San Wojakowski helps teams that get stuck get back on track

With over thirty years at Fontys, San Wojakowski is an old-timer. San works at the P&O department as a team development expert and uses the Team Development Circle in her work. This consists of seven building blocks that together form a circle: mission and vision, strategy, structure, processes and systems, leadership, personnel and finally culture - and the latter is perhaps the most important. 'The vast majority of team development questions we get have to do with culture.'

More direction

What do we actually mean by culture? San: 'Culture refers to the way we treat each other, how we want to work together, what we expect from each other and whether we are allowed to make mistakes. Culture largely determines the atmosphere within an organization.'

What does such a question look like? Well, like this, for example: 'All kinds of things are going on within our team, without being expressed.' Incidentally, we got that kind of question a few years ago much more often than nowadays. Now we get many more requests to help teams develop further towards agile, collaborative teams.'

From inside to outside

During her time at Fontys, San has seen culture change. When I joined in 1993 there was a family culture. Like: we'll sort it out amongst ourselves. Things that were not quite right were sometimes covered up with the cloak of love. The organization has become much more professional and is assuming its social role by looking from the outside in and acting accordingly. There is also more and more connection and cooperation between the institutes, which is necessary to make education more flexible and allow students to follow their own learning route.'

A famous saying: people are willing to change, but no one wants to be changed. In other words, imposed change often evokes resistance. San: 'I know that from my own experience. I really enjoyed coaching teams myself. At one point my role changed, so I could no longer act as a team coach myself. This put me in a lot of resistance for a while, but I also realized that teachers experience something similar when the focus of their role shifts from subject matter to coaching students. That helped me let go of that resistance.

Intervention

In her current role, San supports managers and teams by using the Team Development Circle to determine their needs for development as a team and the appropriate intervention. 'The Team Development Circle is a layered model; attached to each building block is a number of questions that a team can ask itself to determine whether this building block is sufficiently fulfilled for now. If the building block needs attention, interventions are offered. One such intervention is the Talent Team Methodology of the research group Dynamic Talent Interventions, with which teams can achieve (improved) use of talents within the team.

Another commonly used option is the use of a team coach; we at Human Resource, Learning & Development have built up a flexible shell of team coaches, and in my role I can find an appropriate team coach to fit the development needs of the team. For example, a team coach can work on helping to break non-helpful patterns. For this, the Deep-Democracy method can be used, where each team member gets to speak and give their opinion. We then sometimes get as feedback, "Gee, that's the first time I've heard all my colleagues." In a team, you will always have people who speak up easily and loudly and people who are a bit introverted, but that certainly doesn't make their ideas any less valuable. If you don't hear these voices, you may be missing out on important information.

You can find more information about the Team Development Circle on the P&O portal Learning and Development (in Dutch). There you will also find a questionnaire you can use to submit a request for support.