For many of us who work in an organization, whether we like it or not, team collaboration is a necessary process to accomplish specific common goals or outputs. This article is about my recent experience working with a new team and the harsh lessons that I learned.
I have just completed a wonderful three month Management course. The course focused on four main themes: Marketing, Strategy, Accounting/Finance, and Human Skills. On the first day of class, we were all assigned to a specific group. For the duration of the course, we were required to work within this pre-assigned team for discussions, in-class exercises, debriefings, and of course, for a final case study presentation.
My sentiments of this arrangement were a mixture of anticipation, excitement, and concern driven by the realization that I had to work with a pre-assigned group of individuals who were complete strangers to me. Nevertheless, I looked forward to working in collaboration with these individuals. It had the potential to be a wonderful opportunity to learn and grow from the others’ experience and knowledge. Yet, by the same token, I had horrible flashbacks of group assignments that had been the antipode of wonderful. No doubt other members of my new team were experiencing similar sentiments.
At the onset, the team was very polite, and as time went on, we developed a cordial camaraderie. The challenge settled in when we received our final case study one month prior to the date of our final presentation. We were all overwhelmed by its intricate details and complexities. Our first meeting about the case study was engaging. Yet although a lot of good discussion took place, we were disappointed that we hadn’t progressed very far. As time marched on, the team dynamics seemed to spiral downward from that first meeting. As a result, the project deteriorated to the point of near disaster.
Time has passed since this devastating experience and some dust has settled. I have asked myself what went so wrong with this decent group of intelligent, professional individuals. I offer the following list of recommendations, after some review of my class notes and upon some serious moments of reflection about this recent team-related experience. I hope that these recommendations prove useful to you in your team-centric endeavours.
Recommendations*
- Make sure that the team has a clear understanding of the purpose of the project from the beginning.
- Set up explicit Ground Rules with the team. Everyone in the team must be ready to comply with these behavioural boundaries and expectations.
- When conducting meetings, make sure that there are explicit and clear processes in place:
- Distribute an agenda to each team member prior to the meeting.
- Properly define roles for each member present at the meeting (i.e. leader, facilitator, scribe, and member).
- Make sure that there are measurable goals or outputs to be accomplished.
- Generate an action plan from the meeting.
- Maintain regular communication and interaction to build and sustain momentum and relationships.
- Establish processes to deal with roadblocks (skepticism, incompatible personalities, stress, lack of discipline and structure, etc.)
- Establish effective decision-making processes.
- Make sure that the attendees who are invited to the meeting have the appropriate competencies and skill set to address the topics on the agenda.
- Remain committed, focused and disciplined in order to achieve the goals set out.
- Ensure that mutual respect among all team members is maintained at all times.
- Be wary of Groupthink – As the team settles into the maturity stage, maintain vigilance if you notice that team members fail to disagree, or do not challenge the team’s decisions.
I realized that although our team?s initial efforts were sincere, the failure to not have a clear purpose and objectives defined and not have implemented and followed rigorous procedures at the beginning of the process ultimately resulted in our dismal team performance. Now I understand with much more clarity the following key formula that was introduced in this course:
TEAM RESULTS = PURPOSE X PEOPLE X PROCESS
Yours in Service,
Kimberly Hains
Director, Learning Solutions
* Concepts and principles were derived from the “Developing Teams” workshop developed by Jennie Constantinides, one of the fantastic facilitators at the Executive Development Course held at McGill University.
