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Global Teambuilding Using the PTPS and the TDS

The head of a newly formed global IT leadership team that was somewhere between the "forming" and "norming" stages wanted his team members to better understand themselves and each other in order to build more trust across the team andhopefully encourage more communication and interdependence.

To help this team, I developed a teambuilding intervention built around the combined used of the Parker Team Player Survey and the Team Development Survey which allowed the team members to profile themselves and to provide input on how well the team was doing up to that point on the 12 important team performance indicators measured by the Team Development Survey (TDS). The day-long teambuilding was the kick-off event within one of this global team's semi-annual face-to-face meetings. This team faced the normal challenges of coming together as a new team and the additional challenge of working remotely.

It was not only important for the team members to have an understanding of their primary and least active Team Player Styles but also to see what team members viewed as their strengths and major development needs as a team. The TDS uses a dual scale that rates not only the degree to which the team views a behavior such as "Open Communication" as characteristic is of their team but also how important that characteristic is to the success of the team. The TDS was sent to all team members for completion prior to the workshop, and the results from team members residing in Europe (Germany), Japan, and the US were consolidated on an Excel spreadsheet so that the results could be shared with team members during the teambuilding intervention. The TDS has two open-ended questions that solicited input from team members regarding the strengths of the team and ways the team could improve. The combination of the quantitative and qualitative data painted a very clear picture of the perceived strengths and development needs of this team! Best of all--it represented input from the entire team since all 12 team members took the time to complete the survey. The written comments were captured in a Word document that was distributed during the teambuilding program, and the key themes from the two categories were highlighted as part of the intervention.

As the teambuilding intervention unfolded, team members learned more about themselves, their preferred Team Player Styles, the profile of their team--which has a healthy mix of Team Player Styles--and what they needed to focus on to improve as a team. For behavior modeling, the video "Team Building: What Makes a Good Team Player" was also used, and participants were asked to look for themselves and their teammates in the video. While team members whose primary language was not English experienced some difficulty with certain words or colloquialisms (e.g. the style name of "Collaborator" has a negative connotation to this day in Germany), this did not significantly deter them from completing the PTPS. I provided individual help on interpreting statements or words as needed and allowed sufficient time for all to complete the survey during the workshop to ensure that all team members were comfortable with their responses to the survey items.

The results of this global teambuilding were very positive because of the combination of using the PTPS and TDS. It gave the team new insight about themselves and their team's dynamics, and allowed them to have some fun with their styles while developing a new appreciation for their diversity and the value this brings to their team. Perhaps most importantly, the TDS results gave them a direction for the future, pointing the way to the behaviors that needed to change so that their team could progress to the "Norming" stage as a truly high-performing team.

Kathleen (Kathy) McGuire
Sr. Organizational Design & Development Consultant
Human Resources
Bayer HealthCare North America
400 Morgan Lane
West Haven, CT 06516-4175
Phone: 203-812-3059