Team Ground Rules

Question: What are your teams ground rules? Answer: Team Ground rules are important factors to adopt in order to achieve a healthy environment and generate new and innovative ideas. When we work as a team we must adopt these factors for a better open communication and interaction .Evaluating the team performance periodically is important to ensure a team has adopted ground rules .the leader needs to enforce or modify behaviors as needed ("Research Guides: Team Development: Teambuilding: Structure", 2016). In my opinion the most three improvement team ground rules are: Stay focused on the improvement goal. Speak one at a time. Participate by sharing your own opinions and experiences. Team members need to stay focused .If everyone in a team puts an effort to discuss only the meeting-related topics, the team will have a better chance to achieve success sooner and better outcome and productivity. Discussion on unrelated topics is time wasting and decrease the productivity. Genuine questions or questions of clarification should be encouraged rather than developing attacking questions which can divert the actual topic of discussion. Its important to keep the discussion brief in order to stay focused, this reduces the repetition and the same comments as well as saving the time. Having an agenda, keeps members stick to the topic and discussion on track but its important to have the members refocus during the meeting. (Chaneski, 2009). The second important ground rule that team needs to adopt is speak one at a time and there should not be any side discussions. This gives everyone the opportunity to speak. This means the team members are considerate of others, when everyone in a team has the opportunity to speak and offer his or her ideas. One should not be judgmental rather should be open-minded. This mode of action demonstrates the respect for others even they may not agree with those ideas but everyone must listen to others respectfully. Not everyone speaks on every topic or subject however when they feel they always have a chance to offer their suggestions and ideas they feel they are part of the meeting. Only if each member gets equal opportunity to speak, then all would participate in a discussion in order to generate new and innovative ideas. In addition interrupting between a discussion is an offence. Thus, being aware of peoples frustration and the consequences could maintain a team unity. (Schwaz, n.d). The third important ground rule is sharing all relevant information and experiences. When team members present the information that might affect on solving a problem or making a decision, this provides a common pool of knowledge for the members to make a better and informed choices.so they could take the time to minimize the differences and achieve an agreement sooner (Chaneski, 2009). If people help make decisions and then withdraw them from relevant information they may fail to follow through the decision or even withdraw their support. According to Peters (1999), the team members should aim to build up personal relationships to augment trust and open communication. Team members must share all relevant information and details including those that do not support their preferred solution. Such accountability help others make an informed decision. (Schwaz, n.d).so by sharing the opinion and experiences those not in complete agreement at the start, they have to compromise in order to r each a final agreement that all can support at the end ("Research Guides: Team Development: Teambuilding: Structure", 2016). References: Chaneski, W. S. (2009).What are your team's ground rules?. Cincinnati: Gardner Publications, Inc. Peters, J. (1999). Ground rules in team working.Team Performance Management: An International Journal,5(4) doi:10.1108/tpm.1999.13505daa.001 Research Guides: Team Development: Teambuilding: Structure. (2016).Libguides.gwumc.edu. Retrieved 7 September 2016, from https://libguides.gwumc.edu/c.php?g=379280p=2568610 Schwarz, R.Ground Rules for Effective Teams(4th ed., pp. 2-3). Retrieved from https://www.exubero.com/Ground_Rules_for_Effective_Teams_Fourth_Edition.pdf