From the course: Teamwork Foundations

The five stages of a team task

From the course: Teamwork Foundations

The five stages of a team task

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- When are you at your best during a team project? At the start, in the middle, or near the end? You might have certain abilities or skills that aren't needed all the time. The idea is to know what your strengths are at all phases of a project. For example, creative people are great at the start of a project. But the last thing you want is someone having more ideas just when you've nearly finished. Ideally, that creative person would switch off their creativity once the plan is being agreed. And then use a different part of their skillset, maybe helping with the work of implementation, or going into quality control mode. The main phases of a team task or project are as follows. First is the direction-setting phase. When the best contributions are to suggest big long-term goals to setup processes and to assign roles to people. Who's going to do what? How much planning time should we have? That kind of thing. Then there's the planning phase, where the main tasks to be done are to generate ideas, assess the quality of those ideas, and get the ideas boiled down to one plan. How can you contribute to this? Are you best at generating ideas or best at evaluating them for how feasible they are? Then comes the briefing others phase, because not everyone was in on the planning. So everyone on the team needs to know what the plan is. This phase might involve presenting, explaining one to one, delegating out parts of the task, and checking that people are okay with the plan. Then we come to the action phase, where you carry out the plan. All the idea generation is now behind us and the team members are now doing their agreed share of the work, which could involve solving problems along the way, making sure that quality is maintained, attention to detail, and being a stayer when the work gets tough. Also at this stage, someone in the team needs to attend to the people functions, which include helping others, mediating in disputes, and in some cases, providing a bit of humor. And then finally, we come to the finishing of the project. This involves getting all the details finished off, making sure that every I is dotted, every T crossed, and then maybe organizing a review, where we learn from what happened and document it for next time. So I want you to think about how you can be a great contributor throughout every team project that you're involved in. Which of the stages are you less naturally good at? And for those ones, could you maybe work out a role for yourself, and therefore, enable yourself to contribute better during that phase?

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