P4 Unit 19 Business
Unit 19: Developing Teams in Business
Assignment 3
P4
In this assignment I will be discussing our snack group, how well we worked as a team and how team working is very important.
Teamwork is defined in Webster's New World Dictionary as "a joint action by a group of people, in which each person subordinates his or her individual interests and opinions to the unity and efficiency of the group." This does not mean that the individual is not important anymore, but, it does mean that effective and efficient teamwork goes beyond individual accomplishments. The most effective teamwork is produced when all the individuals involved put their ideas together to work towards a common goal.
Our team leader in our snack group was Natasha Rees, in my …show more content…
opinion she was a very good leader. Firstly, communication is very important when working in a team, Natasha did that very well, and she asked everyone what they would like to do and took their ideas in and asked them if they would like to do any certain tasks and what she felt would be their strong points. Throughout the whole assignment she would help everyone with what they needed to do or if the were stuck. Also, as it came towards the deadline of the assignment, some of the members of the team hadn’t finished their work, so Natasha took the work into her own hands as the other members weren’t in to do the work and she did it herself to make sure that the team would pass the assignment. She was a very consistent, fair and understanding team leader.
Being a team leader is a difficult job, it requires confidence, determination to do what ever you can for the team, understanding and to make sure that everyone is happy to work towards one goal. But, there are many other aspects of being a good leader. Firstly, communication is one of the most important, because having good communication skills, you are able to give your team members good feedback and speak to them about anything you want, this will also be helpful when providing and receiving feedback and setting objectives, as you will be communicating with your team members about how well you are doing and how well they are doing and by speaking to your team members about what objectives they must complete. Planning is another aspect of being a good leader, because with a plan you can sometimes get things done quicker as you know exactly what you have to do, you just have to put yourself to the task of doing it. So far I feel the Natasha had all of these aspects when being the team leader. Next, teaming building is a huge part of a team coming together and knowing each other well enough so that they can work closely. Leading by example is the next skill of being a team leader, this is when you take things into your own hands and show the other members of the team how to do everything correctly and when your get on with your work how you are supposed to, in my opinion I feel that Natasha was very good at leading by example. Motivating your team is a very difficult skill to have when being a team leader, but it is very vital, as without motivation your team members might not feel any need to do the task that has been set for them. Consulting is also another skill that is very important, as being able to go to your team when you have a problem is very important as the leader cannot always make the decisions on their own, therefore going to consult with team member about what to do is very important. Also, monitoring is very important as a team leader as you want to know how well you are doing, to make sure that you speak to every member of the team to make sure that they are doing everything correctly. Preventing a resolving conflict is very important, as conflict within the team can easily bring the teams moral down, therefore as the team leader you must try and resolve the conflict and try and make sure nothing is damaged in terms of the team and the work. Finally, adapting leadership style according to situation, this is very tricky to do, as sometimes you are unsure of how your team members like to work, or what task has been set for your team to complete, as the most important thing is making sure everyone is happy but the work is still being done in an efficient way.
Within our team, there were no conflicts at all, as everyone worked well together and everyone was happy with what tasks they were set to complete. As Natasha made sure that everyone was happy and that they were doing something that they were good at and they enjoyed doing it.
P5 & P6
In this part of the assignment I will show you how to demonstrate working as part of a team towards achieving specific goals, dealing with any conflict or difficult situation as a team leader goals.
The definition of leadership is a person or thing that holds a dominant or superior position within its field, and is able to exercise a high degree of control or influence over others. A leader needs to be someone who is strong, understanding, and respectful and tries to make the right decisions of their team. There are different styles of a leader, autocratic, democratic, participative, and laissez-faire.
Firstly I will start with autocratic leadership, also known as authoritarian leadership, is a leadership style characterised by individual control over all decisions and little input from group members. Autocratic leaders typically make choices based on their own ideas and judgments and rarely accept advice from team members. Autocratic leadership involves absolute, authoritarian control over a group. There are benefits to this, as when decisions have to be made quickly, the leader will make the decision without asking anyone else, and this requires a strong leader in order to get things finished quickly and efficiently. While autocratic leadership can be beneficial at times, there are also many instances where this leadership style can be problematic. People who abuse an autocratic leadership style are often viewed as bossy, controlling and dictatorial, which can lead to resentment among group members. Because autocratic leaders make decisions without consulting the group, people in the group may dislike that they are unable to contribute ideas. Researchers have also found that autocratic leadership leads to a lack of creative solutions to problems, which can ultimately hurt the performance of the group.
