Sunday, March 25, 2012

Introduce Agendas

You know what "they" say about failing to plan.  Good planning is a key skill to introduce to your team.  An agenda is a great tool for your team to use toward this end.   You could provide some examples, highlight the advantages, and help with the team's first few attempts at creating agendas.  With the right introduction and enough enthusiasm from coaches and team leaders, the team will embrace the concept and will be surprisingly independent in agenda-setting.

Remember:

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Teamwork Development


Part of creating a star team is to head off teamwork problems before they begin. This is easiest to do when forming new team, of course. Setting the ground rules from the get-go gives both team members and coaches a blueprint for building cooperative relationships within the team.

It's a bit harder to rework interpersonal interactions in an established team. Here is a common difficulty coaches have shared with me (I applaud coaches for voicing their frustration about how it can take only one team member to disrupt the whole team and who look for innovative ways to handle the problem):

Q: We have a student that disrupted our team last season. We do not have a process or policy in place to alter team membership status. How can we "uninvite" a student from our team?