Effective Team and Performance Management Essay - 3

Effective Team and Performance Management - Essay Example Effective teams are categorized by traits of trust, mutual respect, cooperation and affability among the team members. Usually, successful teams are ones which have strong leadership and pay a lot of attention to how the team is built. They have a shared vision and sense of ownership so that all members feel responsible and work for the completion of the goal set by the team leader. Another important characteristic of successful teams is the communication factor, teams that do well have an open system of information exchange, team members coordinate among themselves to get the job done and are truthful with each other about work related issues. (Effective Teamwork, Constructing Excellence). This assignment is based on a series of lectures geared towards helping participant groups learn how to best work in groups and helping team members realize what their individual strengths and weaknesses are when working as a part of a collaborative team and how these contribute for the better or for the worse towards the achievement of the end goal. Each lecture involves a different activity, which allows participants to learn different aspects of being part of a team by involving themselves in the activity and reflecting upon it. Our team leader was chosen by a process of voting. All team members took a vote as to who should be our team leader and team member ‘a’ got 3 votes which was the maximum number of votes any team member got and thus the role of leader was delegated to team member ‘a’. Our team was to collaborate across a time period of 8 weeks. We would be attending 8 seminars, one every week and each time a task would be allocated to us and we would have to decide how we would go about it as a team. Once done with the procedure of attaining the goal that was expected of us in the task, we were to reflect upon the strengths, weaknesses, causes of these strengths and weaknesses and possible ways of improvement. One of the exercises was abou t being ‘lost on the moon’. In this task, we were to imagine that we had just crash landed on the moon and the mother ship was 200 miles away. There were just 15 items we had left for survival on our trip from the landing site to the mother ship and we had to rate the items from 1 to 15 in order of importance for survival, 1 being the most important and 15 being the least important. The keys issues we faced here were mostly centered in the difference of opinions among the group member as to what item should be given what rank of importance. The items varied greatly in nature and different people felt that different items were more important for survival when lost on the moon. Our team leader ‘a’ proposed that we brainstorm this situation according to rank so for example we started with rank 15 and all team members suggested which item they thought was least important and the reason why they thought so. This was to the end of convincing other members of thei r reasons so that we could narrow down to one item per rank by agreeing on one thing. And thus we moved up ranks till we reached rank one with our most important mutually agreed upon item. This tactic combined the use of collaboration and brain storming to bring about cohesion in the thought process. Another task was that of ‘the egg flying contest’. Our challenge as a team was to 5 of the 7 resources mentioned to be able to build a mechanism that would enable the egg to not break when dropped from a height of 2 meters. Under our leader, we chose 5 critical items from the given list based on a discussion among the team members concerning building a mechanism to stop the egg from breaking.