ASQ CQE Certified Quality Engineer – Section I – Management and Leadership (18 Questions) Part 4

39. 1D Leadership Principal and Techniques – Types of Teams

Hey, welcome back. Coming to the next topic which is Leadership principles and techniques. In this topic I will be discussing two things here, types of teams and team stages. Tuckman model of team stages. So these two things will be covered in Leadership principles and techniques. So one thing I want to remind you here is that section one has general management topics.

So if you are aware of these topics, you want to quickly go through these. You can run all these videos at 1. 5 or two times speed and quickly glance through that and maybe look at specific areas which you want to look. So with that statement let’s come back to this topic which is Leadership principles and techniques. And as I said, two things we are covering, one is types of team and second is team stages. So let’s look at types of teams. So when we talk about teams, there could be a number of types of teams. So here I have listed some of the common types of teams you could have. One is a functional team.

So you could have a team of people who are from a single function. Let’s say you have a team where you get all people from quality department, they are working on a problem, solving a problem that’s a functional team. There could be a marketing functional team, there could be a production functional team. The key thing here is that people in this, the members of this team are from a single function. On the other hand, when it comes to cross functional team, you could have a team where you get members from different disciplines, different functions and why you need that. There could be a problem which basically spans over number of functions.

So you need to have people from different functions together, sit together, look at a problem and solve that problem as a single team coming from different disciplines. So that’s cross functional team where you have members from different functions coming to the next type of team which you could have, you could have a virtual team.

Also virtual team is where you don’t have people sitting face to face in a single room. You could have a virtual team where the team members are from different locations. So all these people talk to each other in a group conference or video conferencing or sending an email. So there are some limitations when you have a virtual team. When people are not sitting face to face with each other, some of the members might be in a different location where it’s night, when it’s your daytime.

So all these things need to be considered when you have a virtual team to find out a mutually good time, have a video conference. Even if you have a virtual team, it’s always a good idea to meet once in a while face to face. So let’s say once in a year or at the beginning of the project if there’s any opportunity to have a face to face meeting, have that and then rest of the things could be carried out as a virtual team. Then you could have a self managed team where people engage themselves and make a group of their own and then they start working on that without management initiative, without anything asking them to do that. So that’s a self managed team.

Another important type of team could be quality circles, which was quite prevalent in Japan where people from one production area will work together and act as a quality circle. So they meet after work and solve typical problems, what they have in their work area and that way they could improve their workplace. So this is a quality circle.

Here you have management support as well. Then after whatever they have done that they make presentation to management. Management recognizes these quality circle. At one time this was quite famous, having a quality circle, but probably these days I see less of these quality circles in the organization. But that could be my personal opinion. But yes, quality circle is an important aspect of team which can help in solving problems. So what happens when a team is formed and through what phases this team goes through? Let’s look at that in the next video, which is Duckman’s model of team.

40. 1D Leadership Principal and Techniques – Tuckman’s Model

Understand team stages. Tuckman proposed a model which is called as Tuckman’s model or Tuckman’s stages of team development. Let’s understand this model. This will explain how team works from the beginning to the end. Any team goes through five stages. And these stages are shown here on this picture, which are forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning. Let’s quickly go through that. And then in next few slides, we will go through each of these items one by one. Each of these stages one by one. Starting with the forming. In the forming stage, the team is formed. This is the first time members come together and meet.

That’s the forming stage. So if you start a Six Sigma project or you start any project, you will have a team which you will assemble as a part of this project to perform the project. This is the forming stage where people meet together first time. Then comes the storming. At this stage, people start realizing that teamwork is not easy. There are difficulties, there are difference of opinions. This is the storming phase where you have sort of a disagreements between team members. Once you pass through the storming stage, the next stage is norming. Norming is the stage when team moves beyond the storming stage and starts functioning as a team.

