Week three's activities and resources were based around Lencioni’s (2002) 5 disfunctions of a team, behaviours and communication. Bruce Tuckman's Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing model was also investigated.
Unfortunately, before I had the chance research these properly the group was informed that our team leader had decided to leave the group. After absorbing this surprising information and turn of events the remainder of the group decided that we would happily continue with the project if allowed.
With the confirmation that we could continue as a quartet, our attention now turned back towards restructuring the team and continuing with our project. We used our weekly meeting to establish a new team leader as well as redistribute the workload accordingly.
Upon reflection and working through the week's materials, I asked myself whether it would have been possible to prevent the whole situation from happening?
Roles and Skills
Belbin explains that 'in order for a team to be successful there must be a diverse yet balanced group of individuals that fulfil different ‘team roles’ and 'must develop the right mix of skills' (Belbin 1991).
Complementary skills are needed for a team to work cohesively and effectively, these team skill requirements fall into three categories. (Belbin, 1991):
Technical or functional expertise
Problem-solving and decision-making skills
Interpersonal skills
Using the above above categories as a starting point, I believe that original group had a good mix of expertise and technical skills to complete the given task, but initial cracks may have started to form with regards to our collective decision making and communication.
From my own point of view, I felt I was able to communicate with everyone freely on an individual basis - but believe that initial group meetings were a struggle, due to time zones and outside commitments combined with a lack of trust (due to being unfamiliar with each other) and also not wanting to upset anyone.
Lencioni (2012) states that 'the desire to preserve artificial harmony stifles the occurrence of productive due to ideological conflict. Teams that are lacking trust are incapable of engaging in an unfiltered, passionate debate about key issues, causing situations where team conflict can easily turn into veiled discussions and back channel comments. '
As a consequence of this, there was confusion between some of the roles and skills within the group and caused conflict between myself and another team member due to the overlapping of our perceived roles. This was latterly discussed privately between the the two of us, and we were able to define our roles and responsibilities more clearly.
This could have been fixed earlier if we all had the confidence to discuss our potential concerns earlier - which may have been possible if we had more time to get to know each other as a group, either via the pre arranged mixers or by integrating some more team bonding activities.
It's also possible that early meetings suffered from a lack of purpose or identity and focused more on the agenda than actually progressing with the project due to everyone's desire to keep everything harmonious and may have contributed to a stuck team syndrome.
This in turn could have led to a perceived lack of commitment and too much ambiguity which in turn caused internal disgruntlement and caused the team leader to leave.
Interestingly though, Lencioni (2012) states that it is: the role of the leader to "confront difficult issues" and it could be implied that our team leader could have intervened sooner and confronted these issues - but this would assume that the team leader had the appropriate skills and confidence for their team role (Belbin 1991).
The diagram below shows Belbin's (1991) Nine Team Roles and feel that each member of the team contained a mixture of these within their behaviours, however it's now apparent that we were perhaps missing someone to really take on the co-ordinator role and this led to our initial issues.
(Image 1: Belbin's Nine Team Roles 1991)
Whilst I'm not sure that we could have stopped the team leader from leaving the group, due to them struggling with the role that they chose and the difficulties of communicating effectively whilst remote working.
I also believe that we were unable to respond and potentially fix any of these issues, as we (the rest of the team) were not communicated early enough with - with both our team leader and supervisor - and in turn we couldn't make any adjustments (if possible).
On a positive note, I'm confident this actually brought the rest of team closer together, helped us to focus on the task and brought out the co-ordinator that we needed within the group.
References:
Daft, R.L. and Lengel R.H. 1986. 'Organizational Information Requirements, Media Richness and Structural Design'. Management Science, 32(5), 554-571.
Katzenbach, J.R. and Smith, D.K. (2015). The wisdom of teams : creating the high-performance organization. Boston: Harvard Business Review Press.
LENCIONI, P. 2012. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. Team Assessment. San Francisco, Calif: Pfeiffer.
MindTools (2009). Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing. [online] Mindtools.com. Available at: https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newLDR_86.htm. [Accessed on 14/06/21]
PARKER, A. 2o21. Effective Communication. Available at : https://flex.falmouth.ac.uk/courses/913/pages/week-3-effective-communication?module_item_id=50031 [Accessed on 14/06/21]
R Meredith Belbin (2010). Team Roles At Work. Routledge.
Xquadrant. (2021). The 5 Dysfunctions Of A Team: summary, review and hidden limitations. [online] Available at: https://xquadrant.com/5-dysfunctions-of-a-team/ [Accessed 3 Aug. 2021].
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