Planning and NEPA Forum

Working Effectively in Interdisciplinary Teams

A broadcast originating from the BLM National Training Center in
Phoenix, Arizona

**November 18, 2004**

This transcript is from the closed-captioning file produced during the
telecast.

It may contain errors and omissions in transcription.

The Bureau of Land Management satellite network presents live from the
BLM national training center in Phoenix, Arizona, the BLM planning and
NEPA forum, a continuing series of televised courses and programs
highlighting important topics on planning and NEPA in the BLM. Today\'s
topic\... \"Working Effectively in Interdisciplinary Teams.\" Now your
course facilitator, Joe Ross.\
\
J. Ross: Good morning and welcome to the fourth installment of the
planning and NEPA forum series. Today\'s forum will be a departure from
our usual format. In this program we will focus on people. We\'ll
discuss techniques and tips to improve interdisciplinary teams. From now
on I will refer to them avenues I.D. teams. With me this morning to talk
about teams is Linda Culver, a consultant from Prescott, Arizona. She is
provided team training for BLM since 1995. Good morning, Linda.\
\
L. Culver: Good morning, Joe. It\'s a pleasure to be here.\
\
J. Ross: Next we have Abbie Jossie, field manager for the Grants Pass
resource area in Oregon. Welcome Abbie.\
\
A. Jossie: Good morning, Joe, it\'s an honor to be here to par face in
the broadcast today.\
\
J. Ross: Also we have with us this morning Jude Trapani, fishery
biologist with the Salmon field office in Idaho. Good morning, Jude.\
\
J. Trapani: Good to be here.\
\
J. Ross: Finishing out the panel is Karen Kelleher, a planning team lead
with the Phoenix field office. What\'s travel advisory and looking like
today?\
\
K. Kelleher: The weather is sunny although we have had rain. So if
anyone is interested in seeing the spring bloom, it may be possible this
year.\
\
J. Ross: Thanks a lot, Karen and all the panel members. You should all
have a copy of the Participant Guide in front of you. We will be
referring to it throughout the course. If you don\'t have it, it can be
downloaded at the national training center\'s website. It contains more
material than we will cover today. We\'ve included extra information in
this guide so that it will be a good desk reference. Please also use it
for note taking today. As with all our telecasts, we\'ll let you know
when it\'s okay to push to talk by putting a green light in the upper
corner of your screen just like this. Push and hold the button to talk
us to and you should stay about 12 to 18 inches from the mic so that we
can hear you better. Say your name and your location that you\'re
calling from, and then wait to be acknowledged. Please keep in mind that
after you\'ve made your question or comment, you\'ll need to release the
mic button in order to hear us respond. If more than one of you try to
talk at once, I\'ll use this time-out signal telling all of you to
release their mics. Then identify which person should go first. If you
didn\'t get the phone number and pass code for our phone bridge, please
call our operator toll-free at the number shown on the screen. For those
that don\'t have access to the push-to-talk system, we encourage you to
fax in any questions or comments to the number on the screen. Please
include a name and location. A fax form can be found on page 6 of your
Participant Guide. We will let you know a few minutes before each
question and answer question begins so that you can get ready. Also feel
free to jot down questions when you think of them.

Now I\'d like to give you some information. First, a little background
about this course. The design team for this training represented a cross
section of BLM offices. We also received feedback on the teamwork issues
that you wanted us to discuss and we did our very best to include them.
We really appreciate all the responses we got from the field as well as
the hundreds of people who took the pre-assessment. Hopefully the next
few hours should give you some ideas to continue to improve team
communication. Working in I.D. teams is a crucial part of BLM\'s work.
Land use planning and environmental analysis receive a great deal of
public scrutiny on both local and national levels. The effective
interpersonal functioning of the I.D. team directly impacts the quality
and effectiveness of our land use plans, implementation plans and NEPA
analysis. Before we go further, let\'s take a moment to hear from Deb
Rawhouser, group manager for planning assessment and community support
in Washington D.C.\
\
D. Rawhouser: Good morning. A wise person once said you can have all the
technology that money can buy, but if you don\'t have people working
well together during the planning process, you won\'t achieve our goal
of a we thought out decision document. Hi. I\'m Deb Rawhouser, the new
manager for planning assessment and community support in the BLM
Washington office. Thank you for joining us today. Teams that work well
together are a vital part of all our planning efforts. This is why we
want to take time to share with you lessons learned from successful
interdisciplinary teams and techniques to solve some typical I.D. team
pitfalls. As you know decisions are best made in a collaborative
setting. Techniques and tools shared today will help you work better
internally and externally with our partners. Along with the BLMers I
would like to welcome participants from the Fish & Wildlife Service, the
national Park Service and private contractors. We encourage all of you
to participate using your push-to-talk systems or faxes and we look
forward to answering your questions as well as hearing about your
challenges and your successes. Thanks for all your hard work during the
planning efforts. Your I.D. teams are critical to the success of BLM and
our partners. Now let\'s rejoin the panel for today\'s discussion.\
\
J. Ross: Thanks a lot, Deb. Let\'s go over the course objectives for
today. First we\'ll discuss the qualities of good teams and the factors
that lead to team successes. Second, we\'ll discuss some of the typical
pitfalls that teams may encounter and then ask you to look at some
scenarios involving unproductive team behaviors. You\'ll have a chance
to try tools answers techniques that successful teams use to improve
I.D. team skills. Let\'s first go to Abbie who will discuss the benefits
every successful I.D. teams. You\'ll able to follow along on page 9 of
the Participant Guide.\
\
A. Jossie: We\'re providing this training for two levels of team
performance. This course will help newly formed teams get off to the
right start and help existing teams improve their effectiveness. The
benefits occur to individuals, the team itself, the organization, the
process and the product. Here are some of those benefits. The commitment
of the team. The team will have an enjoyable experience if they\'re
committed to the process. And the team will celebrate their successes as
a group. And the team can form bonds throughout the process and that
continues beyond just the project and the effort.

There will be common goals among the team and the team will be
successful together. And working in teams develops a sense of group
power. There\'s also continuous improvement which is the model of
teamwork. It\'s a very worthwhile effort and it becomes a way of life
eventually and people don\'t know why they haven\'t been doing it all
along, not to mention that, but the management really appreciates that
working in teams also achieves organizational goals and it results in
improved communication, not only within the team, where the
communication is more efficient, but it also helps the team clarify
decisions and communicate directly with management. The morale on the
team is also improved. Team members share information freely, which
contributes to a better product. Empowerment is also a benefit. Teams
accept the responsibility for the effort they\'re working on, and they
can manage their own performance. And the team learns how to make
decisions during the process. They also can work more directly with
management and make those recommendations for future decisions.

Quality is also a benefit and it\'s defined as anticipating, conforming
to or exceeding customer requirements. You do that by improving project
time lines, increasing creativity and reducing costs. It is never too
late to begin to improve a team\'s effectiveness. Continuous improvement
should be our goal. Remember that human interactions are dynamic.
They\'re affected throughout the process by organizational culture and
driven by the need for good collaboration. Joe?\
\
J. Ross: Thanks a lot, Abbie. Based on your feedback and the design of
this course, we\'re going to discuss nine criteria for effective
teamwork today. Those can be found on page 10 of your Participant Guide.
Linda Culver is going to start taking us through them. Linda?\
\
L. Culver: Thank you, Joe. Let\'s look at the first criteria for
teamwork. It\'s building and maintaining management support. It is
essential that teams gain that commitment and direction from management
to help their teams. Some of the things that will be helped as well is
the ability to establish common goals and commitment. That also helps us
determine what the team composition and expertise is that we need on the
team. It also helps to acknowledge our supervisory and budget controls,
outline our decision space, our schedules and our expected outcomes.
Abbie, would you share a few thoughts on management support?\
\
A. Jossie: I would be glad to. Managers can provide I.D. teams with the
critical support pieces such as setting the sideboards and parameters
for the project, clarifying the decision space of the team and providing
team building and training opportunities. Managers can also help by
building understanding and knowledge within the team and keeping the
team informed. The managers need to listen to the team and they need to
ask questions of the team and managers are also there to assist in
resolving disputes. Managers need to stay engaged in the team\'s
process, monitor the progress, and communicate with them at critical
junctures. An effective team can be most effective when all these pieces
are in place. The soaring eagles team is an interdisciplinary team from
the Grants Pass field office in Oregon. We were fortunate enough to have
them develop a series of video clips with the different members and to
get \-- provide you with some great examples of how teams work. We\'ll
be sharing their thoughts on effective team functioning throughout our
discussions today. Now let\'s hear some of what the feel members had to
say about management support.\
\
Part of the success of the team is also dependent on management, and
management has given us a great deal of support in being able to find
our own direction. Our team doesn\'t always work in the most direct
manner, but we do get to a solid solution and develop very good projects
that the manager can make a good decision based on what we produce. That
support from the management and the freedom that we\'re allowed and \--
from management is really a very important part of the process.\
\
Another thing as a coach is I\'ve noticed over the years as a team has
developed they are becoming more and more self-sufficient in terms of
knowing the boundaries they have to work within, of going through all of
the steps, of what decision space they have, and that\'s one of the
great things that we\'ve had here is managers that have given the teams
a decision space and the trust to actually go forth and to do some
really good planning work and do some really good projects.\
\
A. Jossie: Thank you, soaring eagles. We\'ll be hearing more from you
later in the course. Linda?\
\
L. Culver: Thank you, Abbie. Once we have built management support it\'s
time to look at our second criteria, which is to assign team roles.
It\'s important to establish the team responsibilities, the roles each
member will play, commitments made by the team and talk about
accountability, which we\'ll cover in more depth in a moment. Remember
that the manager is part of your team. Be sure to define their role.
This can help your manager to know what role you would like him or her
to play on your team. You may follow along on page 12 of your
Participant Guide as we talk about two kinds of accountability. One kind
of accountability is within the team. The other is beyond the team.
Let\'s start with what\'s within the team. It\'s important to clarify
within the team who is going to do what, how members will work together,
the commitments we have as a team for results, some of the questions
that will help us establish this is who is responsible for what, how
will we see solve conflicts, what behaviors are encouraged in our team,
and which are discouraged. We\'ll spend a lot more time on that later.
How team decisions are supported. Let\'s look at accountability beyond
our team. This clarifies beyond the team commitments we have to our
publics for results, who needs to be informed and consulted, where do we
get our resources, how do we get our various stakeholders involved in
the process, and the questions that we have here, who is going to
initiate key tasks, who needs to be informed and who needs to be
consulted. What kind of input and what kind of resources do we need in
order to make effective decisions? And how do we get that needed support
and how do we ensure our success? I\'d like to ask our team and the
panel here what other examples of team roles and responsibilities should
be considered.\
\
How about figuring out how to share leadership between team members.\
\
A. Jossie: And how are you going to build your technical and team skills
competent tease.\
\
J. Ross: I would suggest the team needs to be empowered so they accept
responsibility and are able to manage their own performance and make
decisions.\
\
J. Trapani: I think also being an advocate versus being a
representative.\
\
L. Culver: Jude, could you go a little further on that and explain the
difference.\
\
J. Trapani: Advocacy is kind of like the program by program approach
where the team can get stuck and divided and make poor decisions.
Representation allows for a more global perspective where the whole team
represents the issues collectively and thus can make better decisions.
Additionally team members can often speak for each other and we do this
often at my field office because of this crossover education that can
mature over time.\
\
L. Culver: To continue with team roles, let\'s move back to page 11 so
we can discuss team mission and vision statements. Quickly, a mission is
a concise statement establishing the direction for and the boundaries of
the team. A vision is a mental image of the future, the ability to
perceive something that is not actually visible, visions tend to
describe the end result. For our teams it is a goal, what it is working
toward becoming or accomplishing. Mission and vision statements serve as
checks and balances for our decisions and the directions we take. There
are mission and vision examples in appendix A on page 38 of your
Participant Guide. So check them out. Now we\'ll hear again from the
soaring eagles and learn more about the importance of a mission and
vision statement.\
\
As far as our mission and vision statements go, it\'s just something
good to always have and keep in front of you and just kind of remember
your big overall picture of why we\'re doing this, where we\'re going
and what we\'re trying to do.\
\
I think one of the important things and why this team works so well
together is that we are \-- we have a common goal, we\'re all working
toward the same Oklahomaives, and no one feels \-- same objectives and
no one feels that they have to push a particular point of view.\
\
Another observation I had, and I think its real key to how this team
works, is that they rotate leadership. My experience is somebody got
assigned to leadership and they did a pretty good job at it and they
kept using them over and over again because it kept everyone happy and
you got something do. Well, here was a team that constantly rotated
leadership, and I \-- I have the suspicion, I have this feeling, that
maybe that\'s why the team works. And I\'ve always known troops. If you
want to be a good team member, you need to be a team leader once and
experience how hard it is to get folks to work together.\
\
L. Culver: Thank you, soaring eagles. We\'re now on page 13 every your
Participant Guide. Our third criteria is to establish ground rules. It
is important to set rules for good business practices on our team.
Establishing our procedural and logistical norms. We\'re going to be
looking at three areas for setting those. Ground rules that deal with
issues before our team meetings, during our team meetings and outside of
our team meetings. Before our meetings we want to look at such things as
limits, what time limits do we have as a team, what policies affect what
we\'re doing and what authority level the team has for decision making.
You\'ll also want to pay attention to goals. Yours as a team and also
management\'s goals for the product or the project.

