Learning from This Week's Webinars: Building Teams and Managing Change

Bob Greene's webinar on today in the Nonprofit Webinars Wednesday series on Building Real Teams touched on some ideas that I've been mulling over about managing change.

Bob talked about how groups become teams, and how an organization can support—or undermine—the process. As Bob described it, team success requires shared intentions, shared effort, clear communication, and leadership. Organizational leaders need to ensure that the environment supports team performance and that expectations are clear, and they need to model the behavior they are trying to foster. He talked about systems thinking and used the metaphor of ecology.

This is what I consider the essence of successfully managing change, most particularly in the strategy development and implementation phases (see previous post).

Of course there are major differences between a small, focused work team and the aggregate staff and disparate functions of a large or even mid-sized nonprofit. But the characteristics of effectiveness are not so different. It's just that much more difficult to shape strategy and implement new behaviors at a larger scale.