mySawdust.com - Team Development & Team Leadership

Team Development & Team Leadership

As a participant in the C-33-05 WoodBadge course, (Soaring Eagles patrol) I saw what a random bunch of people thrown together into a team with common goals and a desire to succeed could become in a short time. This inspired me to take the teamwork and leadership modules presented during this course and combine them with other resources available to me. Out of that came a series of Team Development and Team Leadership lunch-n-learns at my place of employment.

The materials created and used during this series are presented here (largely unchanged).

Core

The core of the materials is found in the Team Development & Leadership Modeling document.

The first section covers the various phases of the Team Development Model presented by Bruce Tuckman ("Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing"). It is augmented by information from Alan Chapman and Glen Alleman as well as materials from the C-33-05 WoodBadge course.

The second section covers the Team Leadership Model with help from the above mentioned sources as well as my experience with Situational Leadership courses.

One of the things created for this series that I found most valuable was the attempt at a "unified" model of team development and team leadership. It takes a graph form and is included in this document. I created an almost poster-sized 11"x17" version of the Team Development stages as well as the Team Development & Team Leadership graph (links removed due to my difficulty in getting PDFs of that size).

Films

It was decided that these materials would be presented in a combined fun/learning fashion. The week before the film was shown, the Team Development & Leadership Modeling document was delivered along with an overview of the film being shown and some discussion questions. A room with comfortable chairs was reserved, invitations were sent out, and lunch was brought in. The first five minutes was spent discussing the purpose and point of the exercise and then the film started rolling. I paused it six times to ask the assembled two questions:

What is the team's morale?

What is the team's actual productivity?

Following the film we spent half an hour or more going over some of the questions presented in the overview and the discussion questions document.

Remember the Titans

There are multiple examples of team development (e.g., the Titans, the coaches, their families, the school, the city) in Remember the Titans (RTT). For the purposes of our discussion, we focused mainly on the Titans themselves.

The overview I provided for this film also includes a cast of characters, some scenes to watch for and some quotes for many of the crucial scenes.

The real story of the Titans is even more amazing than the film.

October Sky

The team development displayed in October Sky (OS) is at a different level than in RTT. While RTT looks at two groups of people forced to perform as one, October Sky takes an individual with a problem and watches a team build out of the need to solve that problem.

There's also an emphasis on the mentors around the team and how they impact the team and its goals that's not there in RTT.

The real story of Homer Hickam and the Rocket Boys is even more amazing than the film.

Twelve O'Clock High

No other film I've seen matches Twelve O'Clock High (TOCH) for its portrayal of a team's development stages and the good (and bad) responses of that team's leaders. From the "smoking with Ernie" scene to Savage's eventual crackup, the depiction is nearly flawless.

Additional resources:

"smoking with Ernie" (PDF)

more Ernie

Miracle

I've not seen Miracle yet. If I'm still going strong after TOCH, we'll get to Miracle.