Define where you\'ll meet, when you\'ll meet, what you\'ll accomplish
and what you will talk about and how you will get the work done. During
our meeting, which is really common for typical ground rules, such
things as being on time to meetings, sticking to our agendas, making
sure that everyone participates, maintaining order, clarifying opinions
and really important, respecting one another. Outside the meeting there
are ground rules as well. How will we follow up and make sure that
follow-ups are done? What will we do to check for results to see what we
have accomplished? Examples of ground rules can be found in appendix B
of your Participant Guide on pages 39 through 41. I have a question for
all you participants. Are you ready? Does anyone have an example where
not having ground rules impeded the progress of their team? And how did
you get past that?\
\
J. Ross: Okay. Great. Linda has posed the first question of the day for
our participants. The green light is now on. We\'re looking forward to
hearing from you, so push to talk now. Does anyone have an example where
not having ground rules has impeded the progress of your team? And how
did you get past that? Okay. We know you\'re out there, and we don\'t
want to have to just discuss this as a panel today, but think of a
situation where you\'ve worked on a team and you haven\'t had clear
ground rules. Has that in someway impeded your progress? How did you get
past it?\
\
Caller: This is John Snyder in Medford.\
\
J. Ross: Hi, John. Go ahead.\
\
Caller: One of the problems I\'ve had in the past with teams and teams
is trying to set an agenda too late during the meeting. In other words,
the meeting starts before there\'s an agenda, and the meeting rambles
on, and before you know it, the meeting time is over and very little was
done.\
\
J. Ross: Great answer. Great answer. I have been to plenty of meetings
myself where we haven\'t had a clear agenda and just think of the

commotion that can cause and the wasted time. Does anybody else have an
example?\
\
Caller: This is Roger in the state office in Wyoming.\
\
J. Ross: Roger, welcome. Turn your TV down just a bit and give us your
question today or comment.\
\
Caller: I guess my question is, what happens when none of these things,
including \-- well, all three of the first items \-- are adhered to? How
do you go about correcting this?\
\
J. Ross: Boy, I\'m glad you asked that because we\'re going to be
getting into that a little bit later this morning. It\'s probably a
little early to address that for Roger, but certainly \-- would you like
to take a quick stab at it, Linda?\
\
L. Culver: Roger, I will take a quick stab at it. I think it\'s
important that these things be done, and what they do is, we\'ll be
talking about, I mentioned earlier, they serve as checks and balances
and there\'s an opportunity for you to revisit them when you\'re having
the issues and just stop whatever is happening, go back to your mission,
the purpose of why your team is there, what you\'re trying to accomplish
and the ground rules you\'ve established and simply ask for them to be
adhered today.\
\
J. Ross: Karen, let me ask you a quick question, okay? Suppose we have a
team that has some established norms of behavior but they\'ve never
really established ground rules. What would you recommend they do?\
\
K. Kelleher: I\'d really recommend you write down your ground rules. I
work on a team right now where we have norms of behavior. It works okay
but I think there are times when it would be helpful to have the ground
rules written down so that maybe there\'s some member of the team who
doesn\'t feel comfortable without having written ground rules and it
would make them feel more empowered and in control of the situation.\
\
J. Ross: Great, thanks a lot, Karen.\
\
J. Trapani: Can I add something to that previous question? Without good
facilitation, I think that those situations can happen all the time, and
so I encourage you to choose facilitators that are able to handle the
group at hand and you may need to change them or get more skills and
training for them.\
\
J. Ross: Thank you both very much, and thank you for the call-ins this
morning. I would like to say that John Snyder in Medford has won a book
this morning for being our first responder to our first question. This
is a good book, I understand. I haven\'t read it myself but it\'s called
\"the team building tool kit,\" and congratulations, John. So now we\'d
like to go back to the soaring eagles again and see what they have to
say about ground rules.\
\
One thing we do is on our minutes on the back of them we have just kept
our ground rules so every time at our meeting on the other side our
minutes is a copy of our ground rules, and I think we\'re all pretty
aware of them, and some of the \-- one ground rule that I think is
pretty good is no disruptions and no side conversations. Try to keep it
to a minimum, anyways. That really helps, when you don\'t have those
kind of disruptions, helps the meetings flow better, people don\'t get
frustrated, people don\'t get distracted and lose their train of
thoughts, and will we\'ll point it out to people, hey, you\'re
interrupting, hey, you guys are having a side conversation, can we keep
to that a minimum?\
\
L. Culver: Thanks again, soaring eagles for those insights. It\'s really
great to see you all again. Let\'s talk about the techniques to develop
ground rules. Our key process is brainstorming. The definition of
brainstorming is it\'s an intentionally uninhibited group technique for
generating a lot of ideas. We\'re looking for quantity here, not
quality. We\'re actually encouraging wild ideas. The reason for wild
ideas is sometimes those wild ideas bring up or surface an idea that
wouldn\'t have come up if the wild idea wasn\'t mentioned. There are no
criticisms, nor judgments allowed in the brainstorming process.
Judgments can also be positive statements such as, \"that\'s a great
idea.\" Saying that can discount other ideas or people. All ideas are
recorded during the brainstorming process. It\'s important to avoid
wordsmithing. Record actually what the person says. You save time by
doing this because you\'re only going to be wordsmithing what you agree
to.

Using a facilitator can really help this process as Jude talked about
just a moment ago. Let\'s go ahead and talk about our fourth criteria.
Our fourth criteria is to establish a communication process. This
involves methods, schedules and procedures for your communication
process. Some of these can be actually established in your ground rule.
But let\'s review just those that are related to communication. Remember
to set schedules for meetings. Always establish an agenda. Consider once
again using a facilitator, especially for the examples we just heard
about how you keep the group from going outside of their mission, vision
and ground rules. Listen actively and avoid interruptions. Share
information within your team and with other teams that are important to
what you\'re doing. Joe, let\'s go to you.\
\
J. Ross: Thanks a lot, Linda. Now we\'re going to hear from Howard in
Roswell who have given an example of the importance every sharing
information in the team. Howard, you\'re up. Hello, Howard, are you
connected with us by phone this morning?\
\
Caller: Our technology failed thus morning, so we\'re doing the back-up
with the telephone.\
\
J. Ross: Great. Good morning. How are you doing Howard?\
\
Caller: We\'re talking about communication?\
\
How do you share information within the team?\
\
Caller: We do all the things we\'ve talked about so far. We set the
agenda. We have, if not a formalized set of ground rules and behaviors,
there are some standards we all try to live up to. The thing that really
helped our team come together as we were practicing this several years
ago is we discovered our outdoor recreation planner had \-- what came to
be termed a super secret cave man and we had to impress upon this
individual if you really want to do your job right by the resources, you
would have to share the information with us and then we could all work
together to protect the resources that we\'re supposed to manage or
allocate the correct amount of use. Once we got past that, we really
seemed to come together better as a team.\
\
J. Ross: Okay. Thanks a lot, Howard. Can you tell me a little bit about
how you share information among other teams in your office?\
\
Caller: We make probably too much use sometimes of e-mail. We try to
share it around with each other. We have a coordination meeting once a
week where we start bringing in various projects and programs that we
have within the office, and we talk about opportunities, problems,
things that we have to get done, this whole melding of the different
skills we bring to the table so that we got a pretty good idea what\'s
going on out there.\
\
J. Ross: Fantastic. Thanks a lot, Howard, for those great insights this
morning. I must admit that e-mail has been a great technology, hasn\'t
it, for sharing information, almost too much information at times coming
our way. Another thing we would like to do right now is go back to the
soaring eagles and we\'re going to check in with them because Linda
touched on the use of facilitators. So let\'s see how the soaring eagles
handle facilitation.\
\
Using a facilitator has really helped our team meetings. We\'ve really
seen some progress in our meetings in the last 6 months to a year we\'ve
been using the facilitator. We\'ve been able to stay on track throughout
our meetings and make sure that everything gets covered, make sure
everybody has a voice throughout the meeting, and I think the
facilitators have been doing a good job with that in making sure
everybody gets heard. A lot of times there\'s people that are
overbearing or some people that don\'t talk as much, and with the
facilitated meeting, everybody has a chance to say what they want. What
we do is we rotate the facilitation duties every six months. So-so far
we\'ve had three team members who have been doing the facilitation, and
that works real well because you have \-- everybody gets a chance to do
this and brings their different styles to the group.\
\
J. Ross: Robin, those were some great insights this morning. I know up
in Roseburg we have a team of trained facilitators on district and we
often call upon them for different meetings we hold. We probably have 20
trained facilitators on district and that\'s a great thing to have on
your district. Right now we would like to move onto the fifth criteria
of team effectiveness. Linda, back to you.\
\
L. Culver: Thanks, Joe. Our fifth criteria is establishing guidelines
for team decision making. Teams need to agree on and use a decision
making or planning process. Developing specific actions to achieve the
goals, monitor ring the processes and evaluating results. Let\'s define
consensus. There\'s a lot of confusion over what consensus actually
means, however, not within this group. By the way, I\'d like to
compliment all of you, your pre-assessment scores show that you have a
good grasp on what consensus actually is. 95% of you got this question
correct. Congratulations! Yea. We really appreciate all of you that
completed the pre-assessment. Let\'s go back to consensus. Broken down,

the word consensus means, \"with a sense of verbal action or
agreements.\" Karen, can you add to that?\
\
K. Kelleher: Thanks, Linda. Consensus is not a unanimous vote or a
majority vote and it doesn\'t require that everyone be totally satisfied
although if your team can achieve that, that\'s a great thing. What
consensus is, is a proposal acceptable enough that all members can
support it and move forward in the project. Jude?\
\
J. Trapani: And consensus requires that enough time is used to address
the issues, active participation by all, quality communication skills
and also creative thinking and open-mindedness. Abbie?\
\
A. Jossie: Thanks, Jude. Successful teams know time required in the
beginning saves time in the long run. Because the commitment is made and
there is little time spent rebuilding commitment and dealing with
unproductive behaviors. Joe?\
\
J. Ross: Thanks, everyone, for that great team effort this morning. Now
let\'s go back to those soaring eagles in grants pass resource area and
see how they view consensus.\
\
One thing that\'s important to our team is reaching consensus on a
decision, and I think you need to have shared consensus on a team even
if it means you\'re kind of changing the decision a little bit, any way
you can do it so everybody is pleased with the result. The way our team
has learned to do it is that when a decision comes around for a decision
to be made, we kind of do this thumbs up, thumbs down, you know, halfway
like this, and if everybody goes like this, well, that\'s great. It\'s
easy. If somebody goes like this or like this, we say, you know, \"what
would it take for that team member, we ask them, what would it take for
you to get from here to here? That leads into a discussion about, well,
I don\'t like this and this part of the decision or this part of the
project, and then we just have a real open discussion about how things
can possibly change, be modified a little bit, not drastically, and I
think our team environment is very open and comfortable for people to
express their feelings and we talk about it and maybe that person won\'t
budge, and then, you know, you have to kind of figure out what you want
to do from there, but generally we are able to get people from here to
come up to here.\
\
Everyone is involved and everyone may not completely agree with the
resolution, but at least they know the process that we went through to
get to it, and no one is left out of the decision making process.\
\
Everyone doesn\'t always agree, but we eventually come to some kind of a
decision before we leave a room. We like to get consensus, but with
everybody at least being able to live with it or we don\'t leave the
subject. One time recently we had a decision that one of the folks
didn\'t like, but to move on and progress they could live with it by
showing us the thump they can live with it. I have my own opinions on
things and I\'m not afraid to argue a point, although, I also know when
to concede that I can live with a project so we can proceed. Because in
my opinion, doing something as a compromise is better than doing
nothing, which is what was happening where I came from.