Secondly, Democratic leadership, also known as participative leadership, is a type of leadership style in which members of the group take a more participative role in the decision-making process. Researchers have found that this learning style is usually one of the most effective and leaders to higher productivity, better contributions from group members and increased group morale. The benefits of this are that the group members are encouraged to share their thoughts, democratic leadership can leader to better ideas and more creative solutions to problems. Group members also feel more involved and committed to projects, making them more likely to care about the end results. While democratic leadership has been described as the most effective leadership style, it does have some potential downsides. In situations where roles are unclear or time is of the essence, democratic leadership can lead to communication failures and uncompleted projects. In some cases, group members may not have the necessary knowledge or expertise to make quality contributions to the decision-making process.
Participative leadership is a style of leadership that involves all members of a team in identifying essential goals and developing procedures or strategies for reach those goals. From this perspective, participative leadership can be seen as a leadership style that relies heavily on the leader functioning as a facilitator rather than simply issuing orders or making assignments. One of the main benefits of participative leadership is that the process allows for the development of additional leaders who can serve the organisation at a later date. Because leaders who favour this style encourage active involvement on the part of everyone on the team, people often are able to express their creativity and demonstrate abilities and talents that would not be made apparent otherwise. One potential disadvantage of participate leadership is the time factor. This leadership style does often involve the need for more time before action is taken. This is only natural, since the very nature of participative leadership means allowing input from every member of the team. However, the extra time necessary for this process often leads to decisions that ultimately benefit everyone to a greater degree than faster decisions that are more limited.
Finally, Laissez-faire leadership is a type of leadership style in which leaders are hands-off and allow group members to make the decisions. Researchers have found that this is generally the leadership style that leads to the lowest productivity among group members. Laissez-faire leadership can be effective in situations where group members are highly skilled, motivated and capable of working on their own. While the conventional term for this style is 'laissez-faire' and implies a completely hands-off approach, many leaders still remain open and available to group members for consultation and feedback. Laissez-faire leadership is not ideal in situations where group members lack the knowledge or experience they need to complete tasks and make decisions. Some people are not good at setting their own deadlines, managing their own projects and solving problems on their own. In such situations, projects can go off-track and deadlines can be missed when team members do not get enough guidance or feedback from leaders.
Leadership and power are closely linked. People tend to follow those who are most powerful. But leaders have power for different reasons. Some are powerful because they alone have the ability to give you a bonus or a raise. Others are powerful because they can fire you, or assign you tasks you don't like. One of the most notable studies on power was conducted by social psychologists John French and Bertram Raven in 1959. They identified five bases of power, these are; Legitimate, this comes from the belief that a person has the right to make demands, and expect compliance and obedience from others. Reward, this results from one person's ability to compensate another for compliance. Expert, this is based on a person's superior skill and knowledge. Referent, this is the result of a person's perceived attractiveness, worthiness, and right to respect from others. Coercive, this comes from the belief that a person can punish others for not working hard enough for the team.
In any situation where a group of people are trying to achieve some goal, one or more of those people will emerge and act as a leader to the others. According to John Adair, there are three elements to all leadership situations. Firstly, the achievement of a goal or task. This may be the completion of a very practical activity or it may be a less tangible goal. We know that effective groups have clear goals shared by all members. Often the task is what brings the group together in the first place. Secondly, the group of people performing the task. It is likely that the task will only be achieved if all members of the group work together to the common good. Therefore, the group itself has to be understood as a whole in its own right. Finally, each individual member of the group involved in the task. While the group will take on a life of its own, individuals do not lose their own identity. Their needs as people must continue to be met if their allegiance to the group, and their motivation to achieve the task, is to be sustained. This approach is called "Action-Centred Leadership", it is centred on the actions of the leader. The leader has to balance the needs from each of the three elements. The effective leader is the one who keeps all three in balance. If any one element is ignored, the others are unlikely to succeed.
