The importance of team development: Teams cannot achieve their goals if team members aren’t capable enough. To combat this, managers must create an environment of continuous learning, thus contributing to the development of competence.
What makes a team competent?
If you as a leader want to focus on team development you should work on those five components:
How to foster individual competence development
- Lead by example: Commit yourself to your own personal mastery. Lay the seed for a learning culture. Help create a learning organization.
- Encourage and enable self-study: Give time, resources and room.
- Training and certification: By itself a certificate doesn’t mean anything but it can catalyze all other competence measures.
- Coaching: Hire external coaches. Develop internal competence leaders.
- Learning from failure/experiments: It is important to celebrate learning in safe environments.
Team Communication
Examples:
- Reduce/bridge distance
- Document relevant outcome (this is one of our nine rules for better business meetings)
- Establish rituals
- Listen/pay attention
- Nonviolent communication
- Powerful questions
Tip: Learn more about positive feedback with the plus module Better Feedback
Helping each other
Examples:
- Shared vision/goal (see OKRs for more)
- Common ownership of responsibility
- Peer learning
- Knowledge hours
- Exploration days
Team competence structure
- Different competencies at different levels
- see Team Competency Matrix for more