What is the role of consensus? Last time I sat with the team, they went
through trying to arrive at consensus and I\'m not sure they ever quite
got there. Every once in a while they would call one another on it
because they would think they had agreement but a couple of people were
observing that they really didn\'t have that agreement and that they
were kind of moving forward without real agreement, and that\'s pretty
subtle, but the team seemed to pick up on it and keep going back and
keep going back until they really had some kind of consensus.\
\
J. Ross: Okay, soaring eagles. I can tell you\'re clearly an empowered
team that has a great decision making process in place. Let\'s move onto
criteria number 6 now and to take us through that we have Abbie.\
\
A. Jossie: Thanks, Joe. Criteria 6 is to use good project management
techniques. One of the ways management can support a team is to provide
them training with project management, and that can help them to be more
effective. Use of good project management techniques within the team can
help the team avoid some common interpersonal pitfalls. This can be done
by establishing the scope, clarifying the roles, identifying the tasks
and the task relationship and identifying and mitigating the risks. We
want to make sure that we get all the adequate resources allocated to
the project team as well to the project. We also can identify and
control the change by using good project management techniques. This can
help the team complete projects on time and within budget. An example of
where a project management can provide a tool is in the management of
the scope of a project. The team will need to understand the scope and
should scope get out of hand, known as scope creep, they may need more
time and resources to meet the expanded scope. Understanding this issue
as a team will give the team the opportunity to use not only good
interpersonal skills within the team, but also to manage the project
process as well. The team will need to identify as a group whether the
scope needs to be revisited and then they need to communicate that with
management if changes are necessary. Joe?\
\
J. Ross: Thanks a lot, Abbie. Let\'s go on now to the 7th criteria,
establishing a climate of trust an inclusion and to start that off,
let\'s go straight to another clip from the soaring eagles team.\
\
Why does our teamwork so well together? I think part of that is \-- or a
very big part of it is trust, trust in each other, trust that we can \--
trust that we can speak openly, we can criticize each other without
feeling like it\'s a personal attack, trust in each other\'s expertise
and respect for each other, too, I think is really a very important part
of the whole process.\
\
I see people growing. I see old foresters like myself that have learned
new skills from people that have just come on the job. And I think the
main difference is the attitude that they bring, and they come with an
attitude that says, well, we can do this, or, why can\'t we do this? And
they also don\'t come with some of the baggage of the past.\
\
Everyone is there together to be supportive of one another. Everyone
wants the team to be successful. We want to meet our deadlines. We want
to turn out quality products. And we\'re all very support and helpful of
each other.\
\
What I\'ve noticed with our particular team is that we\'re able to come
together and talk about all of these projects that we have and bring our
disciplines together and come up with products that are acceptable to
many of the different users of our product.\
\
It\'s not just one team member getting their assignment and going off
and then we all come back together. We work together throughout the week
or the months. It\'s not just when we come together and sit in one room
for a meeting for an hour or five hours.\
\
J. Ross: Great. Now let\'s continue on with this subject of building a
climate of trust and inclusion. With our own team here today of Jude,
Karen and Linda. Jude is first.\
\
J. Trapani: Let\'s talk more about criteria 7 of establishing a climate
of trust and inclusion, and we know in teaming how important this is.
Openness is very important. Sharing ideas and questions and concerns,
not holding back information. Also credibility is very important to
maintaining this team integrity. One needs to demonstrate competence.
Doing what you say you will do and owning up to lapses in
accountability. Karen?\
\
K. Kelleher: Thanks, Jude. Respect is also really important, both
respect that you show and that you receive as a team member. It\'s
important to acknowledge and use the skills and expertise of your team
and to respond to and resolve the legitimate concerns that your team
members express. Accountability is another factor that\'s very
important. Team members need to trust that promises, commitments and
agreements will be met by all their team members, both in the specific
tasks they take on and also in team behavior and interactions. It\'s
important through all this to focus on accomplishing the goals of the
team and aiming to achieve tangible results. Linda?\
\
L. Culver: Thank you, Karen. Another area is individuality. This is
valuing the individual styles and differences of how our team members
react and act within our team meetings, capitalizing on those individual
differences and the strengths that come from individuals. We\'re going
to go to Elena Misquez in the Palm Springs field office who will share
some of her experience with the value of using personal profiles to
understand and appreciate the differences Elena.\
\
J. Ross: Good morning, Elena. How do you go about using these
differences?\
\
E. Misquez: Good morning. Well, at the very beginning of our planning
process, the planning team lead at the time, Rebecca white, had us all
do a personality profile, and then, after, of course, we took the test,
then we compared our results and really got to know what were the
interests and tendencies of the other team members. For me it really
opened my eyes as to the strengths and tendencies of each of the team
members and it helped me to best utilize their skills in the development
of the plan.\
\
J. Ross: Thanks a lot, Elena. Truly working on a team involves everyone
bringing a certain toolbox to the table, and everybody\'s toolbox has
certain individual strengths and weaknesses in them, and what you need
to do is share with your team what those are through some type of
inventory and then teamwork is really the result when you can capitalize
on those strengths that everyone brings. The soaring eagles team also
has some insight into personal styles.\
\
I think one of the key pieces in the successful team is recognizing the
value of the different communication styles and definitely being aware
of your own style. For instance, I tend to be more assertive in the
meetings and talk a lot, and now I have an idea that that could be
disruptive to some people or it may keep other people from pitching in
their ideas, because one team member may be taking over the meeting more
so than others, and so that has helped me to sit back and I think I have
become more of an effective team player because I am listening to the
other team members for their input and not just staying stuck on what I
think might be a solution to a project or whatever.\
\
You can know who is stronger at certain things. There\'s people that are
stronger at organization on the team. There\'s people that are stronger
at like big picture thinking on the team. There\'s creative people on
the team. If you know that and you have a project that requires that \--
those parts of that type of personality, you can direct the parts and
break the parts of your project out to those people, that those are
their strengths. If you know also their weaknesses, you can work
together to support each other. So if \-- you know, if my weakness was
organizational skills or details and someone else\'s strength was
details, we could work together on that and they could take the detail
part of it and I could take the more big picture part of it.\
\
J. Ross: Corey and Jean any, thanks a lot for that great perspectives
this morning. Now we\'re moving to number 8, setting guidelines to deal
with unproductive team behaviors.\
\
L. Culver: Thank you, Joe. The 8th criteria is setting guidelines to
deal with unproductive team behaviors. Ground rules are a first good
step for this. They help us manage conflict, deal with our negativities,
deal with sabotage of the team, dealing with lapses of commitment and
accountability, how to deal with the personal values that might be in
conflict with BLM, our team, the mission, the vision, the RMP. Dealing
with hidden agendas and defensive competition. Let\'s talk a little bit
specifically about conflict. Conflict is the result of any opposition or
antagonistic interaction. It can be functional or unhealthy \-- excuse
me \-- it can be functional or healthy, it can be unhealthy, we\'ll talk
about that in a moment \-- and healthy conflict causes us to consider
new ideas and that\'s the good kind.\
\
Dysfunctional or unhealthy pits us against each other and that\'s
unproductive. Conflict is normal and natural. If we didn\'t have it, we
would never change the way we do anything. A lot of reasons are around
for why we have conflict. People today, we live pretty stressful lives
and that stress often overflows into the workplace. We also have
incompatible expectations about why we\'re here, what is important that
we take care of. We also have differences on how things should be done
and, of course, one of the things we live with on a daily basis is the
increasing complexity of our work. External pressures that come from our
various publics and the people that are outside of our organization also
create some level of conflict. Another contributors to conflict can be
our nonverbal communication. Body Lang swing what we call it, and body
language tends to relay our attitudes and our emotions. I have seen in
my many years of working with teams that it can do more to destroy a
team than any words spoken. Now we\'re going to play a game, and the
game is \"what\'s my message?\" First we\'re going to go to Abbie. It\'s
pretty obvious that Abbie has lost her patience. She\'s frustrated,
she\'s had enough with this team, but hopefully not for real up here.
Let\'s take a look with Jude. Jude\'s demonstrated he\'s not agreeing
with us. Let\'s take a look at Karen. Karen has checked out. She\'s no
longer listening to the conversation. I have a challenge for all of you
right now. Look around in the room where you are right now and check the
nonverbals among your own teammates. Are you surprised by what you see?
This is something to think about. Now for more on conflict. Let\'s go
back to the soaring eagles team once again.\
\
We don\'t tend to try to take one another on. We will take issues on. We
will discuss in a very hard way the disciplines and the issues, how they
relate to the issues and how one discipline may see an issue different
than another. We\'ll talk about that. We feel free to talk about that in
a respectful manner. But as far as conflict between individuals, we
don\'t have that much. I think that\'s the mutual respect and the fact
that we appreciate one another.\
\
L. Culver: Now let\'s look at some conflict resolution block styles.
These are styles that we fall into, and when we\'re in them, we\'re
unable to resolve conflict. Some people are aggressive in conflict.
We\'ve all seen this style in conflict. They come on strong. They push
hard for their own agendas. Their style is one that uses an attack mode.
They not only start with whatever is bothering them at the moment but
oftentimes their past annoyances find their way into the conversation as
well. This style\'s biggest problem is it\'s hurtful. It offends and
hurts other members of the team. And the results of it is not only that
it does not resolve the conflict at hand but it results in more conflict
related to how the treatment is felt by the others on the team.

Passive members in conflict can actually be as difficult as the
aggressive styles because what is happening is the team has been robbed
every their true input and their true feelings. Passive individuals in
conflict often give in even when they don\'t want to. Usually there\'s
some kind of retaliation later. It could be, and this is really
important, it could be a loss of support, that that person just does not
support the team or the members of the team who have created their
disharmony. One of the biggest problems with this particular behavior is
it can lead to people becoming victims, feeling victims of the team, of
the organization, of the project, whatever it may be.