The Tannenbaum and Schmidt Continuum is a simple model of leadership theory which shows the relationship between the level of freedom that a manager chooses to give to a team, and the level of authority used by the manager. As the team's freedom is increased, so the manager's authority decreases. This is a positive way for both teams and managers to develop. While the Tannenbaum and Schmidt model concerns delegated freedom to a group, the principle of being able to apply different levels of delegated freedom closely relates to the 'levels of delegation' on the delegation page. As a manager, one of your responsibilities is to develop your team. You should delegate and ask a team to make its own decisions to varying degrees according to their abilities. There is a rising scale of levels of delegated freedom that you can use when working with your team.
| How well did you work as a team? | What would you improve? | What was good about our activity? | What should we do better next time? | How well do you think my contribution added to the team? | What did we not do so well? | Chris | I thought we worked well in parts. | Communication within the team. | It was good fun coming up with the idea. | Work on our communication skills. | | The detail of the work. | Natasha | Some members of the team worked well. | Making sure that everyone understands what they are doing. | I enjoyed the team work. | Make sure we work as a team from the start. | You were very good in helping people with what they needed to do. | Communicating with each other. | Adam | I thought the team worked well. | Communication in the team. | Trying to be better that the other teams. | Work for each other and not ourselves. | You got your work done. | Didn’t work as a team very well. | Michael | It could have been better. | Making sure the tasks are complete. | Trying to come up with a good product. | Do the work in more detail. | Helped others with their work. | Needed to talk about everything more. | Becky | We worked okay, but could have done better. | To do the work in more detail. | Coming up with the idea for a product. | Work on communication within the group. | Did well at creating the business plan. | Help each other out. | Joe | I thought we worked well. | Try and actually do the work. | Coming up with new ideas for the group. | Do the work better than how it was done. | Did your work well and quickly. | Communicate with each other more. |
From the questionnaire, the overall outcome was that everyone thought that we could have communicated as a team more, not by just talking to each other, but making sure that everyone knew what they were doing and that they were one hundred percent sure that they were happy with what they were doing.
Natasha did do this, but I think some members of the group lacked a little urgency when doing their work. Natasha, Adam and I worked very hard in trying to put together a detailed and satisfactory presentation for our product, having to do some other peoples work to make sure it was done. Michael, worked well but didn’t really turn up in class which made it difficult for us to know what exactly work he had done. Becky and Joe didn’t really make much contribution to the group, Becky put together some of the advertising and did a sufficient amount, but Joe did nothing to contribute to the presentation. Overall, the main outcome of how the team thought I contributed was good. They said that I worked well to bring together everyone’s information to create the business plan and that I helped them with anything they were struggling with. Myself, I thought that I could have worked a little harder on the business plan and make sure that it was in complete detail, but it was hard when I didn’t quite know what everyone had
done.
Conflict can be pretty much inevitable when you work with others. People have different viewpoints and under the right set of circumstances, those differences escalate to conflict. How you handle that conflict determines whether it works to the team's advantage or contributes to its demise. Conflict isn't necessarily a bad thing. Healthy and constructive conflict is a component of high functioning teams. Conflict arises from differences between people; the same differences that often make diverse teams more effective than those made up of people with similar experience. When people with varying viewpoints, experiences, skills, and opinions are tasked with a project or challenge, the combined effort can make a more successful team than what a group of similar individual could achieve. Team members must be open to these differences and not let them rise into full-blown disputes. When a team oversteps the mark of healthy difference of opinion, resolving conflict requires respect and patience. To be able to resolve this conflict, the team member must be able to acknowledge the conflict before it can be managed and resolved. The tendency is for people to ignore the first signs of conflict, which can then lead to it being a lot worse that it could be if it is acknowledged. For example, there was a little bit of conflict over the name of our snack group. Natasha, Becky, Adam and I all came up with the idea of inside ‘ose. Michael was not present for this particular session or a few sessions after that, but when he came back he was not happy with the name and wanted to change it to something else, but we had all decided that that was the name and we weren’t going to change it. So Natasha, our leader, said that it was final and he could have no say in the matter because he was not there. In my opinion I think that that is completely fair as if he was at the session for deciding the name, then he could have had an input but absence from the sessions made it fair for Natasha to tell him that he cannot have a say in the name. That was the only real conflict that we had in the group and we all worked well from there one.
