Contract Clarification with Team Members
The formal client is the team leader as the representative of the organisation. The social client, however, is the entire team. This must also be mirrored in the contract clarification, in which the team members can position themselves in such a way that they can name to the team developer their goals, topics and concerns for a workshop in advance.
The best possibility for this are personal preliminary conversations (comparable to those with the team leader). These can take place individually and one-to-one, in small groups or with the entire team. Each format has advantages and disadvantages. Often, though, how exactly this can proceed is also dependent upon the budget possibilities as well as the temporal and spatial availabilities of the participants. The telephone or written forms are only a very poor substitute. The following points are important:
• Every team member should be able to say to himself, “This team development is (also) my event, in which I (too) can and should pursue my interests!”
• The conversations serve quite substantially to also build up trust or reduce mistrust regarding the event of team development as such and regarding the consultant as a person. Here it particularly revolves around the credibility of his impartiality or his neutrality.
• In summary, the conversation and the running information must enable the consultant to form hypotheses about the interaction patterns, goal processing, team preservation and team parameter working strategies, as well as the team reflection routines. For this, the consultant requires a conversation guidance concept, a theory which enables him to evaluate and recognise patterns and a concept about how he can prepare his insights for the team and, if applicable, make them available.