There\'s only one stall that actually resolves conflict, that\'s being
assertive. Assertiveness resolves conflicts. It is the only style that
embraces win-win resolutions. Let\'s look at the definition of
assertiveness. Some people say, I\'m not being aggressive, I\'m just
being direct and honest. They are missing that important respectful
piece to that definition. Others might say I\'m not being passive, I\'m
just being respectful, and they are missing the direct and honest piece.
But assertiveness is all three. It\'s direct, it\'s honest, and it\'s
respectful while we interact with others. Our 9th criteria is have fun
and celebrate milestones. When teams are asked to describe the elements
of the best teams they\'ve ever been a part of, without fail, having fun
is always on the top list. I have a favorite quote for you. \"have fun.
Misery is optional.\" Recognition is actually a very powerful motivator
and that can be from management or within the team. Sometimes we wait
for management to recognize us. Powerful teams recognize inside the
team. The completion of any milestone should always be celebrated, and
the team should decide where their milestones are, and those soaring
eagles, they know and like to have fun as well. Let\'s find out what
they consider to be fun.\
\
There are a couple of people on the team that seem to see it in their
role to make things fun. There are Robin and Stephanie I see as being
planners of fun things. And then Tim I see as being kind of the guy with
the jokes during the team, people to make laugh during meetings. Those
are all awesome characteristics for a team. The team has fun. They plan
picnics and they just laugh a lot during their meetings, which goes a
long ways towards productivity.\
\
One thing you definitely need to do to be an effective team is have fun,
and that\'s one thing that we do very well, and so many meetings can go
on and on and on, and now and then you just have to throw in some humor.
Once in a while, actually, \"Gumby\" and \"Pokey\" come to visit our
meetings, and sometimes just kind of bending little \"Gumby's arms
around and throwing \"Pokey\" at Tom relaxes everyone and reduces the
tension and just kind of serves as an impromptu break in the meeting and
just remind everyone that, you know, let\'s not take this all too
seriously.\
\
One thing many I think is important \-- that I think is important and I
think our team all agrees with this is to recognize your success and
then celebrate the success as a team. For one thing, I think it\'s good
for us to bring closure to a project and to say, okay, we\'ve got
through this stage of the project. Let\'s kind of celebrate that and
recognize it. One way to do it is simple things like, you know, bringing
cookies to the meeting or just giving somebody a pat on the back and
saying, \"hey, you finished this, you did a good job, way to go.\" I
think every little bit of encouragement helps and makes people realize
\"wow, I did that and I feel good about it.\"\
\
A. Jossie: We want to thank the soaring eagles and let them know that
we\'ll be bringing home a very special \"Pokey\" and \"Gumby\" for the
team, and we have our share of cookies here in front of us today. Joe,
we would like to have some par punts from the audience share how their
team celebrates success and bring fun into the team as well.\
\
J. Ross: great idea. Let\'s take those thoughts on how you celebrate
success and have fun. It\'s an important criteria for effective
teamwork. Let\'s turn on the green light and see what you ever to say.
Remember that you can always fax us at the number on your screen if you
don\'t have access to push-to-talk. So, any takers to Abbie\'s original
question now on how you celebrate success and have fun? All right.\
\
L. Culver: This is pretty sad.\
\
J. Ross: This is one of the easier questions today. I know all every us
do find ways to do this.\
\
Caller: Hi. This is Heidi.\
\
J. Ross: Heidi, where are you located?\
\
Caller: I\'m in the Safford field office, and what we do on our team is
we go up to the mountains and we have a cookout.\
\
J. Ross: Great idea. Invite me next time. Sounds fun. Anybody else have
an idea on how you celebrate success and have fun as a team? Well, I\'ll
tell you that in Roseburg we used to public \-- it was a fairly regular
south river times field office newspaper that was a publication and it
improved morale. I know that the first Friday of every month in Roseburg
is Hawaiian shirt day. That\'s something we do. Anybody else have an
idea? How does your team celebrate those successes and have fun?\
\
Caller: This is Dennis. We had a weed coordinator resource management
team and we just have a weekend barbecue, roasted a goat that had been
eating our weeds.\
\
J. Ross: That\'s a good one, Dennis. Thanks a lot. Back in the old days
in Las Vegas we used to have a pig-out every year, and I have to thank
Dale SIVISH for that idea. Any other ideas?\
\
Caller: This is Edie in the Barstow field office here in Barstow we have
a chili cook-off. Know some think we may don\'t \-- don\'t make chili
here in Barstow but that\'s how we celebrate here.\
\
J. Ross: That\'s great. I wonder why people who work in the desert like
to eat those hot foods like Chicagoie but I think it does keep you cool,
doesn\'t it? Okay, well we have something to give away to some every our
respondents this morning. First of all, Heidi in Safford is going to
receive one of these. Heidi is going to receive the poke \"Pokey\"! And
Dennis, we have a \"Gumby\" for you! All right. Thanks a lot to awful
you for calling in this morning. The soaring eagles are also available
to answer your questions. So does anyone have any questions today about
anything we\'ve discussed to this point? There has been quite a bit of
material about those nine criteria of effective teamwork.\
\
L. Culver: Take a look at your criteria and see if there are any
questions you might have on that.\
\
J. Ross: Let\'s look at your criteria again. I know we have some people
in Ukiah and some in Winnemucca, Albuquerque we hope to hear from you
later, Carlsbad, vernal, Coeur D\'Alene.\
\
L. Culver: And Salmon.\
\
J. Ross: Come on, ask Jude a tough question.\
\
L. Culver: Come on, Salmon.\
\
Caller: This is Lorraine from the training center. How do you deal with
aggressive behavior?\
\
J. Ross: Okay. Aggressive behavior. You touched on appear about it.\
\
L. Culver: I did. I would simply say that making sure that your ground
rules deal with respect. I think that all \-- a lot of these behaviors
come under disrespect and that would be a good one to come back and
bring the group back and say, I think we want to remember our ground
rule that it\'s important to respect opinions and ideas, even if we
don\'t share those. So I would use the ground rules and just come back
to that. It\'s that checks and balances idea. Karen?\
\
K. Kelleher: I think sometimes also it\'s a good idea to use a
facilitator, especially when a team is first getting started, because
they can help to make sure the people that may be more passive get \--
their ideas get pulled out and that the aggressive people giver them the
more passive people an opportunity to do that. So I think a facilitator
can help with that if you\'re having that problem.\
\
J. Ross: It\'s good to have some private conversation, maybe the team
leader can talk with the individual that is coming on in this manner and
find out what\'s causing some of these kinds of behaviors as well.
Jude?\
\
J. Trapani: That\'s just what I was thinking.\
\
J. Ross: Okay. Let\'s take the other side of that coin, and how would
you possibly deal with the passive behavior?\
\
L. Culver: I think some of the things that can really help with the
passive behavior, and we\'ll be demonstrating this a little bit later,
and that is to use concepts like round Robin where each person takes a
turn in participating. A lot of times passive people will not jump in
the middle of a conversation with a lot of people who can tend to be
pretty assertive or even cross the line into aggressive styles. So
making sure that the rule is that everyone participates and that we
ensure that takes place and use strategies that make that happen.\
\
J. Ross: Do we have any other questions now from our participants
today?\
\
Caller: This is Edie in Barstow again. Do you have any specific
strategies for a project management? I know I\'ve tried software that
seemed like the software that I was using took as much time as my
project itself. So do you have any specific recommendations on project
management techniques?\
\
J. Ross: That\'s a good question, Edie. I think I\'ve used that same
software and it took me probably three times as long as it did you, but
once you get the hang of some software, it certainly is a benefit in
many cases. One thing I would like Linda to address this morning is
action planning. I\'ve heard you address that before in some of your
training when I\'ve been a coach with you.\
\
L. Culver: There are great software programs out there for project
planning. What I would suggest is find the pieces that work for you and
put those together. But one of the simplest things that we talk about in
the working in teams training is being able to do a good action plan. It
figures out the steps we take to get where we\'re going to get done,
accomplished, who is going to be responsible for championing the step,
doesn\'t necessarily mean they have to do it all and time lines for each
of those. It helps us to monitor and evaluate as we go along, make the
adjustments and so on, and if you can find those pieces in software
programs that you have, then don\'t worry about using all of it. Just
pick what works for your team.\
\
J. Ross: Yeah, I might add that the national training center has a very
good course in project management, and they also offer facilitation
training. Linda, you ever taught the working in teams training as well
as the high performance team training for the training center and
you\'ve delivered that for nearly 10 years to the BLM. So there\'s some
great training out there, and I would like to get maybe a management
perspective on this, too, Abbie, and what do you think in terms of
project management?\
\
A. Jossie: I think the training course from the training center is a
good option. And remember, you don\'t have to use every single part that
you learn. It\'s just what works best for your team. Keep in mind, too,
that project management is a little bit different than team process, and
of it needs to come together and all of the team needs to understand
that it is a project you are managing as a group but you\'re doing it
through a team process. So try to keep that separate and \-- but keep
your eye on the goal.\
\
J. Ross: Edie thanks a lot for that question this morning. Let\'s hear
some other questions or comments about our nine criteria for effective
teamwork.\
\
Caller: Joe, this is grand junction, Colorado. How do you engage team
members who have no interest in functioning as part of the team?\
\
J. Ross: That\'s a very good question. Sort of the person that\'s
December engaging, that doesn\'t want to participate. Let\'s have Linda
take that first.\
\
L. Culver: Well, I\'ve heard this one before, so I don\'t think it\'s a
rare situation. I think when a team sits down and talks about the
responsibilities and roles people will play, if that person is such a
thing as a scarce resource and they choose not to be a part of the team,
I think there can be two things that happen\... one is that that person
is made aware that there are certain times when the team must have that
expertise and to make decisions and directions without that can be
really hard. The other thing is to be aware of that, especially if it\'s
a scarce resource individual, and realize that they may be needed in
other teams and for other projects. So minimize the time that they have
to be a part of it. And I think there\'s a point where, as much as they
choose not to, if you need them, they need to be a part of the team or
the project that you\'re working on and not doing that just isn\'t an
option. But you can make it as easy for them and as effective for the
team as possible.\
\
J. Ross: Yeah, Karen, you did a pretty good job earlier displaying some
body language that showed some disengaging behavior. How about you
giving a shot at this?\
\
K. Kelleher: Yeah, I think it\'s important if you have a team member
that seems like they don\'t want to be engaged to maybe give them a
specific it is a took help them to become more engaged in the team and
specific projects that you want them to get done, and if you have a
facilitator, that can be really helpful because if they see that person
December engaging, they can ask them a specific question or use some
techniques to try to get them back involved in the team meeting.\
\
J. Ross: Thanks a lot, Karen. Jude, what do you think about this?\
\
J. Trapani: I would tend to try to find out what the person is
interested in. For an example, maybe they don\'t like to be in an office
setting at all, and maybe taking them out to the field one on one or
with the team might bring out some of that blossoming that you want to
hear, and I\'d look for those situations.\
\
J. Ross: Those are some great ideas. I would like to add a couple things
of my own. It\'s important not to overreact or under react to someone
exhibiting this kind of behavior, but certainly it would be important to
get with them and talk with them about it. Act quickly before such
behaviors become something of a habit that is being condoned on the
team. We have a couple faxes that have come in this morning. The first
one is from Ann Boyd in Spokane, and she asks: how do you select a
facilitator? Does that person need to have been to facilitator
training?\
\
J. Trapani: Good question.\
\
A. Jossie: I can take that one. You know, when you\'re working in a
team, and if you\'ve done the personality profiles or anything like that
and you have some experience with each other, you\'re going to see who
naturally has some of those skills, and you can talk about it as a group
and then select somebody as a group. The other option is if you don\'t
have those skills or you think an outside facilitator will help you, you
know, you need to ask for that support from management so that you can
get another person to come in and help you facilitate. I know there\'s a
lot of offices that do have a trained cadre of facilitators and in some
cases they are people not in the resource field and would not
necessarily be on the I.D. team and sometimes those are the best folks
to look for because they tend to be a lot more objective about the
behaviors and not so much about the content. They don\'t get involved in
that. That\'s one way to go.\
\
J. Ross: Thanks a lot, Abbie. Ann had a follow-up question here and she
asks with a smiley face attached to it: can I have a \"Gumby,\" even
though she didn\'t say please. For being the first fax, I think we
should give her a \"Gumby.\"\
\
L. Culver: Begging always works.\
\
J. Ross: We have another fax, Gary in the Hollister field office makes a
comment: The lack of comment celebrating milestones may demonstrate the
lack of recognizing achievements and encouragement.\
\
A. Jossie: Absolutely. I think it\'s important that the team realize
that sometimes you got to pat yourselves on the back first and do that
on a regular basis. I mean, there\'s nothing wrong with giving each
other recognition for small things and that always builds up. But you
need to bring your manager into the picture, your supervisors into the
picture at some point, too, because they don\'t always stay involved
with the meetings, they don\'t know when these milestones have been
reached or necessarily how hard it was to get there. So maintain that
communication link with your supervisors and managers and let them know
when you want to give each other awards or have a little party.\
\
L. Culver: Who was that fax from?\
\
J. Ross: That was from Gary in Hollister.\
\
L. Culver: Gary that\'s a very pertinent fax you sent and what I would
suggest is since we didn\'t have a lot of people flooding the line to
tell us how they celebrate and have fun, I hope the next time you have a
team meeting opposite your agenda and you will actually talk about where
could we do more celebration and wherein could we have more fun? I\'ve
actually seen that on agendas, that there will be some piece, some form
of celebration, so people have to come up with something to recognize
another team member, to talk about a success that\'s taking place, and I
think each step in your planning process, every time you complete one is
a reason to celebrate. So just find more reasons to celebrate.\
\
J. Ross: Great. Great. Remember, everyone that this green light is on
right here, and that means the push-to-talk system is working. So please
giver us a call with a question or a comment. Jude let me ask you one
real quick here. Say if you could do one thing time prove team
effectiveness, if you\'ve got a pretty good functioning team now in
Salmon, and if you could do one thing, what do you think it would be?\
\
J. Trapani: Well, I think that the evaluation process is really
important to me, and we\'ve done this a lot in Salmon, where we
continually evaluate and focus on our successes and how to improve them
and I think it\'s done us a very good service to keep improving through
evaluation.\
\
J. Ross: Continue learning and continual improvement is something every
team needs to go through. Another good thing I would recommend is just
getting outside a little bit more, take your meeting to the field. How
about that, Jude?\
\
J. Trapani: Yes, we do that a lot. We do that a lot. I would recommend
that. My personal bias is go to the field all the time.\
\
J. Ross: Do we have any last comment or question that would like to come
in at this time?\
\
Caller: This is Sandra from Medford.\
\
J. Ross: Hi, Sandra. Go ahead.\
\
Caller: I have a question about \-- it deals with trust and unproductive
behaviors. What do you do when you have people that exhibit those
behaviors on the team and how do you bring them around?\
\
J. Ross: Did everybody hear the question?\
\
L. Culver: Can you be a little more specific on what level of trust or
what the issue is?\
\
Caller: Some of the behaviors \--\
\
L. Culver: Go ahead.\
\
Caller: Some of the behaviors I\'ve seen are where people who have
perhaps had bad experiences in the past on teams or just have general
negative feelings about a lot of the things a team might be working on
and how do you get them to feel positive and productive and contributing
and feel like the team has a good place they\'re going and they could be
a part of it.\
\
J. Ross: I could take a stab at that. The fact is trust is maintained
with a very fragile thread and the solution to establishing trust is not
to lose it in the first place. So again we talk about having good
respect, understanding each person\'s strengths and weaknesses, keep
your promises, be reliable, beg for forgiveness if for some reason you
ever to break a promise. Those are the kinds of things that I would
probably recommend. Any other thoughts?\
\
K. Kelleher: I think we\'ve all had the experience of working on a team
that didn\'t work and that can definitely make us skeptical about
starting a new team process but I think if you start right from the
beginning going through the steps that help to make a good team that
that helps to start to rebuild the trust in getting people to move
forward.\
\
J. Ross: Thanks a lot, Karen. That\'s about all time we have now for
questions. We\'re going to take a 10-minute break. Remember, if you have
other questions, now is a good time to fax them in or just hold onto
them and we\'ll get to them in the push-to-talk in the second half of
the course. During the break, we\'ll show some of the training that\'s
available from the national training center on team building,
facilitation, project management and planning. When we come back, we\'ll
address team stages, team pitfalls and some interesting scenarios where
you can participate. So for now, get up, stretch, grab a snack, get some
water, and don\'t go back. We\'ll be back in 10 minutes.\
\
J. Ross: Welcome back. Before we move on, I\'d like to read a fax to
everyone that came in during the break. It came from the Tucson field
office. It shows my ignorance about certain cartoon characters these
days. It says, please n capital letters, with an exclamation point, do
not separate \"Gumby\" and \"Pokey.\" They are a team, after all. So,
thank you for pointing that out to me, Tucson. And just for that, we\'re
going to send both \-- let\'s see, we\'re going to send out to both
Dennis and Heidi, the pair of \"Pokey\" and \"Gumby.\"\
\
L. Culver: The team of \"Pokey\" and \"Gumby.\"\
\
J. Ross: Sorry. A pair can be a team. We had a cup other faxes come in
and we\'ll get to those in a bit. Back with me are Linda, Abbie, Karen
and Jude. Now we\'re going to talk to the stages of team development,
team pitfalls and then some scenarios. So let\'s get into the three
stages of team development. You can follow along beginning on page 24 of
your Participant Guide. Linda, it\'s all yours.