So many of these disagreements have been resolved. So now they start working as a single team. And once the norming happens, the next stage will be the performing. This is the stage where the team reaches its best performance. Now everyone works together as a single team and they do high performance work. Once performing stage is over, the next stage is Adjourning. Adjourning is the completion of the project because every project has a starting and ending date. So once the project is completed, the team needs to be adjourned or dismantled. So this is the last stage which is adjourning. Now let’s go through each of these stages one by one, starting with the forming. As I earlier said that in forming, the team first assembled together. So now the project have been established. This is the Six Sigma, or the improvement project we want to do.

A team has been formed. The role of leader in the forming stage is important because you need strong leadership during the forming stage. Because everyone depends on leader to tell what’s expected and what’s not to be done. So the role of leader at this stage is to direct to the team. That what is the scope, what we are expected to do, avoid any type of controversy, avoid any type of serious discussion which could lead to team trouble at the very beginning and have some minimum feedback at this stage.

Once the team has passed through this forming stage, the next thing will be the storming phase. And what you would see in the storming stage is the team member will express their strong views because each member has come with some strong thinking so they will be expressing that they will be challenging each other’s ideas.

They will be challenging even leader, their authority and the position. Some members might even withdraw from the team. And you will see that there is some sort of a push and pull for getting controlled because each person wants to show their own importance. So at this stage, you will see a lot of reactions and defense and pulls and pushes. So this is the stage where you will have some sort of a high tension environment.

The role of leader at this stage is to coach the team members and direct them towards the objective of the team, objective of the project. So this is the storming stage. This doesn’t last very long. So once people have gone through that pull and push, expressed their strong opinions, challenged to each other, then slowly they will start adopting to each other’s opinion. And then we will reach this next stage, which is stage number three, which is norming. Here, people start listening to each other. So there’s active listening. There is a shared leadership. Now at this stage, people find out the way of working, how things will be worked out. So they make some sort of a plan, okay, this is the way we will work. And then even they change their strong opinion also.

So whatever their preconceived views or their strong opinions are, they are ready to change that. At this stage, in the favor of team as in the favor of a group. And now they become receptive to each other’s ideas, compromise their own ideas, then actively participate in the team. The conflict is seen as a challenge which this team needs to handle. And there is an open exchange of ideas. So things start working. At this stage.

The role of leader changes from being coach to facilitator, to facilitate whatever team wants. Because now slowly team is taking over the project and the role of leader becomes a little bit less important as we move through these stages. So now the role of leader just remains to facilitate, to provide any support what team needs after the normal stage. The next stage is the best stage in the team which is performing here. Everyone is creative, everyone is working towards the goal. There is an openness, there is trust, there is a strong relationship between team members and this team wants to achieve high. And at this stage, the role of leader even becomes less important.

The role of leader is to delegate everything to team. Because now team is working in its full form, in the full potential. So leader will just delegate everything to the team and provide support only once it’s required. After this high performance stage where the team is performing, the next stage will be completion of the project. And this stage is adjourning. Adjourning is that whatever objective this team had, that objective has been achieved.

So now, once the objective has been achieved, then this team needs to be dismantled. Then everyone will go back to their own department, their own function, or start working what they were doing earlier before joining this team. The biggest challenge at this time is since the team is dismantling now, people feel some sort of a detachment that we are losing this team and we are going back. So the role of leader is to reassure and communicate with the team that, okay, there will be a chance once again to meet or work as a team.

As we move further, some might feel at this stage that they might be losing their job because the work is done. Some of the projects might be like that, where you do the project and then you don’t know whether you’ll be going back or you’ll be losing your job. So the role of leader is to reassure the team members that, okay, you have done a good job in this project and definitely you will be the part of the next project. So these are five stages which every team goes through. They start with the forming, then there is a storming. Norming performing and adjoining. So this was the Tuckman’s model for the team development.

