Team Workshop

Reflect on your Team Role

Analyse internal customer-supplier-relationships across teams to improve Role Clarity

50-75 minutes

5-20 people

Remote & on-site

Background

Just like each team member has a role in the team, each team has a role in an organization. This workshop is about aligning the team’s perception of the role and also clarify interfaces with other teams in the organization.

Team workshop instructions

Preparation

Online: Shared Whiteboard with personal areas for sub-groups
On-Site: Big Whiteboard & flipcharts for sub-groups

Check-In (5 minutes)

Welcome the team and introduce the workshop’s goal & overview.
Explain the metaphor of supplier- and customer-relationships within a company.

Goal: Align our perception of the team role within the organization and visualize internal relationships with other teams.

Example for Supplier- & Customer-relationship: “The Sales team (customer) gets leads (product or service) from the Marketing department (supplier).”

Step 1 (5-10 minutes): Identify relationships

Group work: After the team understood the internal supplier- and customer-relationships, you can divide the team into 3 to 5 sub-groups and ask each sub-group to individually list the internal relationships of the team with other teams within the organization.
Make sure the team name is in the center of each groups flipchart and to list internal supplier team on the left and internal customers on the right.
Let the sub-groups connect each team to theirs with a line. On each line they should write a couple key words what “products or services” are exchanged.

Step 2 (15-25, 5 minutes per group): Presentation

Let each group present their results and try to summarize each teams results on the shared whiteboard. If there are multiple services in a relationship, just list each of them next to the arrow that connects the team.

Step 3 (10-15 minutes): Review expectations

On the shared whiteboard you now have a summary of all relationships and the services or products the teams exchange.
You can now decide which relationships you and your team would like to analyse further. Visually highlight each chosen relationship on the whiteboard. We recommend limiting it to maximal three relationships.
Group work: Now ask the sub-groups to review and formulate for each relationship what the specific expectations for each of these internal services are. Example: “The Sales team expects a steady flow of adequately qualified leads from the Marketing department.”

Step 4 (10-15 minutes, 3 minutes per group): Present expectations

Ask each group to present their results by just reading out the expectations. Either ask the team to write them on the shared whiteboard while presenting or just do it for them.

Ending (5 minutes): Generate follow-ups

Openly ask the team on their perception where follow-up todos would make sense. The following questions could help to identify room for improvements:
- Which of the relationships were unclear to us? (We probably should align ourselves on those – maybe even with the other team.)
- Which of the relationships have we defined differently within our team? (We probably should align ourselves on those – maybe even with the other team.)
- Which of the relationships are currently causing problems for us or seem in-efficient? (We could talk to the other team to clarify or even refine the relationship.)
Note the agreed upon todos on the whiteboard.
As a check-out, you can ask each team member to share their main take-away from this session.

First Aid

There are just too many internal relationships In step 1, you can limit the scope flexibly by asking the team to choose and only list the team’s five most relevant relationships.
Teams can’t come up with expectations for the relationships If it’s hard to come up with specific expectations, you could as well ask them to sort the relationships by how much conflicts or in-efficiencies they observe in each of those relationships. Then ask the team to specify which conflicts they observe and what they goal state of the relationship would look like (the result will be an expectation). Let the teams focus on the relationships with conflicts and exclude relationships where they don’t see any conflicts.

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