Team Development Diagnostic Approach

Environment

• Difficult clients / customers
• Lack of work / opportunities
• Workflow irregularities and challenges
• To much work to perform in time given
• Difficult organizational policies, procedures and reward systems

• Missing or unclear goals
• Organizational and or customer / client goals that conflict
• Individual team members’ goals that conflict
• Changing goals and priorities

• Missing or unclear role definitions for the team members
• Role definitions of what some team members overlap with those of others
• Gaps exist between role definitions of some team members and others causing things to fall through the cracks

Procedures

Decision-making

• Lack of opportunities for team members to have inputs on decisions affecting the work they do
  Lack of timeliness in the making of critical decisions
  

Communication

• Information needed is not available
• Information needed is not available in a timely manner
  

Meetings

• Meetings don’t exist or take place to infrequently
• Too many meetings
• Unproductive meeting methods

Leadership

• Leadership style issues
• Clear direction
• Support of team members and issues to the rest of the organization
• Listening for inputs to decisions
• Willingness to give and receive appropriate feedback
• Appropriate levels of involvement i.e micromanaging vs. abandonment
  

• Conflict from non resolution of items above
• Personality / style differences
• Cultural and or values differences among team members or subgroups within the team.

These factors interact with one another. There is a hierarchy of interaction among the variables. Those at the top of the chart influence the ones below them. What appears to be a problem at one level may have its root cause at a higher level. For example, a "relationship problem" between two team members may develop because of different views about how a decision should be made (procedures), who should perform a certain task (roles), exactly what the task is (goals), or pressures from other parts of the organization (environment). Teams should look at higher level variables to determine what is causing a problem before attempting to solve it where the symptoms first appear.

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