Contract Clarification for Team Developments
The topic of contract clarification for team development is particularly significant from a metatheory viewpoint, because the concerns and goal settings of the team leader are often a part of the problem. As a consultant, one must always be clear that the actual ‘client’ is the team, never the team leadership. Those who make factual, social and temporal mistakes here will ensure, from the beginning, that not much will change in the patterns of the team’s guiding processes.
The guiding process goal setting is not only relevant for the system ‘team’ but also for the system ‘team consultant’ which, for example, gives itself the form of ‘team development’. Therefore, the clarification and agreement of a common goal for the measure has the highest priority (=contract clarification). Purely pragmatically, such a contract clarification will be implemented in several, different steps:
• Initial contact
• Contract clarification with HR
• Contract clarification with the team leader
• Contract clarification with the team members
• Contract clarification with the relevant environments
It is not always this separated and defined. It is important that the team members are always involved from the outset, because otherwise this step has to be included at the beginning of a workshop which is taking place. This usually results in too little time remaining to appropriately process the agreed goals.