Who should be responsible for team development?

Best teams constantly think what skills, ways of doing work, and new methods they need to learn or develop. Too often team leaders and team members think that team development is something that the company human resources should be responsible for. Best teams take this responsibility for themselves.

Why? The simple answer is that each team knows best what they need to learn collectively and what each team member needs to learn. All teams in a typical company are different and have different needs. At the same time, the working life, its pace, and requirements, have become ever more complicated requiring that teams perform at their very best. This includes being able to successfully work in hybrid or remote environments instead of the traditional office setting.

All this complexity has partially contributed to companies trying to find one size fits all solutions in pulse surveys, annual surveys, and other such tools. The key problem with these tools is that they do not tell you specifically enough what the problem is or what you need to do to correct the problem.

The bigger issue of course is that one size fits all doesn’t really fit as each team is different: any team that has either knowingly or unknowingly offloaded its development responsibility to human resources or some other part of the company, runs the risk of not working in the best way possible and getting the best possible results.

Best teams are good at setting the team atmosphere for psychological safety. The truth is that getting there is not an intuitive or natural development, it requires a lot of work and will not be achieved by doing annual surveys followed by a couple of hours of discussion. Instead, psychological safety requires constant work and communication from the team to figure out what is its common way of working, what does each individual team member think, and how the way they work serves the task of getting things done in a less stressful way.

Let me tell you how we do this at Leapto. At Leapto we work on our team development each week in our weekly meeting. Using our own tool this takes around 10 minutes each week. For the past couple of weeks, we have been working on transferring marketing know-how to a specific team member to balance workload. We do this by following what our Leapto tool tells us to do in a knowledge transfer situation.

The most important thing about team development is consistency. If you have a plan on how you want to develop as a team and work on the development constantly, you will get ahead. So, if you are like us and really want to improve how you work as a team, try our tool free here.