Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

FRAN REES is the owner of Rees & Associates, a Phoenix-based training and consulting firm. In the year 2001, her consulting firm celebrates her fifteenth year in business. Since the publication of the first edition of How to Lead Work Teams: Facilitation Skills in 1991, Fran has increasingly focused her work on team development, team leadership, and facilitator training, and consults to a variety of organizations. She designs and facilitates meetings for both public and private organizations and has conducted numerous management development, workforce diversity, mentoring, and train-the-trainer programs.

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How to Lead Work Teams Facilitation Skills, Second Edition is a completely revised and updated resource that shows you how to develop the skills that are key for becoming a successful team leader. Step by step, author Fran Rees shows you how to develop the powerful facilitation skills that will help make you an outstanding team leader, coach, motivator, and facilitator. This hands-on book is filled with proven tools, techniques, and skills that can be learned today and put into action tomorrow! Using Rees's innovative L.E.A.D. model you can become a team leader who:
* Leads with a clear purpose. Articulate your team's goals and purpose and encourage open and thoughtful discussion (including disagreement), brainstorming, and active listening.
* Empowers to participate. Encourage team members to communicate in ways that enhance teamwork and achieve results.
* Aims for consensus. Reach consensus by taking the time for questioning, listening, clarifying, augmenting, summarizing, and documenting.
* Directs the process. Lead the process of communication both inside and outside your team.
"The new edition hits the nail on the head. Every employee who works as a member of a team needs to learn facilitation skills. How to Lead Work Teams explains and describes skills and practical techniques in a very readable way." --Judith C. Tingley, president, Performance Improvement Pros, Inc. "An indispensable resource in our work culture, where we train and encourage all people to lead and make a difference. How to Lead Work Teams provides insightful approaches and clear instructions for facilitating that make it a valuable tool for managers, team leaders, and, indeed, all employees." --Tom Baily, training and development consultant, Medtronic, Tempe, Arizona "Fran Rees identifies the key ingredients for leaders and teams to work together effectively and efficiently in teams. This book is an invaluable resource full of ideas, creative solutions, and practical applications. " --Pris Ronan, president, Life Design, Inc., and owner, Strategic Learning Solutions "As leaders are having to deal with greater degrees of uncertainty and ambiguity, it is imperative for them to adopt a more facilitative style. Fran Rees has updated her original classic, How to Lead Work Teams, which provides an insightful and very practical approach to helping leaders become more facilitative and purposeful in their role." --Douglas Reid, president, Douglas Reid & Associates The Author Fran Rees is the owner of Rees & Associates, a Phoenix-based training and consulting firm. In the year 2001, her consulting firm celebrates her fifteenth year in business. Since the publication of the first edition of How to Lead Work Teams: Facilitation Skills in 1991, Fran has increasingly focused her work on team development, team leadership, and facilitator training, and consults to a variety of organizations. She designs and facilitates meetings for both public and private organizations and has conducted numerous management development, workforce diversity, mentoring, and train-the-trainer programs.

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How to Lead Work Teams Facilitation Skills, Second Edition is a completely revised and updated resource that shows you how to develop the skills that are key for becoming a successful team leader. Step by step, author Fran Rees shows you how to develop the powerful facilitation skills that will help make you an outstanding team leader, coach, motivator, and facilitator. This hands-on book is filled with proven tools, techniques, and skills that can be learned today and put into action tomorrow! Using Rees's innovative L.E.A.D. model you can become a team leader who:
* Leads with a clear purpose. Articulate your team's goals and purpose and encourage open and thoughtful discussion (including disagreement), brainstorming, and active listening.
* Empowers to participate. Encourage team members to communicate in ways that enhance teamwork and achieve results.
* Aims for consensus. Reach consensus by taking the time for questioning, listening, clarifying, augmenting, summarizing, and documenting.
* Directs the process. Lead the process of communication both inside and outside your team.
"The new edition hits the nail on the head. Every employee who works as a member of a team needs to learn facilitation skills. How to Lead Work Teams explains and describes skills and practical techniques in a very readable way." --Judith C. Tingley, president, Performance Improvement Pros, Inc. "An indispensable resource in our work culture, where we train and encourage all people to lead and make a difference. How to Lead Work Teams provides insightful approaches and clear instructions for facilitating that make it a valuable tool for managers, team leaders, and, indeed, all employees." --Tom Baily, training and development consultant, Medtronic, Tempe, Arizona "Fran Rees identifies the key ingredients for leaders and teams to work together effectively and efficiently in teams. This book is an invaluable resource full of ideas, creative solutions, and practical applications. " --Pris Ronan, president, Life Design, Inc., and owner, Strategic Learning Solutions "As leaders are having to deal with greater degrees of uncertainty and ambiguity, it is imperative for them to adopt a more facilitative style. Fran Rees has updated her original classic, How to Lead Work Teams, which provides an insightful and very practical approach to helping leaders become more facilitative and purposeful in their role." --Douglas Reid, president, Douglas Reid & Associates The Author Fran Rees is the owner of Rees & Associates, a Phoenix-based training and consulting firm. In the year 2001, her consulting firm celebrates her fifteenth year in business. Since the publication of the first edition of How to Lead Work Teams: Facilitation Skills in 1991, Fran has increasingly focused her work on team development, team leadership, and facilitator training, and consults to a variety of organizations. She designs and facilitates meetings for both public and private organizations and has conducted numerous management development, workforce diversity, mentoring, and train-the-trainer programs.

