Trident's process improvement teams are co-led.These leaders share many responsibilities but both have specific duties for which they are primarily responsible. Following are the primary responsibilities of the Team Leader, the Team Facilitator, and examples of responsibilities, which are shared in the fluid operation of a team approach.

Team Leader

1. Administrative details:  Calls meetings, orchestrates team activities, makes member assignments, oversees reports and presentations.
2. Contact point:  Handles communication between organization and team.
3. "Run interference":  Creates and maintains effective channels of communication to allow team members to operate efficiently, intervenes with supervisors, if necessary.
4. Team records:  Responsible for correspondence, records of meetings, charts, graphs, and data. 
5. Organizational change agent:  Implements efforts within supervisory power that needs no other approval.
6. Participative team member:  Participates in team interaction, work and assignments (Caution:  May need to restrain participation in discussions to encourage member involvement).

Team Facilitator

1. Quality process coach:  Assures proper use of the seven-step quality problem-solving model and improvement tools, helps team identify the outside/organizational perspective.
2. Team leader support:  Conducts pre-group consultation, pre-meeting consultation and post-meeting processing.  Coaches leader on specifics of quality process.  Reinforces leader's efforts, observes the group (especially when leader is engaged in communication), gives assertive feedback to group and leader.
3. Quality Council liaison:  Disseminates pertinent information from Quality Council.
4. Group dynamics facilitator:  Helps members to negotiate conflict, test consensus, redirect nonproductive discussion, summarize key points and meet goals through practicing facilitative membership.

Shared Responsibilities of Leader and Facilitator

1. Role models:  Leaders should model the behavior they expect of members including preparedness, timeliness, and interaction style.  It is especially important that they model conflict resolution productively.
2. Quality Council reports:  Communicate team progress and relate the Council's direction to the team.  (At times, entire team may report to Council.)

Shared Responsibilities with Team Members

1. Communication facilitation: Promote each team member to engage in an optimal level of interaction with other members. Promote seeking opinions, linking members' comments, redirecting, paraphrasing, active listening, empathizing, and using silence.
2. Decision-making: Help the team to block dysfunctional decisions (plops, self-authorized, hand-clasps, minority rule, majority rule) and to promote consensus through functional decision-making (identify problem, gather data, generate alternatives, weigh options, select alternative, act).
3. Being “hard on problems, soft on people”: Help the team to be tenacious in confronting problems to be solved, to be good listeners (empathic) and to be supportive of each other even if they disagree.

TTC'S IMPROVEMENT PROCESS