M2 & D1
In this part of the assignment I shall be comparing the effectiveness of my snack group team with that of another team. The other team that I will be choosing is Manchester United football club. The leader of my snack group team was Natasha Rees, she was a very good team leader. She was considerate, passionate, understating and she had the drive to win. Natasha was the carrier of the group. Natasha set out each individual task to each person within the group and tried to make sure that she gave tasks to people to use their strengths. For example, Adam is very good at researching, so she gave him the job of market research so that he could find out about prices of competitors. Sir Alex Ferguson is the manager of Manchester United, he is one of the best leaders in the world at what he does, he is able to pick out players strengths and use them to his advantage, and play the right players in different games depending on who the opposition are. This is very similar to how Natasha worked, as she used the strengths of each team member to delegate tasks to each person.
Communication is an important part of teamwork. Open communication is a key part of good teamwork, as it allows team members to understand each other's point of view, to share ideas or to express feelings and to come up with ideas. Poor communication can be a major barrier to effective teamwork and trying to beat the communication barrier can be tough and it is not a good start for a team if they have to work on their communication skills before even tackling the task. Within our snack group the communication was on and off, as when we started the task, nobody was really working together and interlinking their task, everyone was just doing their own tasks and not telling others what they were doing. But, towards the end of the activity, we all came together to put our information together to make sure that everything was correct. This was quite tough as it was a bit of a mad rush to try and put everything together. Better communication skills at the start of the activity would have made it much easier. Manchester United have extremely good communication skills, each player work with another players week in week out, therefore allowing them to get to know how each other play and how they can use their own strengths to communicate with other players when in a match.
The balance of a team involves having people whose experience, skills, perspectives, interests and contributions complement one another, rather than duplicate or counteract each other. For example, it is no good having a team full of creative people who have lots of new ideas, but do not have the people who have the stamina and want to stick to the task to see those ideas through to completion. Similarly, a team that is full of people who are steady, strong workers but have little spark or creativity, will also struggle to work together. For example, Adam was looking at prices and market research on packaging, from this he was able to give Natasha information about packaging and types of design she could use. From this they were both able to work with Michael to so that he could come up with the advert for the product. Finally, I was then able to take this information off those three and put it into the business plan to bring it all together into one document. A team needs people who are prepared to risk conflict by challenging existing norms and assumptions, but, a team also needs its peacemakers, the people who set out how others in the group should be working. This is what Natasha did; she set the speed of how others should be working. Towards the end of the activity, some work hadn’t been finished, so Natasha took it into her own hands to finish the work that needed to be done. Manchester United have a very well balanced team, as they have the experienced players, which allow the younger and less experienced players to feed off them. A player of example is Ryan Giggs, who is a Manchester united veteran, but can still pull something out of the bag to win United a match.
A high-performance team can be defined as a group of people with specific roles and complementary talents and skills, aligned with and committed to a common purpose, which consistently show high levels of collaboration and innovation that produce superior results. The high-performance team is regarded as tight-knit, focused on their goal and nothing else. Team members are so devoted to their purpose that they will overcome any barrier to achieve the team's goals. Within the high-performance team, people are highly skilled and are able to change roles within the team. Also, leadership within the team is not necessarily in a single individual. Instead the leadership role is taken up by various team members, according to the need at that moment in time. High-performance teams have robust methods of resolving conflict efficiently, so that conflict does not become an inconvenience to achieving the team's goals. As a team, I do not think we could be defined as a ‘high-performance team’, as although we worked well together, we were not driven enough to complete the task in such depth. For us to have been more successful, we could have had a few different member of the team, as some didn’t really care about getting the tasks done and that is why Natasha, Adam and I had to do extra work. Manchester united can be called a ‘high performance team’ as all the players have complimentary talents and skills so that they are able to play off each other to their strengths and win matches and titles.
