TEAM DEVELOPMENT

Teams in universities, colleges, and academic and non-academic research institutions come together in very different constellations:

• Your own research group with academic staff, student assistants, doctoral candidates and administrative personnel
• Leadership teams in faculties, institutes or centers with peers and administrative professionals
• Project teams with postdocs, doctoral candidates and students
• Large collaborative research projects with steering committees, working groups and graduate schools
• Degree program development teams with peers, faculty administration staff, higher education didactics experts and the university leadership
• Language centers, central facilities, operational units and service clusters

Even if you've often worked in teams during your academic qualification phase and are familiar with these working contexts, everything changes when you're appointed to a professorship or leadership role: you become a teacher, manager and administrator, threatening to be ground down in the tension between teaching, research, grant acquisition and self-governance. And who tells you how to navigate these dangerous waters?
It's worthwhile examining how we communicate, how we interact with one another. This requires an academic culture of learning from mistakes and team self-reflection, where multiple "solo operators" haven't got their own agenda side by side, but where people communicate at eye level across status groups.

• What expectations do team members have of the team/project?
• What is each person's understanding of their role?
• What decision-making structures exist? How are relationships structured within the team? Are there formal guidelines?
• Do we speak the same language (for example, in collaboration between researchers and administration)?
• What does onboarding look like?
• What spaces and formats can be used for problem-solving and conflict resolution?
• What is the conflict culture like – can people show weaknesses?
• What communication culture do you want to cultivate (meetings, email distribution lists, video conferences, home office)?

Cultural change is a big concept. But that's exactly what it's about, and I'm happy to accompany you on this journey!
And when conflicts do arise, team facilitation or mediation can restore the group's ability to work together, recalibrate and adapt the working foundation. Fundamentally, it's beneficial for a team to reflect on their collaboration before conflicts emerge.

Typical areas of conflict include:

• What does the communication culture look like? Is communication appreciative?
• Are new, innovative teaching formats valued or seen as competition?
• Do you have a space or format where problems can be concretely addressed and resolved? How well suited are your current meetings for this? Is there a common foundation or does everyone do what they want?
• Are decision-making structures clear?
• How does onboarding of new colleagues work?
• Can people openly show their weaknesses or is this a dangerous minefield?

Many of these conflict areas could already be addressed at the beginning of team collaboration through professional facilitation.

Let's discuss this in a complimentary initial consultation.