Contemporary Theory and Mgt Essays

Submitted By navilled
Words: 1745
Pages: 7

Rather than presenting my views on some random topic I have decided to present my views on how this class has helped me to overcome one of my weaknesses to be a team player and how it changed my ideas towards a group. I have put some of my personal experience to elaborate the situation.
As a team we had been given many activities in the class. Sometimes we had to role play and get success in our motives, sometimes we had to decide as a team, what should we present as an OD consultant. I wanted to mainly discuss about each and every experience that I had during the class and specifically about the case study which we completed as team. How this course has changed my view towards team efforts instead of an individual as for which I have always lobbied. Our team has grown in many ways since the start of Module. In our first few meetings, each member seemed pretty reserved as none of us had worked together prior to this Module. Meetings took a very long time as we would often show up with no set formal agenda. Everyone tried to pitch in and help with every task and it was obvious that each member intended to do their fair share of work. At times, this was great, but often, it used up valuable time as we were always trying to make sure everyone was included in every task. Reviewing of our results after couple of weeks showed that we had many overlapping personality roles and yet only had one strong facilitator and organizer role. Many of the conflict issues on our team involved not only differing opinions, but emotional attachments as well. Thus some of our disagreements were not simply over "facts" but personal feelings and ways of communicating. We began to have to deal with each other with kid gloves as it was apparent that there were some cultural and interpersonal hurdles we would need to tackle before we really worked as a team. Some of our team members felt disconnected as a result of their suggestions being ignored or tossed aside as irrelevant. Trust was an underlying problem for possibly 90% of the problems we were having and it was hurting our ability to work efficiently.

Seeing as we were having problems with time management, trust, and efficiency, we wanted to build a more streamlined process of getting things done. We began by structuring our roles and goals at the beginning of each meeting so that we would be cognizant of time and stay on track. Spending time during evening after class, class breaks, and lunches allowed us to feel more comfortable with each other, which allowed us to enjoy our meetings more. We began to bond as a team once we were able to laugh at ourselves and openly admit our mistakes.

One of the biggest improvements in our team structure came when we began breaking up our team into units for our case study and each units were given specific part of the case study, e.g we wanted to analyze the case from both point of view so we divided ourselves into two units to analyze the opposite sides and had a conference call to discuss our findings. And then the units swap their positions to read the other side of the story this was the turning point. After this drill we were able to come to a conclusion which was never happening. We now trusted each of our team members to put forth their best efforts in their respective product lines. After each decision session, we took 10 minutes for each group to come together and teach the other group what they have thought that needs to be presented.

This allowed us to all be on the same page with the whole discussion we were going to do in front of the class. This also helped us share best practices; we thought it might help the other group. The changes we made on the project proved to be useful with our efficiency allowing each team member a chance to play a big role on a more micro level.

Our team improved most in its time management. This was tied to trusting each other more and splitting up our work. We also improved as we