Assignment 3
P4
In this assignment I will be discussing our snack group, how well we worked as a team and how team working is very important.
Teamwork is defined in Webster's New World Dictionary as "a joint action by a group of people, in which each person subordinates his or her individual interests and opinions to the unity and efficiency of the group." This does not mean that the individual is not important anymore, but, it does mean that effective and efficient teamwork goes beyond individual accomplishments. The most effective teamwork is produced when all the individuals involved put their ideas together to work towards a common goal.
Our team leader in our snack group was Natasha Rees, in my …show more content…
opinion she was a very good leader. Firstly, communication is very important when working in a team, Natasha did that very well, and she asked everyone what they would like to do and took their ideas in and asked them if they would like to do any certain tasks and what she felt would be their strong points. Throughout the whole assignment she would help everyone with what they needed to do or if the were stuck. Also, as it came towards the deadline of the assignment, some of the members of the team hadn’t finished their work, so Natasha took the work into her own hands as the other members weren’t in to do the work and she did it herself to make sure that the team would pass the assignment. She was a very consistent, fair and understanding team leader.
Being a team leader is a difficult job, it requires confidence, determination to do what ever you can for the team, understanding and to make sure that everyone is happy to work towards one goal. But, there are many other aspects of being a good leader. Firstly, communication is one of the most important, because having good communication skills, you are able to give your team members good feedback and speak to them about anything you want, this will also be helpful when providing and receiving feedback and setting objectives, as you will be communicating with your team members about how well you are doing and how well they are doing and by speaking to your team members about what objectives they must complete. Planning is another aspect of being a good leader, because with a plan you can sometimes get things done quicker as you know exactly what you have to do, you just have to put yourself to the task of doing it. So far I feel the Natasha had all of these aspects when being the team leader. Next, teaming building is a huge part of a team coming together and knowing each other well enough so that they can work closely. Leading by example is the next skill of being a team leader, this is when you take things into your own hands and show the other members of the team how to do everything correctly and when your get on with your work how you are supposed to, in my opinion I feel that Natasha was very good at leading by example. Motivating your team is a very difficult skill to have when being a team leader, but it is very vital, as without motivation your team members might not feel any need to do the task that has been set for them. Consulting is also another skill that is very important, as being able to go to your team when you have a problem is very important as the leader cannot always make the decisions on their own, therefore going to consult with team member about what to do is very important. Also, monitoring is very important as a team leader as you want to know how well you are doing, to make sure that you speak to every member of the team to make sure that they are doing everything correctly. Preventing a resolving conflict is very important, as conflict within the team can easily bring the teams moral down, therefore as the team leader you must try and resolve the conflict and try and make sure nothing is damaged in terms of the team and the work. Finally, adapting leadership style according to situation, this is very tricky to do, as sometimes you are unsure of how your team members like to work, or what task has been set for your team to complete, as the most important thing is making sure everyone is happy but the work is still being done in an efficient way.
Within our team, there were no conflicts at all, as everyone worked well together and everyone was happy with what tasks they were set to complete. As Natasha made sure that everyone was happy and that they were doing something that they were good at and they enjoyed doing it.
P5 & P6
In this part of the assignment I will show you how to demonstrate working as part of a team towards achieving specific goals, dealing with any conflict or difficult situation as a team leader goals.
The definition of leadership is a person or thing that holds a dominant or superior position within its field, and is able to exercise a high degree of control or influence over others. A leader needs to be someone who is strong, understanding, and respectful and tries to make the right decisions of their team. There are different styles of a leader, autocratic, democratic, participative, and laissez-faire.
Firstly I will start with autocratic leadership, also known as authoritarian leadership, is a leadership style characterised by individual control over all decisions and little input from group members. Autocratic leaders typically make choices based on their own ideas and judgments and rarely accept advice from team members. Autocratic leadership involves absolute, authoritarian control over a group. There are benefits to this, as when decisions have to be made quickly, the leader will make the decision without asking anyone else, and this requires a strong leader in order to get things finished quickly and efficiently. While autocratic leadership can be beneficial at times, there are also many instances where this leadership style can be problematic. People who abuse an autocratic leadership style are often viewed as bossy, controlling and dictatorial, which can lead to resentment among group members. Because autocratic leaders make decisions without consulting the group, people in the group may dislike that they are unable to contribute ideas. Researchers have also found that autocratic leadership leads to a lack of creative solutions to problems, which can ultimately hurt the performance of the group.
