Teamwork & Collaboration

Teamwork is essential to successful business practice. Permanent or temporary, workgroups need to function efficiently and effectively. In this course, you'll learn how to construct and lead teams, while avoiding and mitigating dysfunction.

The way in which a team is built is an important factor in determining team success. Leading a team quickly and smoothly into high performance mode requires the groundwork of pulling the right team together, setting team goals, and defining the standards of team behavior. In this course, you'll learn about the five stages of team development and strategies for selecting high-performing team members most suited for your project or team. You'll also learn about laying the foundation for a successful team, including setting team goals, assigning roles to individual team members, and defining specific guidelines that outline how team members should behave to minimize conflict and optimize team performance.

Anyone who has worked in a project or team environment will tell you that team dynamics make a huge difference in the working environment. Developing effective project teams is one of the primary responsibilities of a team leader. In this course, you'll learn how to develop the team culture early on by establishing team member competencies and working to improve team dynamics. You'll also learn about methods used to encourage team participation and motivation and increase team members' commitment. Finally, you'll learn about the importance of assessing and improving team performance.

Establishing a successful team involves ensuring that team members can communicate with you and with one another and that they will work as a team rather than as individuals. Clear channels of communication are required for both on-site and virtual teams. In this course, you'll learn techniques for encouraging effective communication and overcoming communication problems. You'll also learn strategies for encouraging team collaboration. Finally, you'll learn about tools and technologies that are commonly used for virtual team communication and key considerations for establishing virtual communication guidelines.

Successful teams are characterized by having a clear direction, trust among team members, effective communication, and the ability to quickly resolve conflict. The survival of a team depends on a team leader who can quickly recognize conflict, diagnose its cause, and use strategies to resolve the issue. In this course, you'll learn about what causes conflict on a team and the important role of healthy communication in handling conflict. You'll also learn about best practice approaches to resolving conflict and the tenets of principled negotiation. Finally, you'll learn guidelines for addressing one type of team conflict, lack of trust.

Many organizations have discovered the advantages of using cross-functional teams to accomplish their goals. While the diversity inherent to these teams can present certain challenges, successfully managing cross-functional teams is worth the reward. In this course, you'll learn about the benefits of cross-functional teams. You'll also learn about the various development stages of cross-functional teams and the risks at each stage. Finally, you'll learn about the key abilities a cross-functional leader should have and best practices for cross-functional team success.