8600-309 Understand How to Establish an Effective Team

Unit Overview

8600-309 Understand how to Establish an Effective Team is a unit within the ILM Level 3 module that helps the leaders to build the skills that are required for them to understand the principles of setting up an effective team and strategies for effectively leading the team. Teamwork has become one of the most important approaches to managing organisations. It involves being able to divide the workforce into smaller groups that are easier and more efficient to manage. The leader then oversees the allocation of duties and tasks to each team and ensure that they are effectively completed to achieve the goals and objectives of the organisation.

Establishing teams is a critical step as it brings together several principles to ensure that the leaders are able to influence the performance of others within the organisation. In setting up effective teams, they must be able to establish working relationships within the organisations to ensure that they are able to coordinate collaborative work to achieve the set goals and objectives. Principles of trust, respect, and diversity are important in supporting the process of communication within the team to ensure that they are able to collaboratively contribute in achieving the set goals and objectives within the team.

8600-309 Understand how to establish an Effective Team is a unit within the ILM levels that helps to build the capability and potential to achieve these tasks and responsibilities of effectively establishing and managing teams. The unit aims at improving the understanding of potential or practicing line managers on the subject of effective team formation and management. This unit is taught in 5 hours of guided learning and contributes 1 credit value to the overall accomplishment of the ILM Level 3 module.

Suitability of the Unit

The unit is critical in improving the ability of leaders within the organisation to achieve their duties and roles in leading individuals effectively. With the understanding of the principles of teams, it is important to build effective work relationships to ensure that the leaders are able to manage the individuals and ensure that they are able to effectively accomplish the designed team's goals and objectives as well as contribute to the performance of the team in general.

This unit is, therefore, effective in building the ability of the leaders to influence the performance of the teams and hence influencing the performance of the organisation in general. These elements fall under the tasks list of leaders within the organisation; hence the unit is significantly designed to suit the needs of leaders in improving their skills and objectives.

The unit is designed for the learning needs of first-line managers to influence the capacity and ability of the leaders to form and manage teams. The unit is, however suitable for other stakeholders, including middle-level managers and top managers within the organisation, as they have to effectively identify common goals for teams and set principles to follow when establishing teams within the organisations. External consultants can also benefit from the unit as it improves their understanding of the context of the organisation.

Learning Outcomes

Upon completion of the unit, the learners should be able to:

• Understand and explain the benefits of effective working relationships in setting up and managing teams within the organisation

• Understand behaviors that could help to build and develop trust and respect within the workplace and in the area of responsibility

• Understand the role of communication in building and maintaining effective team working within the organisation and team

• Understand the differences between a group and a team and the context of each within the organisational setting

• Identify stages that na be used to form groups based on an established and relevant model

• Show understanding of the benefits of knowing team members and their preferred roles as identified within an established team role model on the performance of the manager

Key Learning Areas

8600-309 Understand how to establish an Effective Team is a unit that aims at improving the ability of the leaders to effectively develop and maintain teams. This unit, therefore, covers critical principles involving teamwork. Some of the main areas of learning that are covered within the unit include:

Understanding Team Work

This area of learning is effective in setting the ground for building and maintaining effective teams. It involves understanding the role that both formal and informal working relationships have to play in setting up the desired teams hence facilitating success in managing individual within the team effectively.

Communication is critical in ensuring that the leader is able to monitor and influence the performance of each individual in the team. This area focuses on training the leaders to establish effective communication techniques focusing on building relationships and impacting the behaviors of the individual within the team to achieve the desired levels of trust and respect, which are critical in contributing to accomplishing organisational goals and objectives.

Theoretical Models on Building Team

This area of learning focuses on introducing the theoretical principles that the leader must understand and focus on in building personal and professional capacities. The learner is introduced to the characteristics of teams and groups to ensure that they are able to master effective contexts that can be used within the organisation.

They are also introduced to theories of group formation, such as Tuchman’s theory, and hence guided in forming effective steps based on the theories that could inform their process of developing working teams based on the goals and responsibilities of each team. Lastly, the learners are guided to identify team roles using models such as Belbin model and build a balanced team to achieve the predefined goals and objectives of the teams by ensuring all team members contribute to accomplishing the goals.

Evaluation

8600-309 Understand how to Establish an Effective Team is a unit that focuses on building both theory and practice in relation to building and managing teams within the organisation. The assessment of this unit is conducted to determine the efficiency of accomplishing the goals and objectives of the team. The assessment is conducted using a written assessment and supervised practice to evaluate both theoretical information and practical abilities learned within the unit.