The Bumblebees Top Collaboration Techniques Mini Site

Overview of The Bumblebees Top Collaboration Techniques Mini Site

This mini site provides concise and well tried techniques in the areas of Team Mobilisation and Team Operations for a wide-range of collaboration scenarios including:

• virtual teams
• cross-functional teams
• collaborative business networks
• virtual communities
• supply chains and clusters

Each tool in the toolbox includes:

• An Introduction to the topic
• The overall process for introducing and using it
• A Detailed Checklist
• A Worked Example/Supporting Spreadsheet

The current toolbox contains the following items:

1. Introduction and Overview of all techniques
2. Defining team objectives, success criteria and required outcomes
3. Establishing Team Capabilities for the job and spotting the gaps
4. Defining Team Ground Rules
5. Assessing Team Culture and new required behaviours
6. Agreeing the Team Karma ("what’s in it for me?")
7. Effective Personal Collaboration Strategies
8. Conducting Effective Team Meetings
9. Good Team Decision Making
10. 360 degree team member review
11. Creating network collaboration opportunities
12. Assessing a teams beliefs versus High Performing Teams
13. Profiling a virtual team
14. Collaborative Document Development
15. Autonomous Behavior Modelling
16. Team Social Network Analysis

Establishing Team Capabilities for the job and spotting the gaps

This technique is used by a business network or organisational team to assess its collective capabilities and then compare this with what capabilities are required to achieve its objectives.

There are 4 main steps

Step 1 – Create the Blank Capability Matrix

Step 2 – Consolidate the Team Capabilities

Step 3 – Review and refine the Consolidated Team Capabilities

Step 4 – Identify the required capabilities

The technique is supported by a spreadsheet to a) gather individual capabilities, b) consolidate them and c) create a visual capability heatmap

Agreeing real and effective team ground rules

Keywords

Ground-Rules, Etiquette, Norms, Standards, Sanctions, Trust, Issues, Conflicts, Information-Sharing, Decision-Making, Meetings, Induction, Mentoring, Communications

Context

It is important for a Team to establish ground rules for how it intends to operate

In my approach to teams I split this into two:

Ground Rules

Covering in general the negative team member behaviours we wish to discourage – this tool addresses Ground Rules.

Team Culture and Behaviors

Covering in general the positive team member and group behaviours we wish to encourage and adopt. Team Culture and Behaviors are covered in a separate tool (Tool#8).

Applicability

* virtual teams

* cross-functional teams

* collaborative business networks

* virtual communities

* supply chains and clusters

Click here for a spreadsheet of typical ground rules which you can tailor for your group.

The seven beliefs of high performing teams

Beliefs are what makes the difference between good and "high performance" In this article I suggest the seven hidden beliefs of high performing teams are :

1. Clear and Public Accountability
2. Trusted Competency
3. Give and Take
4. Total Transparency
5. Shared Glory
6. Meaningful Mission Value
7. Outcome Optimism

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Profiling a Team

How to avoid nasty surprises in supporting virtual teams

From my experience of working with teams, often due to business deadline pressures, we do not spend enough time at the start taking a quick look at the overall shape of the team. This means we often start trying to apply our toolkit of team effectiveness techniques and supporting virtual technology before we fully understand the precise nature of the complex, living and multi-faceted entity we are dealing with.

This generally results in nasty surprises which occur too late to do much about them. For example in a previous article I discussed three broad types of teams – “Recommending”, “Managing” and “Doing” Teams and the very different problems they each have.

Recommender Teams are often part-time; great for reviewing work but can lack a “team engine” for getting detailed work done.

Managing Teams are often staffed with senior executives who have serious time management challenges and are unlikely to engage with traditional team communication and meeting approaches.

Doer teams are great for doing things but their networks may be limited to their own functional areas which can blind them to some innovation and cross-functional opportunities.