Earlier this week, we hosted a free webinar entitled, From Stuck To GO: Unleashing More Team Power in your Organization, with Susan Gerke and David Hutchens. Gerke is the President of Gerke Consulting & Development where she designs, customizes, and implements leadership and teamwork programs. Her clients include Bank of the West, City of Anaheim, Human Options, The Irvine Company, Kawasaki Motors, UC Irvine, Universal Music, Warner Bros, and Zebra Technologies. Hutchens is a bestselling author and consultant who specializes in organizational storytelling, leading, creating and innovating, organizational learning, systems, and more. He has created award-winning communications and learning solutions for companies such as IBM, The Coca-Cola Company, Wal-Mart, GE, and Nike.
Over 330 people registered for this information session.
There was a lot of information so we began promptly. Hutchens moderated the first part.
He began with, “Why don’t people team build?”
There are many reasons, but the main ones seem to be the following:
1. We do not have time for training
2. Too expensive
Often times, a team will head out to lunch, go bowling, even try a ropes course, and call it team building. But in reality, team building is much more than that.
The appropriate life cycle of team building is as follows:
Concrete Experience – Reflective Observation – Abstract Conceptualization – Active Experimentation
Each step has a trait that accompanies it:
Active – Reflector – Theorist – Pragmatist
Do you know which one or two traits you are?
Many team building exercises are not very purposeful and do not have the proper framework which is why they do not work. It is vital to close the loop and make sense of the experience that your team goes through.
Gerke lead the second part of the webinar. It was devoted to Tuckman’s stages of group development.
The four stages are:
- Forming
- Storming
- Norming
- Performing
The “storming” stage is the most challenging. Often times it is a hurdle to get past that stage alone!
There are many reasons why teams get stuck in a stage and have to go backward before they can go forward.
Click here for more information on Go Team and how you can make it work for you and your team.
In the hour long session, we looked at teams from all sorts of angles and tried to understand why teams so often get stuck.
Listen and watch here to find out how you can develop and cultivate your team.
Sign up today to make sure you don’t miss the next free webinar!