L. Culver: Thanks, Joe. We\'re going to be looking at three stages of
team development, the first stage is the orientation stage. It would be
rare for a team to just start off and soar to the finish line without
going through some development. Teams go through a series of stages
before working at the highest productivity levels. Let\'s look at
stage 1. Some of the characteristics of stage 1 is some people, you\'ll
probably see all these behaviors when a team first starts on a project
or you work on something together, there are some people who have very
polite behaviors, some people appear to be very reserved and we\'ve seen
that occasional person who is just plain uptight. Work issues will be
important to establish in this first phase. What goals will the team
come up with and agree on? How will objectives be established? And how
will priorities be set? Everybody has some personal issues when they
first come into the team. How much energy am I going to give to the
team? How much influence will have in the team? How much influence will
others have over me?

There\'s a lot of WIIFMs going on, that\'s our acronym for \"what in it
for me,\" what value will I get out every being on the team? Then
there\'s plain curiosity, what it\'s all going to be about. Some of the
strategies when a team is in stage 1 are these. It\'s important to break
the ice and get everyone participating early in the program. Solicit the
input of all team members, and there is that Humor, in this case having
fun in the very beginning can start the team off on the right foot. Once
a team is passed through stage 1, they move into the power and tasking
phase. This is the most volatile stage for a team. It is where the team
actually organizes. If the team is going to fall apart, unfortunately,
it usually happens in this stage. Some of the characteristics of this
stage is norms are established. These can be explicit, such as your
ground rules we talked about earlier, or they could be implicit, which
means they basically just sort of develop in the team. Cliques can
develop in a team during this stage and one of the problems with those
is that they could lead to coalitions if there\'s not something done to
stop that from happening.

Control and power are huge issues during this stage, who has it and who
doesn\'t. Hidden agendas may surface and we\'ll talk more about those
later. Work issues are around such things as roles and responsibility,
who is going to do what, who is going to be responsible for what. This
can be a pretty tense process for the team. Personal issues, everybody
has issues related to control, leadership. By the way, leadership, and
we\'re talking about true leadership, will often bounce around in the
team, not who the team lead is, but who is actually being listened to
and followed by the team. It will bounce around and eventually fall on
true leaders within the team. Now, another issue is influence. Once
again, who has it, who doesn\'t, who do I influence, who influences me?
Some of the strategies for getting through phase 2 are to be tolerant of
different opinions.

We talked earlier with Elena about differences in styles and behaviors
and we need to do that in this stage. Listening and negotiating,
learning to manage emotions such as anger, frustration, resentments that
may show in the team and dealing with those differences again of our
membership of the team. And it\'s important to be sensitive to feelings
in this phase. People sometimes are wearing them on the outside where
they\'re pretty easy to harm. Now, I want to share something about this
phase before \-- this stage before we mover onto stage 3. It is a
volatile stage. Some teams, however, mover through it very quickly and
without hardly any pain. Some teams actually never get through it and
have a hard time getting through the problems that are associated with
getting all of those issues established and remedied in the team. Once a
team passes through stage 2, the next stage is stage 3. This is the
point where the team becomes effective. It\'s a team production and
feedback stage. Some of the characteristics of this stage 3 is a lot of
openness and team spirit. Those become very evident on the team.
There\'s a level of cohesion. The team is bonded. They begin to work as
a single well-oiled unit. Productivity skyrockets. There is the levels
of cooperation. One of the reasons this is true is our work issues have
been resolve.