Secondly, Democratic leadership, also known as participative leadership, is a type of leadership style in which members of the group take a more participative role in the decision-making process. Researchers have found that this learning style is usually one of the most effective and leaders to higher productivity, better contributions from group members and increased group morale. The benefits of this are that the group members are encouraged to share their thoughts, democratic leadership can leader to better ideas and more creative solutions to problems. Group members also feel more involved and committed to projects, making them more likely to care about the end results. While democratic leadership has been described as the most effective leadership style, it does have some potential downsides. In situations where roles are unclear or time is of the essence, democratic leadership can lead to communication failures and uncompleted projects. In some cases, group members may not have the necessary knowledge or expertise to make quality contributions to the decision-making process.
Participative leadership is a style of leadership that involves all members of a team in identifying essential goals and developing procedures or strategies for reach those goals. From this perspective, participative leadership can be seen as a leadership style that relies heavily on the leader functioning as a facilitator rather than simply issuing orders or making assignments. One of the main benefits of participative leadership is that the process allows for the development of additional leaders who can serve the organisation at a later date. Because leaders who favour this style encourage active involvement on the part of everyone on the team, people often are able to express their creativity and demonstrate abilities and talents that would not be made apparent otherwise. One potential disadvantage of participate leadership is the time factor. This leadership style does often involve the need for more time before action is taken. This is only natural, since the very nature of participative leadership means allowing input from every member of the team. However, the extra time necessary for this process often leads to decisions that ultimately benefit everyone to a greater degree than faster decisions that are more limited.
Finally, Laissez-faire leadership is a type of leadership style in which leaders are hands-off and allow group members to make the decisions. Researchers have found that this is generally the leadership style that leads to the lowest productivity among group members. Laissez-faire leadership can be effective in situations where group members are highly skilled, motivated and capable of working on their own. While the conventional term for this style is 'laissez-faire' and implies a completely hands-off approach, many leaders still remain open and available to group members for consultation and feedback. Laissez-faire leadership is not ideal in situations where group members lack the knowledge or experience they need to complete tasks and make decisions. Some people are not good at setting their own deadlines, managing their own projects and solving problems on their own. In such situations, projects can go off-track and deadlines can be missed when team members do not get enough guidance or feedback from leaders.
Leadership and power are closely linked. People tend to follow those who are most powerful. But leaders have power for different reasons. Some are powerful because they alone have the ability to give you a bonus or a raise. Others are powerful because they can fire you, or assign you tasks you don't like. One of the most notable studies on power was conducted by social psychologists John French and Bertram Raven in 1959. They identified five bases of power, these are; Legitimate, this comes from the belief that a person has the right to make demands, and expect compliance and obedience from others. Reward, this results from one person's ability to compensate another for compliance. Expert, this is based on a person's superior skill and knowledge. Referent, this is the result of a person's perceived attractiveness, worthiness, and right to respect from others. Coercive, this comes from the belief that a person can punish others for not working hard enough for the team.
In any situation where a group of people are trying to achieve some goal, one or more of those people will emerge and act as a leader to the others. According to John Adair, there are three elements to all leadership situations. Firstly, the achievement of a goal or task. This may be the completion of a very practical activity or it may be a less tangible goal. We know that effective groups have clear goals shared by all members. Often the task is what brings the group together in the first place. Secondly, the group of people performing the task. It is likely that the task will only be achieved if all members of the group work together to the common good. Therefore, the group itself has to be understood as a whole in its own right. Finally, each individual member of the group involved in the task. While the group will take on a life of its own, individuals do not lose their own identity. Their needs as people must continue to be met if their allegiance to the group, and their motivation to achieve the task, is to be sustained. This approach is called "Action-Centred Leadership", it is centred on the actions of the leader. The leader has to balance the needs from each of the three elements. The effective leader is the one who keeps all three in balance. If any one element is ignored, the others are unlikely to succeed.
