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 CRCA 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 (untapped resources) (misperceptions) 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 CRCA Team Communication Cycle, 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 for the 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 collect and sort information, effective teams follow the five sequential steps of the CRCA Team Communication Cycle:

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.

Well-facilitated teams are efficient and effective, bringing synergistic potential to problem solving. There is an enormous pool of knowledge, understanding, ability, expertise, insight, intuition, resources, and energy in most teams. When that pool is tapped and utilized, the positive results are beyond imagination. Teams, working together cooperatively, can be more successful than the best and brightest person on that team working alone.

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It is popular, even a bit “PC,” to talk about reaching consensus. Consensus is: “harmony in a general agreement” or, in popular vernacular, “agree to agree.” But the question must be asked: “How?” Consensus is actually a broad umbrella concept of general agreement that arches over varied strategies for reaching agreements. I define consensus as: “reaching a harmony in a general agreement by some form of strategy acceptance.” So, behind the harmony of a general agreement is an agreement on the “how,” the method or strategy that will be used to reach that agreement.

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The stages of Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing are common concepts of team building (see The Team Building Process, published 2/28/11). Conventional wisdom is that once a team forms, it naturally goes through a conflict stage called Storming. Unfortunately, most teams never successfully move beyond this stage and either disband or exist in dysfunction.

The phase of team development where the team establishes rules for working together is called Norming. The disappointing reality is, most teams never evolve to this point and the teams that do are often left to struggle through without benefit of structure or guidance. To assist teams in the Norming process, I developed a process tool called Discovering Team Operandi that guides a team in contracting guidelines for working together successfully.

Discovering Team Operandi: The Team Norming Process

When teams articulate their operational expectations and contract their working arrangement (meaning they have mutually agreed on the rules for working together) they make a significant step toward becoming an effective team. The net result of Discovering Team Operandi is that the Storming stage is bypassed or eliminated (tension, frustration and dysfunction) and the team has a positive, working experience. The momentum created in the Norming process carries the team to its unified purpose.

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In an earlier post, I talked about team dysfunction (What is Teamwork?) and the fact that most dysfunction occurs in the process as the team moves between first and second base, the ME to We phase. (See last weeks post: The Team Building Process.) The most commonly reported team problems are: misapplication, no training, no support, work systems not changed to fit team work, frustration over purpose, endless meetings and unclear expectations.

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In leading/facilitating effective teams, the expectations, beliefs and paradigms of the leader set the parameters (or limits) on the team’s effectiveness. In other words, if the leader has little faith in the team and its ability, and expects little or nothing from the team, that is exactly what the outcome will be. Conversely, if the leader has confidence in the team’s abilities with no limitations, the team will produce outstanding results. Bottom line is, the leader’s expectations and beliefs about the team are a self-fulfilling prophecy on the team’s outcome.

Successful teamwork is based upon three fundamental assumptions: insight/intuition, team synergy and repeatable success.

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As noted in Part I, good facilitators know that creating a proper environment for effective teamwork is critical to success, and they understand that the team’s attention needs to be focused on the task at hand and not on any one individual or individuals.

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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 principles of teamwork. Ancient farmers knew that two or more oxen, mules or horses teamed togethercould accomplish more work in any given period of time than those same animals working individually.

There has been a progress of development, an evolution of teamwork applying these group/team dynamics to accomplishing meaningful work. This development can be organized in three phases:

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