As well as our personal issues have been resolved. So all that\'s needed
to be done in the strategies, once a team actually is in stage 3s to
keep the team on track. If someone is in leadership position, a team
lead or someone is doing that, it may be important to not over control
the team, to let the team go. They\'re moving at a rapid pace, they\'re
basically self-managed at this stage, and they\'re able to make
decisions. One of the things that\'s real critical in this step is to
make sure that tasks continue to be distributed evenly. If some members
start to do all the work and other members are not, the team can slide
back out of stage 3. And always, a lot of praise and a lot of
recognition, and we talked about that. I\'d like to ask my team here
what can cause a team to slide out of stage 3 once they\'ve reached
there?\
\
Well.\
\
J. Ross: Well, I would probably say that the roles or the
responsibilities are starting to get muddy because perhaps a new member
has joined the team.\
\
L. Culver: A new member will always cause the team to move back and move
through from the first stage to the last. Good news is that once a team
has reached that third stage, they know how to get through it pretty
quickly from that point on.\
\
K. Kelleher: Seems like a new manager in the office could have a similar
effect as a new team member, both in affecting how the team functions
and what the goals of the team might be.\
\
L. Culver: Absolutely.\
\
A. Jossie: Changing priorities have a lot to do with it, too. I would
like to caution in any team setting that priorities are going to change
and maintaining that communication with managers is going to be really
critical.\
\
L. Culver: Absolutely.\
\
J. Trapani: Another situation is people bringing up discussions on the
side after a decision is made and even in smaller groups, and it can
sabotage an effort.\
\
L. Culver: Right. Absolutely.\
\
J. Ross: Great, Linda. Let\'s move right along now into our next
segment, the pitfall of teams. Linda\'s back.\
\
L. Culver: Thanks, Joe. We got lot of feedback originally before the
design of this course that dealt with issues of the pitfalls on teams,
and we\'re going to spend a little time on that because it was very
important to you. One area that we have as a pitfall is a hidden agenda.
These are agendas that are contrary to that that is established by the
mission and vision of the team. Hidden agendas can come from a lot of
sources. They can be personal feelings that individuals on the team may
have towards management. They may have towards the organization. They
may have towards the group itself or individuals within the group. I\'d
like once again to ask my team, what are some examples of hidden agendas
that you\'ve observed?\
\
K. Kelleher: I\'ve seen the need to protect our own budget, especially
in this era of flat or declining budgets, that\'s becoming more of an
issue for some people.\
\
J. Ross: I would say protecting turf. Sometimes we encounter empire
builders or somebody trying to build their own area of responsibility.\
\
A. Jossie: Sometimes you have just a personal bias. You may have an
individual who is very supportive of commodity production and you have
others who are pro protection, and that can create some problems.\
\
J. Trapani: Also with our changing in positions and job titles and
everything, people might feel insecure in their job and want to position
themselves in a team in an inappropriate way to save their spot, you
might say.\
\
K. Kelleher: Related to Abbie\'s comment, I would say sometimes people
just don\'t want to see a project happen at all and they\'ll be working
to stop that project in any way they can.\
\
L. Culver: Another area we\'re going to be talking about is defensive
competition. This can result between members, groups of members or
between groups and their management. This is where members are pitted
against one another, constantly trying to win. Another area that we\'re
going to talk about is sabotage. Let\'s practice a round Robin on the
kinds of sabotage you have seen in this team. Karen, I think you\'re
going to start.\
\
K. Kelleher: Thanks.\
\
L. Culver: Not in this team, by the way.\
\
K. Kelleher: Of course not, our team is working together in stage 3, no
doubt. One thing would be missing \-- regularly missing or late to
meetings and then wanting to be caught up so the whole team has to stop
and go back to the beginning of the meeting and repeat what\'s already
been accomplished.\
\
A. Jossie: Sometimes you have folks who just simply forget their
assignments, not sure what it is they\'re supposed to do, and they come
to the next meeting completely unprepared.\
\
J. Ross: I\'ve occasionally seen some teams that have come to decisions
and then you find one or two members really aren\'t happy with those and
they\'re speaking out against them behind the scenes.\
\
L. Culver: And I\'ve certainly had examples where some members just
aren\'t carrying their weight, aren\'t sharing enough of the work on the
team.\
\
J. Trapani: I\'ve seen, too, where people just won\'t come to the table,
or they won\'t even take off their hat and coat when they\'re at a
meeting, and they\'ll just stay disengaged for as long as they possibly
can.\
\
K. Kelleher: I\'ve also seen people who talk and talk and talk and talk
to stop the group progress and you\'re just kind of going on and on
without getting anything accomplished in your meetings.\
\
A. Jossie: A filibuster. We\'ve seen this happen, not just in I.D. team
processes but in other teams, where when you\'re using the thumbs up,
thumbs down, thumbs sideways process, there\'s somebody who always has
their thumb down and they can stop progress repeatedly by maintaining
that posture.\
\
J. Ross: How do you deal with that issue, if there is somebody that is
such a nay sayer who is always trying to stop a project.\
\
A. Jossie: You need to visit with that person and find out what is it
about this project that\'s keeping you from reaching agreement, and keep
going back and revisiting that wish that individual. And sometimes you
do have to take them aside, one on one, and find out, you know, is there
something more to this that we\'re just not aware of, we haven\'t heard
the whole story and hopefully through the team relationships bring it on
to the table.\
\
J. Ross: And perhaps to build on what Jude said earlier, getting out to
the field and seeing the issues there on the ground is the good way to
do it as a team.\
\
L. Culver: I would like to add something on that, too. A lot of teams
will say in their ground rules that we\'ll make all decisions by
consensus and this just gives the ammunition to the person who does want
to stop the process or the progress of the team. I think that we look at
consensus as our preferred method. There is a point at which after
you\'ve listened to this individual who is always doing the thumbs down
what it would take to get them in agreement and be here, and if they
can\'t get there, then the team has to make the decision that we will
move ahead with the decision because we have considered their
viewpoints, we\'ve tried to resolve those, the team still thinks it\'s
the best decision to make and we do move forward.\
\
J. Ross: Linda, you were talking about sabotage. Do you have any
questions?\
\
L. Culver: I have a question for the team. What do we usually do about
\-- what do we usually do about sabotage on our teams?\
\
K. Kelleher: Ignore it.\
\
A. Jossie: Hope it goes away.\
\
L. Culver: Does it ever go away on its own? Typically not. What should
we do.\
\
A. Jossie: Surface the behavior, bring it out in the open. Make sure
that you call attention to it.\
\
J. Ross: Certainly do it earlier than later, the sooner you can do it
the better.\
\
A. Jossie: Then correct it.\
\
L. Culver: Absolutely. What\'s another thought?\
\
J. Trapani: I have another thought, especially with the idea of the
public being involved in more of our meetings, is we may have to spend
more time on the side with those publics to find out what the real
issues are that they don\'t really want to live with and how they\'re
going to undermine it at all costs unless they feel validated or
participating in the process.\
\
J. Ross: One thing along that regard, Jude, in a big effort that we had
in Roseburg dealing with an adaptive management area we had to really
define decision space early on, and the way that our team decided to do
that was to give me an assignment of trying to summarize all the laws
that we have to deal with in the BLM, and so eventually a 30-page
document got prepared with about a paragraph about each that tried to
just present to the public what some of our own agency decision space
is, and I\'m telling you, that was a nice mayor of a project. But it\'s
a handy tool and we still use it.\
\
L. Culver: One last thing on that is again we keep bringing this up, but
it\'s important here, and that\'s the use of a facilitator. Very soon
you\'re all going to get some practice on dealing with sabotage in a
series of scenarios. But first, a message from Joe.\
\
J. Ross: Thanks a lot, Linda. Great job. Now we\'re going to open up the
push-to-talk bridge and take your questions and comments on the three
stages of team development and team pitfalls. Who would like to go
first?\
\
Caller: This is Jamie Blair from the Pocatello field office.\
\
J. Ross: Good morning. Go ahead.\
\
Caller: Can you send that list of \-- of the 300,000 laws we have to
comply with \-- I think it would be actually pretty useful in a number
of the different field offices.\
\
J. Ross: I was afraid you would ask that after I spontaneously said
that. The training center has a copy and if they can\'t produce copies
or put on it their website, I will certainly do it myself. Just send
your name and e-mail, Kathy Humphrey, and she\'ll be able to take care
of it for you, with my help, of course. Any other questions or comments
about team pitfalls, team development stages?\
\
Caller: This is Mark from Tonopah.\
\
J. Ross: Go ahead.\
\
Caller: You haven\'t discussed about disciplinary actions of team
members if they don\'t want to participate in a team or disqualification
of team members where you actually kick them out.\
\
J. Ross: That\'s a very good question, you know. The agency certainly
has some processes and procedures in place, don\'t they, Abbie, that
occasionally have to be invoked, preferably not immediately when
somebody is starting to distribute \-- exhibit some kinds of negative
behaviors. What do you think?\
\
A. Jossie: If you\'ve exhausted all of your options within the team, and
that includes revisiting your ground rules, making sure everybody
understands what the mission and vision is, and you still are having an
wish an individual team member, you do have to surface that behavior to
the supervisors. If the supervisors are not the team lead or the team
lead doesn\'t have any supervisory responsibilities, you will have to
take it outside of the team. That should be a last resort, though, as
you try to work through your team process together. But sometimes that
does happen, and you need to make sure that management knows that your
team cannot move forward as long as this continues and maintain that
communication with them, too.\
\
J. Ross: A lot for that question.\
\
Caller: This is Dave in Medford.\
\
J. Ross: Hi, Dave. Go ahead.\
\
Caller: I would just like to follow up on Abbie\'s comment. If you can
bring somebody into the team and bring them into a positive situation
where they\'ve experienced only negative, you\'ve got a good thing
going. So what you want to do is care about that person and bring it out
in the open as was stated earlier and let them experience what it\'s
like to be in a trusting, respectful environment, and generally they\'ll
come right along.\
\
J. Ross: Great comment. That\'s really what teamwork is all about, being
able to experience those strengths, a well functioning team can show
will help those others come along.\
\
J. Trapani: Can I add to that? One thought I had about the call from \--
I think it was Nevada \-- is, you know, teams really aren\'t made to be
everybody agrees with each other. The diverse team usually makes the
best decisions and oftentimes at first it\'s easy to say this person
doesn\'t agree with what the rest of the team is doing and they\'re
grumpy and let\'s get rid of them. But if you\'re patient and your best
to bring those people along in whatever way works, I think it\'s much
worth your time.\
\
L. Culver: Can I add something on that also? It reminded me of an actual
example many years ago myself when I was a government employee. I had a
team that had a very disruptive member and just seemed to know all the
forms of sabotage. He was constantly creative in that area. The team
co-leaders kept coming to me and saying you need to do something about
him. I said, no, I\'m not going to do something about him. It\'s your
team. Gave suggestions. You could try this, try this, and true this. And
this went on for quite some time, and they came back again and wanted
again ideas of what I could do to fix it. I avoided doing that. In a
sense, even though I wasn\'t their manager, I was the lead on their team
as their facilitator, and I\'m glad I didn\'t jump in and try to fix
that. I think some managers, we have \-- want to fix it for them. The
team actually ended up coming with a scenario that really worked well,
and that was simply a stop sign on a stick, and every time they had a
meeting, somebody was responsible for the stop sign, and when the stop
sign came up, that meant everybody got back on task there was no
discussion about it. I would have never thought of it. I think that the
importance of this, that teams need to figure out what works for them
when they have behaviors like this.\
\
J. Ross: Okay, thanks a lot, Linda. Let\'s move on now to the fun part
of our training. I\'m not going to introduce sponge Bob square pants or
big bird or anything like that. We\'re actually going to visit some
scenarios. We\'d like each of you to choose a spokesperson, read the
scenario in your Participant Guide, brainstorm with your team to develop
ideas that you would recommend to resolve the issues. Finally, we would
like you to share your thoughts with the rest of us. First off, scenario
number 1 is the case of the missed deadline. Please turn to page 28 in
the Participant Guide and take five minutes to work with your team.
We\'ll put the timer on the screen for you.\
\
J. Ross: Okay. Now we would like to hear from you. We\'ll turn the green
light on. Who would like to go first sharing one or two ideas your team
came up with?\
\
Caller: This is Steep from \--\
\
Winnemucca \--\
\
J. Ross: Let\'s go with Steve. I heard Steve first.\
\
This is Steep in Carson City, and this is simply a matter of
prioritizing and committing to the work, prioritizing from all the other
busy project they have to do. We all know what that\'s like.\
\
J. Ross: Exactly. Good. Thanks a lot. So what\'s going to need is either
a manager as part of the team or the team needs to recognize management
commitment to this project and somebody\'s got to decide, this is
priority, or somebody else is going to work on it.\
\
J. Ross: Again, it\'s critical to have that communication link with
management. One thing in Roseburg is we initiate our teams with a
project initiation letter. It spells out what the goals are of that
particular project with some scheduling concerns. Any other comments
from out there in terms of the scenario.\
\
L. Culver: Winnemucca came in.\
\
Caller: This is Jerry from Winnemucca. We talked about those same things
the last caller did. We also felt you should go back to your
mission/vision statement and you should ask folks what they really need
to do to get the work done and possibly checking with their supervisor
to see that that individual is given the time he needs to get the work
done.\
\
J. Ross: Excellent comment. Thanks very much for that.\
\
Caller: We also would like a \"Gumby\" and \"Pokey.\"\
\
J. Ross: Okay. Let\'s have another comment and \-- in response to this
scenario.\
\
Caller: This is Tony in Medford \--\
\
This is \--\
\
J. Ross: We have a little crosstalk there. I heard a Tony first.\
\
Caller: Tony Kerwin from Medford. We had quite a list but we kind of
parsed it down to take a field trip to discuss the issues and projects,
form up some team buddies, work with each other to try to get things
done and praise any progress to date.\
\
J. Ross: Excellent. Excellent. Let\'s hear from another office. I heard
an Anchorage.\
\
Caller: This is Pat in Anchorage. One idea that we have is to be sure
that our communication is clear, that everyone is noticed and that
they\'re noticed in an appropriate way so that they understand what\'s
expected and when it\'s due.\
\
J. Ross: Excellent. Thank you, Pat. Let\'s have one more answer. I heard
a Dan and also a Tonopah. Let\'s go with Dan first.\
\
Caller: Yeah, our main thing was we would go directly to the person and
talk to them about their problems and issues and then we would also
