How to mobilise a high-performing team fast using “Goals, Roles & Souls”

Goals, Roles & Souls (GRS) is a simple and flexible checklist for mobilising a group of individuals into a focused team quickly for group development activities such as business simulators or other team-based exercises.

GRS can also be used for setting up teams quickly to address urgent operational or strategic challenges, problems and opportunities.

Goals – cover team goals and/or challenge goals

• Team goals cover the learning objectives or desired behaviours of the team.
• Challenge goals cover the specific objectives which the team has been formed to address, specifically their target results, strategy and execution.

Roles – address team roles and/or functional roles

• Team roles are the divisions of labour needed for the team to operate effectively. Examples could include leader, timekeeper and note-taker.
• Functional roles are the divisions of labour needed to achieve the challenge objectives. Examples could include CEO, sales director and finance director. As an added sophistication, each functional role may have access to different information which may need to be shared (or not). In addition, different functional roles may be given specific goals, possibly private, which may result in team conflict (e.g. sales versus operations regarding optimum stock levels).

Souls – express team values and/or core values

• Team values address team etiquette and ground rules, i.e. how the team have agreed they are going to deal with each other and what will be acceptable and what will not.
• Core values represent the key values of the organisation which the team are representing. Organisational values can result in values conflicts, which can be very useful in some team learning scenarios.

For more information

Business simulations are a great way to accelerate the development of new teams and to inject innovation and agility into established teams.

For more information on using business simulations with teams .