Services: Effective Teams
Harnessing the creativity, collective wisdom and energy of diverse teams helps to catalyze development results.
Effective teams are important catalysts for development and social change and they are increasingly diverse and dispersed. Team members come with different values, experiences, technical skills and cultural traditions. Technical assistance teams are pressured to produce results quickly, especially in challenging environments. Teams working closely with local counterparts need to model values of empowerment and participation. In these settings traditional team building is not enough.
SI is a leading innovator in building effective teams for positive social change. Our approach empowers diverse teams, helping them to collaborate more effectively with counterparts and local people in order to achieve development results.
Range of Services
- Team Planning Meetings-rapid start-up for effective technical assistance teams.
- Team Building for Existing Teams-team assessment and tailored team building, including Meyers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), to improve performance of existing teams.
- Building Team-based Organizations-creating organizational leadership processes, procedures, structures and incentives to support effective teams.
- Building Effective Virtual Teams-using specialized tools and methods for building virtual teams and communities of practice.
- PROJECT details
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Strengthening the POLICY Project Team: The Futures Group, 2005
Working with the Futures Group POLICY Project Operation Team, SI designed and facilitated a 2-day team building retreat designed to improve dialogue and empower all team members. The workshop activities included: an activity to identify the resources and assets that made up the positive core of the Policy Operations Team, a series of short team building activities, a Team Work Effectiveness survey to evaluate and improve teamwork, role clarification, establishing mentor relationships, and next steps for moving the work forward. The workshop helped participants identify coordination challenges, clarify roles and responsibilities, and identify specific actions to enhance and improve coordination within the team.
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Strengthening Program Support Team: Family Health International, 2004
SI worked with the FHI's Program Support Department to create a more effective team in an environment of transition and downsizing. A major outcome of the workshop was that junior-senior team member relationships were improved and all were able to see their work and contribution to FHI in more positive ways. The results of the workshop that were taken on board by senior management included a set of statements describing the team at its best, guidelines and agreements for how the department will behave during the transition period and a matrix describing roles expectations/needs at each level to navigate the transition.
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Clarifying Roles for Global Team: USAID/OTI, 2003-04
An important element of OTI's success has been its decentralized management style and flexibility. At the same time, the need for clear roles and responsibilities remains. SI undertook an office-wide role clarification process designed to clearly define roles and responsibilities for all OTI staff members and improve communication among staff members. After a thorough review and analysis, SI submitted a final report with agreed upon role descriptions and guidelines for handling role changes and role conflicts in the future.
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Afghanistan-Building Transition Program Team: USAID/OTI, 2003
The Afghanistan Transition Initiative (ATI) is an OTI program implemented by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) to build community capacity and to extend the reach of the Government of Afghanistan into local communities. SI was requested to conduct team building interventions to strengthen the working relationship between OTI and IOM. As a result of SI's team building activities, the OTI/IOM team realized improved collaboration during the second phase of the program, enabling it to quickly respond to opportunities in the local environment-such as the upcoming elections-and to coordinate more effectively with USAID/Afghanistan.
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Merging Teams for Better Service Quality: AED, 2002
With a newly awarded 5-year contract, the Academy for Educational Development (AED) and DevTech needed to merge their service capabilities for their USAID client. Through various team building activities, SI worked with the newly merged team to deepen understanding of organizational assets, build trust, clarify roles, strengthen communication and identify means for further improving the team's products and quality control procedures. As a result, the merged team has created a strong and seamless collaboration, with great efficiency in work processes and higher quality research products and services for USAID.
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Strengthening Dispersed Global Health Teams: USAID/GPHN, 2001
USAID's Global/Population and Health Bureau aimed to strengthen its teamwork with regional health offices to more efficiently and effectively support global health priorities. Based on a rapid needs assessment, SI developed and delivered a series of joint teambuilding workshops for the health teams. The workshops clarified roles within and between the teams and introduced procedures for virtual team work. As a result, the Bureau has improved coordination and communication between the various teams, leading to improved working relationships and better targeting of technical resources where and when they were most needed by the regional bureaus.
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Effective Teams
Download PDF
A key to improving organizational and program performance (Impact Note No. 10)