The Tannenbaum and Schmidt Continuum is a simple model of leadership theory which shows the relationship between the level of freedom that a manager chooses to give to a team, and the level of authority used by the manager. As the team's freedom is increased, so the manager's authority decreases. This is a positive way for both teams and managers to develop. While the Tannenbaum and Schmidt model concerns delegated freedom to a group, the principle of being able to apply different levels of delegated freedom closely relates to the 'levels of delegation' on the delegation page. As a manager, one of your responsibilities is to develop your team. You should delegate and ask a team to make its own decisions to varying degrees according to their abilities. There is a rising scale of levels of delegated freedom that you can use when working with your team.
| How well did you work as a team? | What would you improve? | What was good about our activity? | What should we do better next time? | How well do you think my contribution added to the team? | What did we not do so well? | Chris | I thought we worked well in parts. | Communication within the team. | It was good fun coming up with the idea. | Work on our communication skills. | | The detail of the work. | Natasha | Some members of the team worked well. | Making sure that everyone understands what they are doing. | I enjoyed the team work. | Make sure we work as a team from the start. | You were very good in helping people with what they needed to do. | Communicating with each other. | Adam | I thought the team worked well. | Communication in the team. | Trying to be better that the other teams. | Work for each other and not ourselves. | You got your work done. | Didn’t work as a team very well. | Michael | It could have been better. | Making sure the tasks are complete. | Trying to come up with a good product. | Do the work in more detail. | Helped others with their work. | Needed to talk about everything more. | Becky | We worked okay, but could have done better. | To do the work in more detail. | Coming up with the idea for a product. | Work on communication within the group. | Did well at creating the business plan. | Help each other out. | Joe | I thought we worked well. | Try and actually do the work. | Coming up with new ideas for the group. | Do the work better than how it was done. | Did your work well and quickly. | Communicate with each other more. |
From the questionnaire, the overall outcome was that everyone thought that we could have communicated as a team more, not by just talking to each other, but making sure that everyone knew what they were doing and that they were one hundred percent sure that they were happy with what they were doing.
Natasha did do this, but I think some members of the group lacked a little urgency when doing their work. Natasha, Adam and I worked very hard in trying to put together a detailed and satisfactory presentation for our product, having to do some other peoples work to make sure it was done. Michael, worked well but didn’t really turn up in class which made it difficult for us to know what exactly work he had done. Becky and Joe didn’t really make much contribution to the group, Becky put together some of the advertising and did a sufficient amount, but Joe did nothing to contribute to the presentation. Overall, the main outcome of how the team thought I contributed was good. They said that I worked well to bring together everyone’s information to create the business plan and that I helped them with anything they were struggling with. Myself, I thought that I could have worked a little harder on the business plan and make sure that it was in complete detail, but it was hard when I didn’t quite know what everyone had
done.
Conflict can be pretty much inevitable when you work with others. People have different viewpoints and under the right set of circumstances, those differences escalate to conflict. How you handle that conflict determines whether it works to the team's advantage or contributes to its demise. Conflict isn't necessarily a bad thing. Healthy and constructive conflict is a component of high functioning teams. Conflict arises from differences between people; the same differences that often make diverse teams more effective than those made up of people with similar experience. When people with varying viewpoints, experiences, skills, and opinions are tasked with a project or challenge, the combined effort can make a more successful team than what a group of similar individual could achieve. Team members must be open to these differences and not let them rise into full-blown disputes. When a team oversteps the mark of healthy difference of opinion, resolving conflict requires respect and patience. To be able to resolve this conflict, the team member must be able to acknowledge the conflict before it can be managed and resolved. The tendency is for people to ignore the first signs of conflict, which can then lead to it being a lot worse that it could be if it is acknowledged. For example, there was a little bit of conflict over the name of our snack group. Natasha, Becky, Adam and I all came up with the idea of inside ‘ose. Michael was not present for this particular session or a few sessions after that, but when he came back he was not happy with the name and wanted to change it to something else, but we had all decided that that was the name and we weren’t going to change it. So Natasha, our leader, said that it was final and he could have no say in the matter because he was not there. In my opinion I think that that is completely fair as if he was at the session for deciding the name, then he could have had an input but absence from the sessions made it fair for Natasha to tell him that he cannot have a say in the name. That was the only real conflict that we had in the group and we all worked well from there one.
