The Manager’s Role in Training Employees to Work as a Team

The manager is responsible to train employees to work as team. The manager cannot take it for granted that assembling talented people in the department will result in teamwork. There are essential skills that team members need to learn and develop for the team to move through the four stages of team development.

The purpose of teamwork is for teams to function more autonomously and take on higher level responsibilities such as problem solving, process improvement, innovation and even certain management functions such as hiring new team members.

The manager must give the training or work with internal or external resources to provide the training.  The four clusters where team members require training are:

1. Tasks: This is the basic level of employee functioning and team members must be able to perform their tasks according to set standards of quantity and quality. These standards are set by the manager/supervisor or by the quality control experts. Once these standards are established and being met, the team can move to the next cluster or phase.
2. Team relationships: This is the next level where team members come together to discuss goals and ` projects. Team members need to learn interpersonal communication skills such as active listening, consensus and conflict resolution. Other skills such as mutual coaching and providing feedback and reinforcement are also essential to develop.
3. Initiative: This is where teams engage in continuous improvement by looking for problems or opportunities to improve processes and functions. It could be related to the team or department goals. It may mean looking at obstacles that are holding the team back from achieving the goals. Team members need to learn group solving problem techniques such as controlled brainstorming, nominal group technique and force field analysis amongst others.
4. Management relationship: Team members need to develop a relationship with management where they can communicate effectively and be able to present their ideas for continuous improvement that come from their efforts for taking initiative. Team members also need to learn how to implement the decisions by management once they are approved.

The manager or supervisor needs to provide the training for the skills described above, otherwise the team cannot continue to evolve and engage in taking more initiative and becoming more autonomous.