revisit their task list.\
\
J. Ross: Okay. Good. And Tonopah?\
\
Caller: In addition to what a lot of other people said, one thing we
suggested was having a public calendar, like a dry erase board, that\'s
posted in a public area so that everybody can see what tasks they need
to do and what they need to do.\
\
J. Ross: Excellent. Good idea. By like to give away another book now to
Steve from Carson city. I believe he was the first to call in \-- is it
steep? Oh, steep. Okay. This particular book is called \"motivate teams,
maximize success.\" I want to get a copy of this one myself. I have
glanced through this book and it looks like a particularly good book.
Got some real nice color pictures. I\'m going to bleed out the camera
with that, but thank you, steep. Panel, real quickly, let me ask you,
did we cover that one completely? Any last-minute real important
thoughts you would like to add.\
\
A. Jossie: I would just like to point out that just like with the
environmental analysis, missing pieces tend to add up and you add up
with a cumulative effect. So when you have something like this going on,
address it as early as possible so that you don\'t end up with a
cumulative problem over time.\
\
J. Ross: Okay. You all did a great job with that scenario. Next up we
have scenario number 2, which is called a case of sabotage. Please turn
to page 29 now in your Participant Guide and this time we\'re only going
to take three minutes to work your team since you\'ve got the routine
down now. Good luck!\
\
J. Ross: Okay. Now we\'d like to hear from you. We\'ve got the green
light on again. So who would like to go first sharing one or two ideas
your team came up with?\
\
Caller: This is Diane.\
\
Caller: Jerry from Ukiah.\
\
J. Ross: I heard Ukiah.\
\
Caller: This is Gary from Ukiah. We were talking about consensus never
really was reached evidently and that\'s assuming everybody was open and
honest in the decision making process. Also, that the decision making
guidelines that the team comes up with should be revisited or
reiterated.\
\
J. Ross: Excellent. Thanks a lot, Gary. Let\'s have another comment.\
\
Caller: This is Diane.\
\
J. Ross: Hi, Diane. Go ahead.\
\
Caller: I\'m calling from the Safford field office in Arizona where we
have more than 20 employees participating today! We all agree that the
team should have never revisited the decision. They made the decision.
They should stick with it, and by revisiting that only encourages the
saboteur\'s behavior.\
\
J. Ross: That\'s a than interesting comment. Are there cases, Abbie,
perhaps, when a team would be empowered to revisit a decision.\
\
A. Jossie: In some cases one of the team members may have new
information that may lead the team in a direction that is more legally
defensible, in particular, new case law that occurs during the course of
the project or new policy or procedures that comes out. So there are
times when revisiting a decision that\'s already been made by the team
is necessary and okay. But those need to be spelled out in advance when
that\'s going to be all right.\
\
J. Ross: I didn\'t get that impression in the way we wrote this scenario
that that was the case. Let\'s have another answer now from somebody
that addressed this.\
\
Caller: This is grand junction, Colorado.\
\
J. Ross: Hello, grand junction. Go ahead. What\'s your name?\
\
Caller: This is Wade Johnson, and we have about 25 people in our group.\
\
J. Ross: You\'ve got it over the southwest field office.\
\
Caller: We\'re looking for any prizes we can get. We pretty much agree
with all the other comments that were made. It looks like to me that
there\'s really a breakdown as far as the whole team dynamics, and you
just need to go clear back and examine the ground rules and make sure
everybody buys into them and everybody realizes that so far the
disagreement has come from a misunderstanding of what the basic ground
rules should be, that there needs to be consensus and from that
consensus you build from there with no negatives coming out of the
group.\
\
J. Ross: Excellent, Wade. Thanks a lot for that comment. From grand
junction. Now let\'s have another comment from one of the offices out
there today.\
\
Caller: This is Dennis from rock springs.\
\
J. Ross: Hi, Dennis. Go ahead.\
\
A. Jossie: Hi, Dennis.\
\
Caller: Hi, there. This may be a schedule problem. Not everybody can
respond in such a short time schedule. Some people are a little bit
longer in their thinking. Other people may mistake a comma for a period
in their speech and get rushed through.\
\
L. Culver: I would like to address if that I may. You know, you\'re
really right on that. Some people, I always talk about the fact that
some people think by talking. I happen to be one of those. I often say,
you know, I\'m not sure I even believe everything I say. But some people
really do have to think by thinking and sometimes in the team meeting
that\'s not possible, so you bring up a good point.\
\
J. Ross: Let\'s have another idea in dealing with this scenario.\
\
Caller: This is Walt George in the Wyoming state office. By like to
address the moral issue, and I\'d also like to add personal values into
that scenario. I think that\'s a situation that\'s very sensitive but
probably not appropriate to the teamwork, and it\'s important for the
team to honor those personal feelings but provide maybe an informal
setting where those personal values can be discussed.\
\
J. Ross: Very good. Thank you very much for that comment. Let me ask a
question of the panel here this morning. Say people are bringing
opinions into the team, they\'ve got some very strong opinions. In what
cases should those kinds of things be considered?\
\
K. Kelleher: I think you need to ask that person who is bringing in
those opinions, do you have facts or evidence that saw is supporting
that position? That will help you to decide whether that\'s something
that should factor into the decision or not. I think that\'s a hopeful
way to tackle that issue.\
\
J. Ross: Another question. Linda, maybe you can discuss a technique to
help define what each team members position is.\
\
L. Culver: One of our responders mentioned the team hadn\'t achieved
consensus. One of the things I think we can do ensure that takes place.
You have seen some our team members using the thumbs and affirming we
have a consensus. I think a round Robin for is that really a good idea.
But I would also like to have you consider that if you\'re making an
important decision that needs to be supported by the team that every
person in the round Robin states their support, and then if they come
back with these behaviors, then you say in the team, you say I support
what we agreed on. That should take care of some of this.\
\
J. Ross: Those were excellent comments. I appreciate all the
push-to-talk comments that came in. We\'ll take some faxes later. But
right now by like to give a book away to Diane in Safford. Can we get
that canned applause from backstage here?\
\
L. Culver: I don\'t know about Diane. You know, Diane, we\'re going to
give you information on how to be dysfunctional. That should be a good
one.\
\
J. Ross: Okay. Thanks very much. Let\'s move on now. We have the third
scenario and this is the case of management support. This can be found
on page 30 of your Participant Guide. Again, please take three minutes
to go over it with your group and we\'ll be back to you in a few
minutes.\
\
J. Ross: We\'re back again and we would like to hear from you now.
We\'ll turn the green light on again. So \--\
\
Caller: This is Bonnie.\
\
J. Ross: Bonnie, she wants a book or something, doesn\'t she, or a
\"Gumby.\" Go ahead, Bonnie.\
\
Caller: I\'m from the Safford field office. We have actually about 28
people. We did a recount.\
\
J. Ross: What\'s your comment today?\
\
Caller: One of the things is to look back over again on your project
management \--\
\
J. Ross: Could you move back \-- Bonnie, could you move back a little
bit from the mic? You\'re just overpowering us here. Go ahead again,
Bonnie.\
\
Caller: I had a response to that, but I decided not to give it. To look
at your priorities again and talk that over with your manager because
usually their priorities are your priorities. Also to revisit the time
line and talk to the manager about the time line they established and
how they had to change because of them being late. One comment was to
fire the manager. My comment was, \"hey, chill out, it all pays the
same.\"\
\
J. Ross: Have fun, I guess. Let\'s have another comment.\
\
Caller: This is Taos, New Mexico. One of the things we talked about was
very similar to what the lady just mentioned, but we feel that
documenting the consequences of pulling two team folks off and providing
that to the manager with some potential scenarios as options and letting
the manager determine whether the project should move ahead on schedule,
whether we fill in behind those folks or whether we all be jumping off
the wagon and going back out and doing other high priority work. Those
could all be options, with you let the \-- but let the manager decide
the consequences and make the necessary adjustments.\
\
J. Ross: Exactly. Gets back to good communications and clearly
identifying what the implications are and getting management buy-in.
Let\'s get another comment on the scenario.\
\
Caller: Taos again, we just want to let you know we\'re all very proud
sponge Bob square pants supporters.\
\
J. Ross: We\'ll talk to the management about getting some of those. Who
else has a comment.\
\
Caller: This is Evelyn from the Salmon field office. We have a large
percentage of the population of Salmon here. Our response to this
scenario is that we felt that the team should have moved on with the
issues they had already identified instead of waiting for the manager to
give a yea or nay. That way they at least could have gone on with
analyzing or developing alternatives based on what they had already felt
were the primary issues.\
\
J. Trapani: There\'s a self-directed team, forgetting the manager \--\
\
J. Ross: They have obviously been empowered there, Jude. That\'s
empowerment. Anyone else like to add something on this one?\
\
Caller: Yeah, this is Pocatello. We got 4700 folks here. Okay. We\'ve
been talking about what the team can do, but I think it\'s also in going
back to the respect. The field office manager has a duty to explain to
the team exactly why he\'s delayed that decision so that they
understand, and then we could do what the Salmon field office suggested,
is move on with other aspects.\
\
J. Ross: That\'s a very good point. Communication is a two-way street.
What do you think manager?\
\
A. Jossie: Absolutely. I think one of the critical pieces of good
project management is to maintain that communication with the manager
all throughout the process, and you\'ve heard this before, you\'ll hear
it again, communicate, communicate, communicate. And one of the things
that the manager knows, I\'m sure, is that they\'ve made a commitment to
an annual work plan as well, and the production of the end product is as
much in the way their performance evaluation, it\'s going to reflect
there, too. So make sure that you can \-- you communicate with that
manager in that process that you don\'t hit that deadline and nothing is
there.\
\
J. Ross: Okay. Fantastic. Really appreciate those comments today. And we
have a book to give away, \"successful team building\" is going to be
going to the Taos field office. Congratulations Taos. Let\'s move on to
our 4th scenario. This is the case of factions. This can be found on
page 31 of the Participant Guide. Please take three minutes again to
brainstorm with your team to develop ideas that you would recommend to
resolve the issue shown.\
\
J. Ross: Great. We\'re back. Once again we would like to hear from you.
We\'ll turn the green light on. Who would like to go first? Tonopah?\
\
Caller: Tonopah.\
\
J. Ross: Was that Tonopah?\
\
Caller: Yes, it was.\
\
J. Ross: All right. Go ahead.\
\
Caller: I\'ve been told to tell you that we have 11 out of 15 people in
our office here, and we want a \"Gumby.\" Regarding this scenario, we
came up with several things. One was to revisit the ground rules and
redefine people\'s responsibilities. Get a facilitator, an objective
facilitator in. Speak with Kelly to figure out what motivations are and
try to get him back. And try to find common ground for everybody on the
team so we have a basis from which to start.\
\
J. Ross: Thank you very much. That was a great job. You had some good
discussion. Who else would like to add a discussion.\
\
Caller: This is Safford.\
\
Caller: I\'m from Medford.\
\
J. Ross: Let\'s go with Safford.\
\
Caller: This is Safford. We like the idea of rotating the lead, so
we\'re going to make Kelly the team lead for the next six months. Also
we would like to know a list of his priorities and how his staying at
his desk actually benefits the team.\
\
J. Ross: Okay. Medford, go ahead.\
\
Caller: This is Tim from Medford. We decided to have our team meetings
at Kelly\'s desk.\
\
J. Ross: At Kelly\'s desk. Okay. That must have been Tim Gonzalez, I
would suggest. He is one of the fun guys on your soaring eagles team.\
\
A. Jossie: That\'s right. Hi, Tim.\
\
J. Ross: Let\'s hear from another office. How about somebody from Utah,
Wyoming or Montana.\
\
Caller: This is Linda Salmon.\
\
J. Ross: Go ahead, Linda.\
\
Caller: One thing you could do is make these members know that the fact
that they may not agree is a good thing. Like you said before, conflict
is healthy, and that they actually do represent opposing views in the
public. So working out what decision they would come up with as a team
will probably be the best decision, and if you can convince Kelly of
that, then he may come back to the table.\
\
J. Ross:. As long as it\'s done in a direct, honest and respectful way,
right? Just like Linda said, in an assertive communication style.\
\
J. Trapani: Again, and diversity is that really important part. I like
to see that diversity happen as much as possible.\
\
L. Culver: If can I make one last comment, remember, regardless of what
our personal preferences are in this case, if the team has come one a
goal for the project, they know the mission, the direction or vision of
the team, that determines where they go with the decisions.\
\
J. Ross: All right. Anybody from Wyoming, Nevada or Utah? We\'d like to
hear from you now. Anybody in vernal? Did they come one a suggestion?
How about wore land?\
\
L. Culver: How about our fax?\
\
Caller: This is Dennis from Wyoming.\
\
J. Ross: Hi, Dennis. Go ahead.\
\
Caller: One of our ideas was to try to broaden out the range of
alternatives and make the people compromise a little more, mix up the
factions and make them work in other alternatives that has a broader
range of perspectives while keeping your factions with their own
alternative but have more alternatives.\
\
J. Ross: Great comment. Sometimes we get into a bit of a routine of not
just having enough on the table that\'s to consider, don\'t we? Karen or
Jude, any comments you would like to add?\
\
J. Trapani: No, I they\'ve covered it well.\
\
K. Kelleher: I agree.\
\
J. Ross: Any other last thoughts from the field?\
\
Caller: This is Mark from Albuquerque.\
\
J. Ross: Hi, Mark. Go ahead.\
\
Caller: We were saying that maybe using some of the more neutral people
in the group as mediators might help. Those people have put aside their
personal feelings, perhaps, and they might be able to help.\
\
J. Ross: All right. Thanks a lot, Mark. We\'re going to be skipping
scenario 5 today, and we are planning to go about 15 minutes longer than
the scheduled broadcast was planned. So you might want to plan for that.
We\'d also like to give away a book in response to the last scenario. It
goes to Tonopah. So congratulations, Tonopah. We\'re skipping scenario
number 5. That was some great discussion. Let\'s have Linda now do a
quick summary of what we\'ve dealt with today regarding unproductive
team behavior. Linda?\
\
L. Culver: Some of the things that are really important in dealing with
unproductive behaviors on the team, whatever they are, is as much as
possible we want to anticipate and prevent those group problems whenever
possible. A good way to do that is with our ground rules. They can
prevent many problems and bring the team or individuals back on track.
Think of each of the hurdles that you have to overcome as a team
challenge. It\'s not about the individual or individuals that are doing
it, it\'s about a team issue that the team wants to deal with. Since
it\'s a team problem, even though the behaviors are coming from those
specific individuals. We want to avoid either overreacting or under
reacting to those behaviors. We tend to overreact when behaviors have
been allowed to continue over a long period of time. We just finally
become fed up and then we overreact and become really \-- have a real
issue with the behavior and our ability to deem with it is compromised.
Under reacting is what we usually do because we\'re either afraid or
