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Ed Kur: Senior Consultant, Phoenix Associates, Tempe, Arizona, USA
Introduction
Several production people, engineers, technicians and a business analyst had been working together for nearly two years. Teamwork had been adequate most of that time. Starting about six months ago, a string of successes led to extremely high levels of teamwork, spirit, and productivity. Then, a conflict arose which drove a wedge in the team. Members took sides on nearly everything. They stopped helping one another and argued constantly. Finally, one of the technicians, fed up with the situation, practically forced the others into a conference room one afternoon and told them he had had enough and it was time to clear the air. The discussion continued into the evening and an additional meeting was held later that week. During these meetings, personal and work issues were brought into the open and conflicts were resolved. During the next few weeks the team regained its esprit and productivity and teamwork again reached a high pitch.
The episode depicted above is commonplace. Teams move from moderate to high levels of performance, then into dysfunctional conflicts, through self-assessment and back to high performance. Most teams, even those with stable membership and strong performance records, refocus from time to time and rebuild themselves.
This experience, and hundreds like it, is the basis of a new model of team development called the "faces model". It describes teams moving in an iterative, back-and-forth process among several team faces or personalities, at one time wearing one face, and at another time wearing another face. This model draws on earlier models yet departs from the many models which describe teams as moving through a step-by-step, or sequential, one-way development pattern. The faces model proposed in this article is based on the idea that teams move back and forth, rather than in one direction, among several faces, temperaments or ways of being. Each face represents a general pattern of behaviour, performance and issues within the team during a particular period of time. Unlike the earlier sequential models, the faces model assumes any pattern may precede or follow any other pattern. Any sequence of patterned behaviours may occur.
The informing face
When teams wear the informing face, their members strive to understand, learn, evaluate and...