How the Power of Vision Can Help Your Family & 4 Tips to Create One
Simple Communication Tips to Set Up Respectful Global Relationships

Almost all of us have experienced or observed a team that made a “right” decision that wasn’t effectively implemented because team members did not feel good about how the decision was made.

Developing and using effective team behaviors ensures your team not only makes good decisions but also that team members are willing and able to support and implement them.

And afterward, if a problem occurs and a team member is asked why the decision was made, they will take ownership and reply, “We thought…” rather than “They thought…”

Use the checklist below to observe whether your team utilizes all of these behaviors.  Not all people need to do all of these things, but if these behaviors are not occurring at all, then your team is losing the opportunity to make and implement decisions effectively.

Task Behaviors focus on what is needed to get the job done. They help the team find solutions, make decisions, and complete the work. Task behaviors include:

  • Initiating: Proposing goals, tasks, new definitions to problems, suggesting procedures or new ideas that initiate action within the team.
  • Information and opinion seeking:  Asking for relevant information, opinions, suggestions, clarification, or feelings from other team members to help the discussion.
  • Information and opinion giving:  Offering relevant facts, information, experiences, suggestions or opinions to the team.
  • Clarifying and elaborating: Clearing up confusion, interpreting comments, developing suggestions, building on ideas, defining terms, envisioning how something might work.
  • Summarizing:  Putting various ideas and contributions together that make use of relevant information and presenting to the team in an understandable way.  Restating content and ideas in a condensed form.
  • Coordinating: Managing and sequencing the flow of ideas or information.  Pulling together various ideas and activities toward a clear course of action.  Developing plans on how to proceed and keeping people focused on the task according to its agreements.  Checking whether the team is satisfied with its procedure, suggesting new procedures when necessary.
  • Decision testing and evaluation: Checking with the team to see how much agreement has been reached and how ready the team members are to move to decision-making.  Ensuring enough alternatives have been considered.  Asking for clarification on which decisions are to be made by the team.  Ensuring that consensus has been reached and a decision has been made.

Maintenance Behaviors focus on how well team members work together.  Maintenance behaviors ensure good working relationships and maintain the vitality of the team.  Maintenance behaviors include:

  • Building accord: Eliciting differing viewpoints, exploring and working out disagreements. Admitting error, finding middle ground, or communicating willingness to modify own position.  Working to resolve or mediate conflict among team members.
  • Encouraging: Acknowledging, praising others and their contributions, encouraging participation by being responsive, friendly, and respectful of others.  Demonstrating acceptance and openness to others’ ideas.
  • Tension Reduction: Easing tension and helping create an enjoyable atmosphere in which the team can stay focused on its tasks, suggesting fun approaches to tasks, reminding the team to take breaks when needed.
  • Gate-keeping: Increasing participation and communication by encouraging less talkative members to contribute or directly soliciting their opinions.  And controlling air time of more talkative members.  Suggesting procedures that encourage full participation and getting out all ideas.
  • Diagnosing and facilitating: Observing the internal team processes (how team members are working together) and using observations to help the team examine its effectiveness, expressing own feelings and asking others how they are feeling.
  • Active listening: Suspending judgment in order to fully understand the ideas of others, checking to ensure understanding by paraphrasing and reflecting feelings, responding non-verbally to what is being said.

Three things you can do to help your team:

Share your observations with your team. Pay attention to your team’s functioning. Are any of the behaviors missing consistently? If you observe that there is too much opinion giving and not enough opinion seeking happening, share your observation. Better yet, collect data and share it. How many times did people give opinions and how many times did they seek the opinion of others?

Fill in what’s missing. Provide the behavior the team needs if no one else is doing it. For example, if you notice that there is a quiet team member, as a gate-keeper, ask that person directly what their opinion is.

Monitor your own motivations. All of these behaviors are constructive when your intent is to help the team function more effectively.  The same behaviors can thwart your team if your intention is to meet your own needs for recognition and attention.

How the Power of Vision Can Help Your Family & 4 Tips to Create One
Simple Communication Tips to Set Up Respectful Global Relationships

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