M2 & D1
In this part of the assignment I shall be comparing the effectiveness of my snack group team with that of another team. The other team that I will be choosing is Manchester United football club. The leader of my snack group team was Natasha Rees, she was a very good team leader. She was considerate, passionate, understating and she had the drive to win. Natasha was the carrier of the group. Natasha set out each individual task to each person within the group and tried to make sure that she gave tasks to people to use their strengths. For example, Adam is very good at researching, so she gave him the job of market research so that he could find out about prices of competitors. Sir Alex Ferguson is the manager of Manchester United, he is one of the best leaders in the world at what he does, he is able to pick out players strengths and use them to his advantage, and play the right players in different games depending on who the opposition are. This is very similar to how Natasha worked, as she used the strengths of each team member to delegate tasks to each person.
Communication is an important part of teamwork. Open communication is a key part of good teamwork, as it allows team members to understand each other's point of view, to share ideas or to express feelings and to come up with ideas. Poor communication can be a major barrier to effective teamwork and trying to beat the communication barrier can be tough and it is not a good start for a team if they have to work on their communication skills before even tackling the task. Within our snack group the communication was on and off, as when we started the task, nobody was really working together and interlinking their task, everyone was just doing their own tasks and not telling others what they were doing. But, towards the end of the activity, we all came together to put our information together to make sure that everything was correct. This was quite tough as it was a bit of a mad rush to try and put everything together. Better communication skills at the start of the activity would have made it much easier. Manchester United have extremely good communication skills, each player work with another players week in week out, therefore allowing them to get to know how each other play and how they can use their own strengths to communicate with other players when in a match.
The balance of a team involves having people whose experience, skills, perspectives, interests and contributions complement one another, rather than duplicate or counteract each other. For example, it is no good having a team full of creative people who have lots of new ideas, but do not have the people who have the stamina and want to stick to the task to see those ideas through to completion. Similarly, a team that is full of people who are steady, strong workers but have little spark or creativity, will also struggle to work together. For example, Adam was looking at prices and market research on packaging, from this he was able to give Natasha information about packaging and types of design she could use. From this they were both able to work with Michael to so that he could come up with the advert for the product. Finally, I was then able to take this information off those three and put it into the business plan to bring it all together into one document. A team needs people who are prepared to risk conflict by challenging existing norms and assumptions, but, a team also needs its peacemakers, the people who set out how others in the group should be working. This is what Natasha did; she set the speed of how others should be working. Towards the end of the activity, some work hadn’t been finished, so Natasha took it into her own hands to finish the work that needed to be done. Manchester United have a very well balanced team, as they have the experienced players, which allow the younger and less experienced players to feed off them. A player of example is Ryan Giggs, who is a Manchester united veteran, but can still pull something out of the bag to win United a match.
A high-performance team can be defined as a group of people with specific roles and complementary talents and skills, aligned with and committed to a common purpose, which consistently show high levels of collaboration and innovation that produce superior results. The high-performance team is regarded as tight-knit, focused on their goal and nothing else. Team members are so devoted to their purpose that they will overcome any barrier to achieve the team's goals. Within the high-performance team, people are highly skilled and are able to change roles within the team. Also, leadership within the team is not necessarily in a single individual. Instead the leadership role is taken up by various team members, according to the need at that moment in time. High-performance teams have robust methods of resolving conflict efficiently, so that conflict does not become an inconvenience to achieving the team's goals. As a team, I do not think we could be defined as a ‘high-performance team’, as although we worked well together, we were not driven enough to complete the task in such depth. For us to have been more successful, we could have had a few different member of the team, as some didn’t really care about getting the tasks done and that is why Natasha, Adam and I had to do extra work. Manchester united can be called a ‘high performance team’ as all the players have complimentary talents and skills so that they are able to play off each other to their strengths and win matches and titles.