Manage Change Through Collaboration and Team Work

This exercise helps students reflect about their own emotional responses to change and how understanding this can help them with future changes. The purpose of the exercise is so that students can tap into their own emotions so they understand the stages that people go through during change.

This exercise helps students to reflect about whether they are "Change Avoiders" or whether they are "Change Chasers". Also the exercise asks the student to think about what could they do to be more of a "Change Chaser". This exercise can help students to think about what action they can take after the course.

This exercise precedes the lecture on skills so that students can reflect about the skills of collaboration. This helps the student to really embed what collaboration is and think about what's involved.

This exercise gives students a chance to assess their skills of Collaboration with a view to creating a plan of action to develop after the course.

Dr Bruce Tuckman published his Forming Storming Norming Performing model in 1965. He added a fifth stage, Adjourning, in the 1970s. This model helps explain how teams develop and can be useful for leaders to know during times of change or implementing new projects.

Belbin first began studying teams at Henley Management College in the 1970s.

Belbin created scenarios / simulations and tested them out time and time again with various teams. Initially he believed that if you put high intellect people together that they would be more successful. But he discovered that this wasn’t the case and that people had different skills / strengths. And intellect wasn’t really a feature.

The most successful companies tended to be those with a mix of different people, i.e. those with a range of different behaviours. In fact, eight separate clusters of behaviour turned out to be distinctive and useful, with the balance required dependent on the purpose and objectives of the team.

This lecture looks at the types and team members Belbin recognised

• Implementer
• Coordinator
• Shaper
• Plant
• Resource Investigator
• Team Worker
• Monitor Evaluator
• Completer Finisher

So difficult to have perfect people but is it possible to have a perfect team -Belbin thought so as long as there was "balance". So does your team have balance?

And what are the reasons for using Belbin's Team Roles?

John Kotter’s book, ‘The Heart of Change’ (2002), presents a model for understanding and managing change. Each stage acknowledges a key principle relating to people' s response and approach to change, in which people see, feel and then change. The model is based on research which shows that there are eight critical steps an organisation or team needs to go through to ensure that change happens and sticks. This video quickly summarises the main steps. 

Knoster argues that enduring organizational change requires the presence of these five elements: vision, skills, incentives, resources, and a plan: 

Part of the power of this model is that - in addition to identifying elements that must be present for successful change management  it also highlights specific emotional outcomes for your team when any one element is missing. This lecture explores the model.

Communication during change is often criticised. Here are some tips for communicating change effectively.