Chapter 9: Creating and Developing Leadership and Project Teams
Identifying Effective Team Types
Identifying the Types of Teams Most Effective for Your Project
Three obvious ways teams differ are related to their respective purpose, membership, and size. Identifying these characteristics and purposes – and even how they will communicate and collaborate – are important considerations for any initiative. While not all projects or engagement efforts will require the range and responsibilities that our project did, our experiences provide an example of some operational and communications structures you may want to consider. The key to all of this, as it is for every project, is the ability and willingness to collaborate and communicate effectively. Regardless of your project’s team structure, there are a number of key lessons we’ve learned that will help you assess the team design more appropriate for your efforts.
Team Experiences & Roles
The experiences and roles of the Water for Agriculture project’s teams is a good example. Our four teams consisted of the following:
- A facilitation team – preferably two (or more) people who work together to ensure your facilitation, processes, relationship building, and tasks are undertaken to maximize the potential success of your initiative. Essentially, keeping the group discussions moving forward in a productive and capacity-building way. (Also see Chapter 7)
- Local community stakeholder leadership teams in each partner community (“local leadership teams”) – typically composed of between 10 and 20 members, representing a wide spectrum of experiences with the issue. (Also see Chapter 2) As the project evolved, we also saw smaller, focused and/or ad-hoc teams emerge.
- A sponsoring organization team – an interdisciplinary team of faculty, Extension educators, and graduate students primarily responsible for the design and implementation of the overall project. This overall team also included three sub-teams with specific responsibilities – the engagement team (responsible for developing and implementing our engagement strategies), or social-behavioral team (responsible for conducting our research methods and analysis), and our biophysical team (responsible for providing the biophysical expertise and research our local leadership teams needed to be successful). We also included, initially, three state teams designed to coordinate state-level project operations.
- An external advisory team – included an interdisciplinary group of faculty from three different state institutions and a small cluster of advisory board members representing both federal and state agencies and institutions.
Team Growth in the Water for Agriculture Project
In the Water for Ag project, as with almost all teams, each of our leadership and teams were initially simply a group of individuals who had agreed to work together. Over time, however, and through the structure and processes project personnel provided, trust and relationships grew and individuals felt comfortable sharing candid conversations and taking action collectively. They evolved from being a cluster of individuals to becoming a team.
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