1. Groups and Teams Building a Team Understand the strengths of the team
Build upon those strengths
Put together a team with different background experiences
Keep the Team diverse
Build a team of individuals that want different outcomes
If just joining a team, come in – analyze and assess skills
Filling a gap in the team
Look inside the organization first
Continue search outside if necessary
“Instant confidence” when hiring known acquaintance from outside of the organization; important to understand it may not always work out

2. Groups and Teams Selecting Team Leaders
Don’t stop after assigning the title to a leader
Manager should apply a process to the recently assigned leader for the following:
Strengthen his or her strengths
Look at ways to improve weaknesses over time
3 Conditions for a group to increase likelihood of success (Hackman)
Identify the group, determine roles, and gain acceptance
Establish basic norms and/or conduct and confirm acceptance
Understand the payoff of the teams efforts

3. Groups and Teams -Build teams in single digit numbers!
Team checklist to gauge how well it is working
Are the clients happy?
Does the team gain strength over time?
Are group members finding work more fulfilling than frustrating over time?
- Be honest with people, even if it means confrontation. If they can’t handle it, tell them to get off the team.
Understand that confrontation is healthy! (to some extent)

4. Exercise Team Inventory
Purpose - To illustrate that teams have unique capabilities both common and uncommon that can leverage into a group projects
Directions - Form small groups of 3. Ask each team to uncover 3 abilities all members of this small group have in common (other than the obvious things such as you have taken the same classes). Someone may be good at accounting, or at public speaking. Then identify 1 capability that is unique to each person in the group. For example, only one person can juggle, and another can bench press 200lbs. Assign one player in each group to be the scribe and give the following instructions: “For the next 3-5 minutes we are going to look for 3 things each member group has in common with the other members of that group and 1 thing unique for each group member. Have the scribe write them down. In the unique part, you don’t have to be the only one in the world with that particular trait. So, if everyone in the group was an management major and you studied chemistry, that is a uniqueness within the group.” When finished, ask each scribe to report on the similarities and uniqueness. Give the teams another 5 minutes to answer two questions about their inventory of capabilities. First, how can the three shared capabilities be leveraged in a team project? Second, which of the individual unique capabilities can be leveraged to make a project more effective? Discuss as a whole.