Jim Sowers asked for more information on team renewal.
Here are some reasons teams need renewal.
Over time, work that was initially a challenging learning experience becomes routine.
Life circumstances change and some team members need to focus their energy in a different direction.
Team membership changes.
The team may complete their initial goal.
When there are challenging interpersonal relationships on the team, people may get tired of putting that much emotional energy into the workplace.
The action you take depends on what’s going on for the team.
It may be time to celebrate past accomplishments, aknowledge contributions and then disband the team.
There may be an opening to re-examime the work the team is doing, and find a new challenging project for the team to work on.
The team may need to reexamine their reasons for continuing as a team or continuing with the work.
Sometimes, for various reasons, its just time for individual team members to move on…so recognize, celebrate and then find a new team member (if necessary) and reform the team (because it will be a new team in many ways).
Some sort of periodic reflection (a retrospective!) is a good way to address on-going commitement before team members get bored or burn out….maybe on a half-year or yearly cycle depending on the work, and with an explict focus of doing a check-in on engagement.
