LDR 726 Week 5 Team Building and Team Training Example

Beyond the Ropes Course: Evidence-Based Team Building, Team Training and Debriefs for Wind Turbine Crews

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

LDR/726: The Dynamics of Group and Team Leadership

Week 5 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

Prairie Gale Wind Services, its programs and its results are composites written for a model paper.

So far this course has found that Prairie Gale Wind Services, an invented firm maintaining about 2,100 turbines on the southern plains, has crews that differ in briefing routines, stability, information sharing and how they handle conflict. Vice president Renee Castillo now wants a program that strengthens crews directly. The company's last attempt, two years ago, was a two-day offsite for 60 supervisors and lead technicians, with outdoor challenges such as a ropes course and a raft-building race. Participants rated it highly, and several said they enjoyed meeting colleagues from other regions. But over the following year, repeat repairs, injuries and near misses showed no change. This paper reviews evidence on team building, team training and debriefs and designs a better program.

What Team Building Includes

Team building refers to interventions intended to improve how teams function. Common components include goal setting, clarifying objectives and standards; interpersonal relations, improving communication and trust; role clarification, defining who does what; and problem solving, identifying and resolving obstacles.

Does Team Building Work?

Klein et al. (2009) gathered the published evaluations of team building and combined their results. Overall, team building had a moderate positive effect on team outcomes, particularly affective outcomes such as trust and process outcomes such as coordination. Among components, goal setting and role clarification showed the strongest effects. Effects were larger for larger teams in some analyses, and interventions targeting specific components outperformed general activities.

Does Team Training Work?

Salas et al. (2008) conducted a meta-analysis of team training. Team training had moderate positive effects on cognitive outcomes, such as knowledge of teamwork; affective outcomes, such as trust; process outcomes, such as communication and coordination; and performance. Training focused on teamwork, such as coordination and mutual performance monitoring, showed stronger effects on some outcomes than training focused on taskwork alone, and effects held across intact and newly formed teams.

Do Debriefs Help?

Tannenbaum and Cerasoli (2013) conducted a meta-analysis of debriefs, structured reviews of performance after an event. Debriefs improved individual and team performance by about 25 percent of a standard deviation on average. Effects were larger when debriefs were facilitated, when they aligned with specific objectives and when participants reviewed their own performance actively rather than passively receiving feedback.

Why the Retreat Did Not Work

The retreat focused on interpersonal relations through recreational challenges, components with weaker evidence, and it brought together people who do not work in the same crews. It included no goal setting or role clarification for actual crews, no practice of real tasks and no follow-up. In Klein et al.'s terms, it targeted the wrong components for the wrong teams.

What Participants Remembered

Interviews with ten retreat participants two years later were revealing. Most remembered the raft race and the dinner. Few could name anything they had changed in their crews afterward. Two lead technicians said the retreat had helped them meet supervisors from other regions, which made later phone calls easier, a modest benefit. None described changes in briefings, roles or safety routines. The interviews suggest the retreat built acquaintances rather than teams.

The Case for Intact Teams

Team building and training research generally finds stronger effects when interventions involve intact teams working on their real tasks. A crew that practices a rescue together builds shared understanding of who does what at height, which a mixed group of supervisors at a ropes course cannot. This principle guides the design: every component involves actual crews and their actual work.

Matching Components to Needs

Earlier weeks identified specific needs: role confusion in reshuffled crews, weak shared mental models, inconsistent briefings, junior members not sharing observations and conflicts that turn personal. Each points to particular components: role clarification, teamwork training, structured briefings and debriefs and norms for disagreement.

The ropes course built goodwill among supervisors; the crews needed to agree on who carries the rescue kit.

Component 1: Role Clarification and Goal Setting

Twice a year, and whenever membership changes, each crew will sit down with its supervisor to settle who leads the climb, who owns rescue and who handles electrical isolation, and to agree on three-month targets for callbacks and safety.

Component 2: Teamwork Training in Rescue Scenarios

Crews will train together in realistic scenarios, such as a technician suspended after a fall or a fire in the nacelle, at the company's training tower. Training will emphasize teamwork behaviors identified by Salas et al. (2008): closed-loop communication, mutual monitoring and backup. Each crew will train twice a year as an intact team.

Component 3: Structured Debriefs

After every major job and every training scenario, crews will hold a five-minute debrief using four questions: what was planned, what happened, why, and what we will do differently. Following the findings of Tannenbaum and Cerasoli (2013) on facilitation, lead technicians will be trained to guide debriefs and supervisors will facilitate debriefs monthly.

Component 4: Norms for Disagreement

Building on Week 4, formation sessions will include norms for technical disputes, reinforced in debriefs.

Delivery for Dispersed Crews

Because crews work across three states, role and goal sessions and debriefs will happen in the field, while rescue training happens at the tower. A short guide on a tablet will support leads.

Sustaining the Program

Programs often fade once the launch ends. To sustain this one, debrief completion will appear on supervisors' monthly reports, role clarification sessions will be triggered automatically when the scheduling system records a membership change and rescue training will be booked a year ahead. Lead technicians who facilitate strong debriefs will be recognized at quarterly meetings.

Evaluation Design

The program will start in one region, with another region serving as a comparison for six months. Measures include repeat-repair rates, near misses, injuries, survey items on role clarity, shared understanding and trust and debrief completion. Participant satisfaction will be measured but not treated as evidence of success.

Connecting to Coaching and Self-Direction

The program prepares the ground for later steps. Debriefs give supervisors natural moments to coach, and crews that complete role clarification and training become candidates for greater self-direction. The components are not isolated events but the first stage of a longer development path for crews.

Costs

The program costs about $240,000 in the first year, mainly technician time for training and lead training, less than the estimated cost of repeat visits identified in Week 2.

Limits

Meta-analytic averages may not apply to every setting, and wind crews face unusual hazards. The regional comparison will show whether effects appear at Prairie Gale.

Conclusion

Research shows that team building works best through goal setting and role clarification, that teamwork training improves processes and performance and that structured debriefs produce reliable gains. Prairie Gale's past retreat targeted weaker components for the wrong groups. A crew-based program of role clarification, goal setting, teamwork training in realistic scenarios and frequent debriefs, evaluated against a comparison region, matches the crews' needs to the evidence.

References

Klein, C., DiazGranados, D., Salas, E., Le, H., Burke, C. S., Lyons, R., & Goodwin, G. F. (2009). Does team building work? Small Group Research, 40(2), 181-222. https://doi.org/10.1177/1046496408328821

Salas, E., DiazGranados, D., Klein, C., Burke, C. S., Stagl, K. C., Goodwin, G. F., & Halpin, S. M. (2008). Does team training improve team performance? A meta-analysis. Human Factors, 50(6), 903-933. https://doi.org/10.1518/001872008X375009

Tannenbaum, S. I., & Cerasoli, C. P. (2013). Do team and individual debriefs enhance performance? A meta-analysis. Human Factors, 55(1), 231-245. https://doi.org/10.1177/0018720812448394