41. 1E-1Team Roles and Responsibilities

So one e one is the roles and responsibilities of Facilitator. So here we will not only learn about the role of Facilitator, we will learn about few other roles in team as well. So these are the roles we will be talking about in this section. The role of the leader, role of the Facilitator, coach and the members. So let’s talk about the role of a leader in the team. Role of the leader is to provide direction to the team members. Leader gives the direction and leader has clarity on the role of all these team members, what these team members are supposed to do. And leader establishes ground rule for working with each other and leader always has a goal for the team, that this is the goal the team is required to achieve. Leader makes sure that the meetings are conducted properly.

So leader prepares for the meeting, conducts the meeting and records the minutes of the meeting. And from time to time if there is any change of the role, leader make sure that the proper role are assigned to the team member. So this is a summary of the roles of a leader. What leader is supposed to do in the team coming to the role of the Facilitator, which was the main topic here, what Facilitator does. Facilitator provides the leadership to the team without formal authority to make decisions. So everything is similar to leader. But here the Facilitator doesn’t have authority to make decision on behalf of the team and Facilitator help team to understand the objective and supports the team on how to achieve this objective. You might have seen where let’s say if you are a quality manager and you are asked to do a Facilitation of the root cause analysis.

That’s one example of a Facilitation where as a quality manager you are facilitating the root cause analysis. And this root cause analysis could be related to production, related to engineering, related to sales, whatever this area is that even might not be your own work area, your own specialty, but as a Facilitator you make sure that you bring team together and make sure that they reach their goal. So you help team to achieve their goal without having a formal authority.

So this is Facilitator. We will talk about number of tools in the next lectures where we will see that what all tools are used by Facilitators to facilitate the team objective. So this was about the role of the Facilitator. So coming to the coach, the role of the coach is to provide one to one support generally after training. So if you have trained people then you assign a coach to that person, the coach will be a go to person. So if there’s any problem you can go to your coach and ask for suggestion, opinion or his or her guidance in coaching. There is a model called grow model where G is for goal, R is for reality, O is for obstacles and W is for way forward.

So g means goal. What does team wants to achieve? That’s something coach needs to make sure that what’s the objective of the team, what team wants? R is reality looking at the current reality or the challenges the team has or is the obstacles. So if that’s the reality, then what stops team from achieving the objective? So we talked about the objective in the goal, we talked about the reality in R and we talked about obstacles. What obstacles this team has to achieve the objective and then how do you overcome that? That is WW is the way forward, what all steps are needed to achieve the goal. So this is a grow model of coaching.

This is how coaching is done. Coach understands that what is the goal, what’s the reality, what are the obstacles and what’s the way forward to achieve that objective? So this was the third role in this lecture. The fourth role we want to talk about here is the role of team members. So what is the role of team members? Team members are expected to participate in team meetings, perform whatever a task has been assigned to them, and actively participate in discussions. Brainstorming, idea generation.

And when I talk of brainstorming, this is one of the Facilitation tool we will be shortly talking about. So these are the roles of people in the team. We talked about members, we talked about coach, we talked about Facilitator and we talked about leader. In the next lecture, let’s look at some facilities.

42. 1E-2 Facilitation Tools – Introduction

So previously we talked about roles and responsibilities of facilitators. In that lecture we talked about roles of a few other people as well. The role of leader, role of facilitator, role of coach and the role of members. Now after looking at the roles of the facilitator, now here in this section we will be talking about facilitation tools tool, what all tools are needed to facilitate. Facilitate is basically helping the group, helping members without proper authority. So Facilitator guides the team, but facilitator doesn’t have a formal authority.

An example which I told earlier was having a root cause analysis. That is one example and there could be few other examples as well where a facilitator helps team in achieving the objective. Let’s look at the list of tools which we will be covering here. So here is the list of tools which we will cover in this team tools which is Brainstorming. We will talk about brainstorming, we will talk about NGT, which is nominal group technique and we will talk about conflict resolution and we will talk about force field analysis. So let’s start with Brainstorming in the next video.

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