unskilled on how to deal with the behaviors. It\'s important to act
quickly. I think Abbie mentioned this at the very beginning, behaviors
that go on for a long time become habits, and as we all know, our habits
are much harder to break.\
\
J. Ross: Okay. Now that we\'ve gotten such great participation from the
different offices that have been out there today, we\'re going to set
aside the rest of our time to take some comments and questions about
anything that we\'ve covered, and I\'ve got a fax, first of all, that\'s
come in from Colorado. It says: If the team leader of a large project
feels he or she made mistakes in the past, what would be effective in
reestablishing credibility and respect of the team?\
\
J. Trapani: That\'s interesting.\
\
K. Kelleher: I would recommend really just talking to the team. You
know, talking to them about where you feel like things didn\'t quite go
as you would have liked and how you would think they need to be
corrected and get some input from the rest of the team members on how
they felt about it and what their ideas tour move forward as a more
effective team. I think that\'s the best way to has been dull it, is to
tackle it directly.\
\
J. Ross: It never hurts to admit you made a mistake and ask forgiveness.
I think most people in this agency are pretty forgiving most of the
time.\
\
A. Jossie: Another thing to do is maybe suggest the team go through a
more intensive team training opportunity, develop those personality
profiles and start out with the three stages of development, and they
may have to go back to square one and rebuild trust and expectations. I
think that will help the team leader as well as the rest of the team
members.\
\
J. Ross: That would be a great point. This is a good time to mention the
training center has a 3 1/2 day session available and there is there\'s
a 2 1/2 day session available. Let\'s take more comments or questions
from the field. We\'re open to any of the material covered today. Please
remember to use the push-to-talk and state your name and location if you
would like to and then we\'ll call on you. And please remember to say
about 12 to 18 inches from the mic. And remember that you can always fax
us at the number on your screen. Who would like to go first?\
\
Caller: This is Eve Flynn Salmon again. I have a question about kind of
balancing efficiency and team process in trying to accomplish project
objectives on short-term projects. A lot of our teams are formed for
things that are mainly for scoping, initial scoping, and then parts of
analysis are divvied among people and one person assembles the EA. Do
you have any comments on shortcuts in this teaming process would that
work for I.D. teams that last for maybe only two or three meetings?\
\
A. Jossie: I think as we all know, as we\'ve gone through various
offices \-- or I have, is that I.D. teams take all forms, and one of the
things that you can do is to have a standing interdisciplinary team, not
one created for each project but one that\'s in place for a longer term,
and then as smaller projects come up, they are brought to that team and
they go through the project management process for the smaller project.
That way you have some stability and continuity and you save a lot of
time on the team process part of project management. That\'s just one
option.\
\
J. Ross: Okay. Do we have any other comments from the field? Let me pose
a quick question to our panel today. Consider this type of a quick
scenario where you\'ve got a manager and some supervisors in place in an
office that don\'t believe in teamwork. Do you think, are there any
situations where the organization doesn\'t really need teamwork?\
\
J. Trapani: Wow. Well, our bias is that we always work on teamwork.\
\
L. Culver: I don\'t think it should be an option to not ever work as a
team.\
\
J. Ross: Is there ever \-- the type of a decision where it\'s already
predetermined what the decision is or \--\
\
L. Culver: Oh, sure.\
\
J. Ross: There\'s only the need for maybe one person to make the
decision or it\'s such a low priority, perhaps, that we don\'t
necessarily need to have a team perhaps \--\
\
L. Culver: But a good team in a field office would know when that
individual decision is to be made, and it still would be a team
decision.\
\
A. Jossie: Because you made it in advance and you\'ve got a process in
place to take care of it.\
\
J. Ross: And sometimes the time frame, that cycle time you talked about
earlier, is so short, it just unfortunately may not be possible to
convene a full interdisciplinary team but certainly you need to get
buy-in from certain resource specialists.\
\
K. Kelleher: And I would say it\'s important for the decision maker to
make clear for the team what the decision space is, and if there isn\'t
a decision the team can make, make that known right up from so the team
isn\'t wasting time on things they won\'t have input on.\
\
J. Ross: Let\'s go to Gary from Ukiah.\
\
Caller: I think there are teams there are situations when you need the
formal team but don\'t need to formalize it but people work as a team,
be it interdisciplinary for a particular environmental report or
something like that. I don\'t think the situations always call for a
formalization.\
\
J. Ross: Good.\
\
J. Trapani: We agree with that.\
\
J. Ross: Okay.\
\
Caller: This is Jeanie in Medford. Continuing on with that discussion,
one thing we talked about here and one thing we do is we\'re a standing
team, and we get a lot of smaller projects, and what we do is we set up
a core team a small core team, within our larger interdisciplinary team
to take on some of the smaller projects.\
\
Caller: This is Kevin in Alaska.\
\
J. Ross: Kevin, let\'s go to you in Alaska.\
\
Caller: Thank you. I just wanted to offer a resource that\'s web based
that goes to a lot of the things we\'re talking about today. It\'s
called community toolbox, and it\'s got 50 different decision making
events, facilitation, gatherings, how to and fact sheets, and you can
get paper copies of it or just download the individual pieces that I\'ve
been talking about here, and that\'s at a national Park Service website,
WWW.NPS.gov/RTCA, and look for the community toolbox.\
\
J. Ross: Thanks a lot, Gary. We\'ll make sure Kathy Humphrey uploads
that particular website address on the NTC website along with the
questions and answers that we\'ve received and won\'t have time to get
to. Let\'s go to a fax now. This one came in from Mary in the Anchorage
field office. With the respect to team participation, how do you deal
with a person who fails to prepare his or her work and hand it in? This
is a bit of a scenario here. Here we have one that\'s just basically not
preparing their work. Again, it\'s a case of not meeting deadlines or
not just doing the work.\
\
A. Jossie: I think one of the things you can do is make sure the team
revisits those ground rules and talk to Mary \-- or the individual \--
sorry, Mary \-- talk to the individual who is doing that and make sure
that they understand that that\'s an expectation for them from the team
to complete that part of the team process, and as we indicated earlier,
if all else fails and you haven\'t been able to figure out why that
keeps happening, you can always take that to the supervisor or manager.\
\
L. Culver: Remember also that we talked about earlier that one of the
first things the team does is establish roles and responsibilities. So
you need to revisit those with that team member.\
\
J. Ross: Linda, I would like for you to think about this one from Wes
Wong in the Salem district. He suggests, how would you suggest building
support for some of the communication tools, for example, being aware
every communication styles through those personal inventories you
mentioned, when some members of the team feel these Mickey Mouse or
touchy feely exercises are unnecessary.\
\
L. Culver: Well, it\'s not the first time I\'ve heard that, and I do use
them in the training that I do, and I try to look at it from this
perspective, through understanding of our differences, we can learn to
value them, and for whatever that \-- the soaring eagles talked about
this also. If I can understand that Jude, my team member here, is better
at something than I am, and I\'m better at something than he is, if we
have that knowledge that we have these strengths, we can be bet or our
team because of that knowledge. It\'s about knowledge. It\'s about
understanding. It\'s about using the strengths of our differences.
That\'s what it\'s all about.\
\
J. Ross: I\'ve rarely seen a team go through these types of inventories
and not have some appreciation and awareness and understanding that
it\'s a great tool and additional information that\'s valuable.\
\
A. Jossie: When you do that, you will understand who on that team is not
a touchy-feely type person and they shouldn\'t make that person feel
like they have to be in order to be a part of the team. That\'s
inappropriate also. It works both ways.\
\
L. Culver: Any team should be able to balance the differences. There
should never be a problem on the team if we have the awareness. It
should only be a strength.\
\
J. Ross: Let me ask you about that fun piece we were talking about
earlier and celebrating. Do you ever encounter certain individuals that
are very serious and just don\'t want to have that level of fun that\'s
being proposed by a team? At what point do you balance the level of fun
and frivolity that a team might want to go to?\
\
L. Culver: It\'s not one size fits all. It has to fit the team and the
team membership and what they do to celebrate and how silly they become
or how serious they stay and that\'s up to them.\
\
J. Ross: Again, it\'s decision making and find that level of comfort
through your team decision making process that meets that fine line of
being fun and serious without going overboard. Okay. We\'ve had a couple
other faxes.\
\
L. Culver: And we certainly learned these teams doesn\'t have a lot of
examples of fun and celebration but their begging for books and
\"Gumby's show they do want to have more fun.\
\
J. Ross: And sponge Bob. Here\'s a fax from Cindy in Salt Lake. How many
team members make an efficient team?\
\
J. Trapani: Depends on the issues, I think. Your issues should drive
that, and you may try a smaller group at first and you may bring in more
people as you need them. I think you need to customize it. If you\'re
going to a big team like Abbie was talking about as a core team, you may
want to focus on having a bigger group to address the issues, but I
think that each group needs to customize it.\
\
L. Culver: I would like to share something on that. There are actually
some statistics on what the perfect sizes are, and I\'ll tell you why
they are this. It\'s basically for an effective team that\'s going to do
problem solving, decision making, the number is 5-12. Don\'t get afraid
if that\'s more or less than what you have. If you have fewer than 5,
what the experts say is that we don\'t \-- we aren\'t assured that we
have all the information. If you have more than 12, then the problem
becomes that you may not have a time to actually hear all the
information that people need to provide. My solution for that, if
you\'re lower than 5 or higher than 12, is a facilitator. That\'s a way
you can ensure you get that information. And if you\'re fewer than 5,
you may need to bring some other people in who might have information
can that help.\
\
J. Ross: I have a couple other great faxes that just came in, and this
particular fax I especially like from the Wyoming state office team. It
says the emphasis on reaching consensus is appropriate, but only
focusing on reaching consensus can be dangerous. After all, there are
decisions that \-- there are deadlines and budgets to meet. So please
discuss some techniques for making decisions in the absence of
consensus.\
\
A. Jossie: We talked about that a little bit earlier, and that is that,
ultimately you want to make sure that everybody\'s been heard and that
you get as much information as you need to have to make the decision,
but, yes, ultimately a decision needs to be made and, you know, as long
as you\'ve covered all of that ground at some point in the process, then
ultimately your decision maker will have what they need to make a good
decision and you need to make sure the decision maker knows maybe there
are some people in the team that aren\'t fully in agreement and that
that information needs to get addressed by the decision maker somehow
also, either by one on one conversation with the team member who
doesn\'t fully support the recommendation or to help them understand why
this is the decision that has to be made. Management does need to get
back to these teams on the decisions that they\'re making and why it
might be different than the one they would prefer.\
\
J. Trapani: Can I share something there? I would like to also add
something that Dave crossings showed me, and he believes a manager makes
decisions on all sorts of a continuum all the time. It depends on how
much ownership and participation that you need. Sometimes it just needs
to be a simple decision and one person pulled in the room can help him
make the decision. Other times he needs the whole entire field office
staff or bigger to make those decisions. And he believes he makes them
all the time in that continuum.\
\
L. Culver: In a self-managed office, like Salmon, that is a consensus
decision because you\'ve agreed that that\'s okay. So keep in mind that
consensus is just an agreement.\
\
J. Ross: Again I would like to emphasize the use of some type of project
initiation letter that management signs and issues to a team and spells
out some of their expectations and goals and purpose of the team and
what some of the deadlines and schedules are.\
\
A. Jossie: This particular issue is especially sensitive when you\'re
dealing with the public the public is a member of the team or you\'re
going to take at least some parts of the decision out to the public to
either formulate alternatives, and eventually it all gets down to that
communication factor.\
\
J. Ross: We\'ve like to take a couple quick faxes from New Mexico. This
one asks, do you have any suggestions or experience on how to work on
teams that cross office boundaries or teams made up of members from two
different offices? We understand that communication is very important
but are there other tips and suggestions?\
\
K. Kelleher: I think communication is really important. I think you can
do a lot of that with conference calls but I think it\'s also helpful
for the team to get together face to face. I think another thing to
think about is in that case there\'s also two management structures and
I think you need to get in touch with both management teams and make
sure both management teams are on the same page about where the team is
supposed to be going and what kind of decisions the team is authorized
to make and those kind of things because otherwise you could get into a
real conflict there, I think.\
\
J. Ross: Let\'s take one more question from an office out there and then
we\'ll summarize.\
\
Caller: This is Diane.\
\
J. Ross: Where?\
\
Caller: Diane.\
\
J. Ross: Diane, go ahead.\
\
Caller: I\'m calling from Safford, and I just wanted to make a comment
about celebrating successes. I think that when a team finishes their
project that the celebration should be all inclusive, and a lot of
people that contribute behind the scenes, the GIS specialist who makes
the maps, the webmaster that does the website, the clerk that does all
the mailings, they are to be part of that celebration.\
\
J. Ross: Thanks very much for that comment. Let\'s summarize, the
success of your plan, decision and implementation is a direct result of
you on I.D. teams work together. Answers to any questions that we
didn\'t have time to get to, we\'ll do our best to post on the national
training center website. Give us a couple days to go through them. And
remember there are nine criteria of effective teamwork and they\'re a
great place to state your name start with any new team. They can even be
used by the seasoned team. We appreciate hearing from you, and
everybody, thanks a lot. Want to thank the NTC crew and everybody on the
panel today as well as the soaring eagles. Please don\'t forget there\'s
additional team building, planning, project management and NEPA training
available from NTC. And that list can be found on page 36 of your guide.
Those are \-- that are enrolled today will be receiving an e-mail with
links to the post course assessment and evaluation within the next 24
hours. Please make sure that you fill these out so that we can continue
to improve on future training endeavors. And if you have any ideas for
future planning and NEPA forums, please e-mail or call Cathy Humphrey
here at Phoenix. Actually this, forum came from a suggestion after the
last forum. So the process does work. As you\'ve seen there are some
really great teams throughout BLM. So let\'s continue to build on our
success. Thank you for watching and so long from Phoenix.