A team is two or more people working together to accomplish a common purpose. If two or more people are seeking to work together, successful communication is critical.

The Team Communication Cycle is an effective way to facilitate communication within the team. Teams are a resource of tremendous potential, and tapping the genius, insight and potential in any team is the challenge of team communication. Individuals who make up the team can bring a vast knowledge, understanding, ability, expertise, insight, intuition, access and energy to the team, yet these assets are not immediately obvious or easily accessible. We have an unmined deposit.

While the team contains the untapped resources of great knowledge and energy, it also harbors misperceptions, partial understanding, blind spots, invalid assumptions, irrational responses, prejudice and bias. The key to successful teamwork is to separate the two,utilizing the former and discarding the latter. Just as the prospector panned for gold and carefully sorted the gold from the mud, a team must select the genius of insight from the mud of misinformation.

The Team Communication Cycle, which is a specifically designed communication method, facilitates the team’s gathering of information and the sorting of the valuable from the worthless. It is a very specific method used to facilitate teamwork by managing communication. It utilizes the same probing questions that drive the team process to stimulate each team member to draw on the pool of resources he/she brings to the task in order to utilize the collective resources to work as a team.

The challenge of an effective team facilitator, like a prospector of old, is to separate what is valuable from what is not. While teams generate a great deal of information, not everything is useful to the team. To collect and sort information, effective teams follow a five-step process, the Team Communication Cycle.

The five sequential steps are:

1. Ask a probing question.

2. Provide time to find potential answers.

3. Report all potential answers.

4. Discuss and analyze all potential answers.

5. Agree as a team on the answer.

The single, most powerful method in facilitating effective teamwork is the Probing Question. The most effective way to involve people in problem solving, strategic planning, or informational dialogue is to ask Probing Questions.

What are the six elements  of a Probing Question?

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1.  Effective Facilitators are experienced in team participation and team facilitation.

2.  Effective Facilitators believe that the team can and will generate a synergistic result.

3.  Effective Facilitators lead teams with an optimistic expectancy and attitude that gives the team a
performance edge.

4.  Effective Facilitators find the balance in the team dynamics.

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Teamwork is a popular theme and concept in American business, yet the principles of teamwork abound in nature. Naturalists tell us that migrating birds fly in a team-V formation for very practical performance reasons. A flock of birds flying together in formation can cover a greater distance in a given period of time than any one individual bird flying alone.

Agriculture has long understood the principle of teamwork. Ancient farmers understood that two or more oxen, mules or horses teamed together

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