What is the GRPI model?

When organizational theorist Richard Beckhard came up with the GRPI team approach in 1972, teamwork was optional for a lot of companies, and a systematized approach to building effective working groups took the business world by surprise. Over time, as the tech revolution not only permitted easier team coordination but practically mandated it for most employers, the model took off and, today, informs management across basically all industries all over the world.

The heart of the GRPI model is the letters themselves, which stand for Goals, Roles, Procedures and Interpersonal Relationships. The pyramid-shaped model seeks to answer a series of questions as a thought exercise to help you define your teams and put them on task effectively. The model has hardly changed since its rollout in the ’70s, and you can still use the same four questions to assemble productive teams today.

What are your group’s goals?

The goals of a group should, ideally, be easy to define in a single sentence. Whether it’s a simple and short-term goal, such as “wash the cars on the lot” or a more ambitious target like “reduce expenses by 10% this quarter,” your group needs specific, unambiguous goals. If it helps, you can imagine stating the goals for your group as if you’re pitching a movie idea to a studio executive: If it takes more than a sentence, it’s too complicated.

If you’re having trouble reducing your team goals to a single mission statement, it’s a sign you don’t yet have the clear focus needed to effectively lead a team. Try breaking your too-complex goals into smaller parts and see whether it works better as a larger number of shorter, simpler mission goals. “Promote sales growth,” for instance, isn’t very specific, while “recruit 10 new sales reps” is far clearer and more likely to succeed as a group goal.

What roles have to be filled to achieve the team’s goals?

When you’ve settled on a discrete set of goals, it’s time to start parceling out the roles everybody will play in getting the job done. This stage is best done as early in the process as possible since the answers you develop here inform your hiring and assignment decisions later on.

If you’re going to wash cars on the lot, for example, the roles you’re looking for will probably all be lot attendants and car washers. Cutting costs, on the other hand, calls for a working group of accountants, financial analysts, managers, payroll specialists and whoever in Operations controls the petty cash. These stakeholders can come in as permanent members of the team, or they might only attend one office meeting to give their input, which would be their role in the team’s mission.

If you have a loose workplace organization that doesn’t admit clear specialization, such as a tech startup where the database architect is also the HR manager, you might have to get creative with assigning roles. Ideally, all you’ll have to do when you’re parceling out roles on the team is focus on objectives, break them down into minute tasks and then apply your workers’ individual skill sets. For hiring the 10 sales reps, for example, you might assign your social media manager to set up a hiring account, while your receptionist takes inquiries and applications, and the HR manager handles interviews.

What procedures must exist to help the stakeholders perform their roles?

Now that your roles are defined, it’s time to design processes to help your teams fulfill those roles. While it might be easy enough to tell your lot attendants to grab buckets and hoses and head out to wash the cars, your cost-cutting team will need more structure.

Draft a set of rules for how to carry out tasks, such as referring layoff decisions to senior management or including the union rep in layoff and reassignment decision-making. This is the stage where you can set up a regular schedule of team meetings to discuss progress and set the agenda well in advance.

In the example of hiring sales reps, you might set a target of 1 month for final hiring decisions and onboarding of the new staff. To manage the processes, schedule a weekly meeting for Monday between the HR manager, social media manager and sales manager. At these meetings, set the agenda for week 1 as planning, week 2 as progress update and confirmation of the social media outreach, week 3 as HR update and week 4 as the wrap-up to debrief on how well it went. A structure like this helps set realistic expectations and keep the whole team on track.

How can you manage interpersonal relationships to encourage following the established procedures?

People are people, and not everyone seamlessly integrates into a team you’ve assembled. This could be a fairly minor issue, such as a scheduling conflict for that Monday meeting one week, which is pretty easy to solve. Or it could be a serious rift between your lot attendants that interferes with the work you need done. Hold an honest dialogue about the personal issues affecting the people on your team and try to resolve any impediments as early in the process as you can.

A happier side of the interpersonal stage of the GRPI model is making use of the unique talents each person brings to the mission. Think hard about the tech skills of your IT rep and how they can bolster the work of your social media manager. Does your sales manager have the ability to help HR with the interviews for new reps? The interplay between various members of your team is one of the things that helps keep management lively and demanding since no two teams have exactly the same resources available to them.

Advantages of the GRPI model

By far, the major advantage of using GRPI is the clarity it brings to the team-building process. Without a systematic approach to the formation and management of teams, every manager knows how easy it is to lose focus and drift from one poorly defined mission to another, possibly never getting anything 100% done. GRPI fixes that by turning an otherwise instinctual process of managing complex teams into a smooth-running program that has controlled variables and predictable outcomes throughout.

Places where the GRPI model works best

GRPI usually works best in medium to large offices, on large work crews for complex projects and during expansions, when it can be hard to manage the disorder of a significant upheaval. To get the most out of the GRPI approach, your organization should be sufficiently large and diversified to accommodate specialist job titles and discrete job duties. Building teams out of existing human resources is a lot easier when you don’t have to outsource beyond your company to get something done and when your stakeholders are less generalist and can credibly claim to have just a single specialty they focus on, such as HR.

GRPI can be less successful in fluid, informal workplaces, especially small offices with very few employees. It’s a bit more formal than you might need for a family business, and it might be an encumbrance to lightweight, agile teams that find themselves rapidly shifting priorities.

It’s not, for example, an ideal approach to team building in workplaces with exceedingly high turnover, nor is it the best approach for a seasonal workforce, such as a holiday season sales expansion. It can be tricky to organize contractors and freelancers into GRPI teams as well, though this isn’t impossible, and you might get some benefit out of trying it in limited applications.

How to implement GRPI team strategies

It’s not hard to get started with a GRPI model for team collaboration. After studying the steps, ask yourself the four questions while planning a team operation. What are your goals, roles, procedures and people doing to get the job done together? When you can answer each of these with a short, unambiguous reply, you’re already using the model to plan your next success.