Types of team

A team is generally understood to be two or more people who:

• Share a common goal, purpose or accountability.

• Must cooperate to achieve it (they are in some way interdependent).

Approaches to team development all too often implicitly assume that all teams are essentially the same.

However, we suggest that there are three basic types of team which have distinctive characteristics which are significant for team development. They are:

• Management (or executive) teams – who run things.

• Operational teams – who deliver an ongoing service or carry out an ongoing activity.

• Project teams (including all varieties of temporary team) – who have to produce a specific product or deliverable.

The differences between these three types of team are described in our Team assessment and development process

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Team assessment and development

Distinctive features of our approach:

1.It assesses the performance of individual team members as well as that of the team as a whole.

These two levels of performance are interdependent and both need to be addressed if team performance is to improve. Team development commonly addresses only the team as a whole and results in feedback which is non-personalised and is therefore hard to act on because responsibility for change is generalised.

2.It ensures that the assessment and development of performance is appropriate to the type of team concerned.

The full process involves:

• One to one meetings with the individual team members
• Identification of key skills drawn from our generic competency framework
• Online assessment by team members (self assessment, peer feedback and assessment of the team as a whole)
• Independent observation of team meetings
• Team feedback
• Individual team member reports
• One to one debriefs
• Follow up

Of course it can be tailored to your specific needs.