The Five Dysfunction of a Team addresses those impediments that can prevent a group of people from working effectively and efficiently together towards a goal. My experience as a member of a Cornerstone formation team last year exemplifies how those obstacles make team work almost impossible and definitely unpleasant. I will summarize that experience and evaluate it in terms of the five dysfunctions explained in the book, ending with my assessment and recommendation on how our group could have overcome the dysfunctions we experienced. In the fall of 2014 I had only just moved into the Moscow area and joined a church close to home. Looking meet people and anxious to find a Catholic women’s group to join I began involving myself in different
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Her emotional intelligence was surprisingly low for a woman who moved around so much and needed to fit into communities quickly and greatly contributed to the retardation of normal group processes. I’m as much surprised at my own behavior as I am hers. In reflecting back on this experience there are several ways that I could have helped the group overcome some of these dysfunctions. In helping to build trust I could have recognized and faced my own dysfunctions at the beginning. I hate conflicts based on behavior. To call someone out on inappropriate behavior is difficult for me. Conflict about my motives concerned me as well, was I unhappy because I wasn’t leading this group and had a different leadership style or was it because we were ineffective in realizing our goal? I’m also clear about my own strengths and weakness when operating in a group and I could have facilitated a discussion so that we all could know each other’s as well. In order to help our team confront our fear of conflict, appointing myself to be the one to call out sensitive issues and force members to work through would have been a sound idea. It would have been important to help them see why working through the conflict would be necessary. Although we took the time for regular progress reviews, deadlines and interim deadlines were never set that would have helped us to determine if we were on track to accomplish our objectives and help with keeping each other accountable. In the future, I would be comfortable taking charge of encouraging the setting of deadlines and providing a summary of them for the group each
Her emotional intelligence was surprisingly low for a woman who moved around so much and needed to fit into communities quickly and greatly contributed to the retardation of normal group processes. I’m as much surprised at my own behavior as I am hers. In reflecting back on this experience there are several ways that I could have helped the group overcome some of these dysfunctions. In helping to build trust I could have recognized and faced my own dysfunctions at the beginning. I hate conflicts based on behavior. To call someone out on inappropriate behavior is difficult for me. Conflict about my motives concerned me as well, was I unhappy because I wasn’t leading this group and had a different leadership style or was it because we were ineffective in realizing our goal? I’m also clear about my own strengths and weakness when operating in a group and I could have facilitated a discussion so that we all could know each other’s as well. In order to help our team confront our fear of conflict, appointing myself to be the one to call out sensitive issues and force members to work through would have been a sound idea. It would have been important to help them see why working through the conflict would be necessary. Although we took the time for regular progress reviews, deadlines and interim deadlines were never set that would have helped us to determine if we were on track to accomplish our objectives and help with keeping each other accountable. In the future, I would be comfortable taking charge of encouraging the setting of deadlines and providing a summary of them for the group each