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How To Lead Work Teams

Jossey-Bass

Chapter One

Many forces are shaping the workplace today, and organizations are in a constant state of evolution. Change is more frequent and pervasive than ever before. In fact, change is the only constant. We need a new word for this type of change, this change that has no beginning, no middle, and no end. We could call it "continuous fluctuation," or "expected turbulence," or "business flow." Whatever we call it, things change so quickly that businesses face everything they had to face in the past, only at triple and quadruple the speed!

Some things that occur faster or change more frequently than ever before are

The life cycle of products (from inception to delivery)

Communication methods and tools

Delivery systems

Decision making

Formation and disbanding of teams

Formation and disbanding of organizations

Company mergers and acquisitions

The rise of new products and services

The employee makeup of an organization Organization goals and strategies

Job requirements, positions, and the frequency with which people change jobs

Why does so much change so quickly? A quick look at the evolving world over recent years will help us to understand why business and organizations are so dynamic today.

The world of work has literally become "the world," as companies do business around the world and around the clock. Global, as well as local, factors must be considered in decisions, and people must be skilled at working across cultures and nationalities.

Technology has shortened the life cycle of products, made cross-global communication faster, proliferated information, created hundreds of new jobs, and left in its wake now obsolete methods, machinery, and knowledge. The once-familiar environments and boxes we called "jobs" do not exist in the way they did a decade ago. Industries have come and gone, or are waning, and new industries are on the horizon. The computer has changed the way we communicate, the way we do business, and the way people work together.

Technology has also created the twenty-four-hour clock. With the increased capability for communication via e-mail and the Internet, people today are expected to be in touch almost continually with those people important to the work they are doing. People all over the world can feasibly work around the clock, due to the ease and speed of today's communication and technology. As a result, workers may feel "married" to their work night and day, never totally free from the tug and demands of it.

More information is available to people, and it is available twenty-four hours a day. Employees have access to up-to-date company information via their company's intranet and to worldwide information via the Internet. Managers have less and less of a secretive hold on information, while employees have more information to do their jobs. Most people today have so much information that they hardly know where to begin to sift through it. Indeed, information management has become both a privilege and a challenge to everyone.

With all this change, job boundaries are blurred and job definitions outmoded. The nature of work today is that people move from project to project, from one organization structure to another, and from manager to manager. They may serve on several teams at once and "report" in a matrix fashion to multiple managers and team leaders.

Unemployment in the United States, especially for skilled and knowledgeable workers, is at an all-time low. Low unemployment means aggressive competition among organizations for qualified workers. It also means that people need to be motivated and treated well or they will seek work elsewhere. Low unemployment usually means more employee turnover.

The temperament of today's worker has also changed. Due to low unemployment, workers can demand more job benefits and special considerations. Workers want to be more and more independent, while the work they are doing calls for more and more connection. Younger workers are less patient with constraints and traditional approaches to work. Line and block chart reporting, bureaucratic complexities, close supervision, putting in a certain number of hours at work, wasting time in meetings, not being given authority to get work done, and waiting one's turn for development are not tolerated by today's competent, self-starting worker.

At one time, it was expected that everyone would hide his or her differences at work and melt into the workforce. People were expected to leave their ethnicity, backgrounds, gender, and creativity at home. Today, people expect to bring their identity to work with them and to make a meaningful contribution because of that identity. The world is diverse. The marketplace is diverse. The workplace is diverse.

Today's marketplace explodes with new products and services and is highly competitive, time-driven, and unpredictable. Companies with effective processes-meaning adaptable, responsive, action-oriented, risk-taking, and future-focused-will be poised to take advantage of new markets and trends. In fact, the way a company works can determine whether or not it can stay in business. Process is as critical as product! Some people say the process is the product. The only way to stay competitive is to use processes that ensure responsiveness to the marketplace. And because the marketplace is ever-changing, the processes too must change.

Managers at all levels are being forced to group and regroup, to think and rethink, not only the way they organize and run their organizations, but what their organizations are going to be about-not in the distant future-but tomorrow! The kind of collaboration, heads-together, innovative work that "work teams" were challenged with a decade ago is now in the laps of all leaders today. No one manager can make the complex decisions that arise in today's work environment. These decisions require team efforts, synergy, and the combined expertise of many.

Impact on Individuals

Individuals are impacted in many ways by the forces shaping the new workplace.

First, people no longer have jobs, they have assignments. They may have a "job," but that job will change frequently. Actually, they may have several assignments. They may serve on one fairly stable team for as long as a year, or they may serve briefly on several teams, some with short and some with long lives. At a glance from the air, the world of work may resemble a flowing river bobbing with little rowboats of "teams" with people jumping from one boat to another.

Second, the roles of leaders and individuals continue to change. Once-clear role boundaries are blurred today, and people are often expected to do more than one job. They may be called on to switch roles as needed to accomplish overall (and frequently changing) goals of their organization. The formerly revered, one-up/ one-down manager-subordinate relationship has almost disappeared in today's high-growth, fast-paced organizations. Words like "supervisor," "subordinate," "employee," and "manager" are apt to be avoided, replaced by words such as "associate," "team member," "team leader," or "colleague." Managers and their direct reports are apt to work more as equals and teammates than as boss and follower. The emphasis is on equalization of individuals at work, implying that all aspects of work are important. If...