the process in your discussions as closely as possible. If that is a less dominant feature of the workflow, team members can just take turns as they feel works the best. This does not have to be highly structured and should allow for plenty of discussion.

5. Within the team there may be individuals who collaborate to a high degree with each other; give them a chance now to discuss their relationship and how their relationship interfaces with other relationships on the team or on other teams if that is the case.

6. Most work begins with gathering things and/or data (such as raw materials or subassemblies). What needs to be gathered for your team to do its work? Where does it come from and how easy is it to obtain? When there are problems, what are they typically? How does the work your team does change the data and/or things to add value?

7. How do you know when you are finished? Where does your work product go when your team has finished its contribution to the process? How does the team know how successful efforts were? What is the feedback loop? Does it need to be improved?

8. Now that your team has done most of the work to trace the structure and process of the interdependent relationships within the team, ask for feedback about where the various processes and interfaces can be improved. This may be an animated, even heated discussion, but if conducted respectfully the material you have already generated will provide strong support. It will also generally have taken long enough that people will be ready to make specific observations and requests to expand the flexibility of the team engagement and process (especially if they know that everyone’s going out for pizza soon)!