For this exercise, we’re to take an experience with a team and describe how that team when through the five stages of team life. Luckily, I have experienced this recently, as I had to create a new team to handle production support for Cricket Wireless. While we didn’t make it through all the five stages naturally, we eventually came to the end of the five stages and now are functioning as a total team and unit.
Team Creation We found that as a company, we were missing a team to support the applications we used as part of our infrastructure. My leader came to me and asked if I would be willing to create a team to take these support roles and turn them into a viable organization. The first thing I did was set out to hire ten people for the …show more content…
None of these individuals had ever worked together before nor had they worked for Cricket. They all were the same level and started out on an even playing field. Our first meeting was a team building exercise where we all spent the day outlining our team scope and function. I led this, of course, but I wanted the team to feel like they helped in the creation process. The important part was for the team to become familiar with themselves (Charrier, 1972). We started off with introductions and allowed the team to start working together towards creating a charter and scope for the team. While I gave a framework, I allowed people to build off the framework. It gave me a great opportunity to see how the team interacted and who was starting to step up into a leadership role. Right away, it became evident that three people were leading and taking charge of the exercise. One of the funny things was how they started to pair off based more on age than on experience or interests. There were three distinct groups formed and it seemed that age was a key focus. My concern was that groupthink would occur during the task of creating a scope during the polite phase. Groupthink is when the consensus is met for just the sake of agreeing (“Improving Group Dynamics”, 2016), and that’s not what I wanted. Now we started the long process of defining why we are …show more content…
In having them work together to define the scope, I basically had them create the part of “why were are here.” The major problem I had was my three different cliques needed to all flow in the same direction of the scope we had defined. “Why are we here” seemed to be more of an individual thought at this time instead of a group thought. One thing I did start to see, and Charrier (1972) defined it well, is the individual hidden agenda’s come into play. As they all were hired as contractors, they weren’t yet full time employees. A couple of them started actively seeking recognition to help them rise above the others and that can lead to more issues in the team dynamic (“Improving Group Dynamics”, 2016). It was evident that one of the leaders purely had his own agenda ahead of my own, so I was forced to adjust the team down to 9 members, and look for another to take his place. I found that after that action, the team was more focused on the team goals, and people started working together more. I still had two people who were looking to be leaders and that took us into the bid for power.
Bid for Power As a leader, this was actually a hard part to stay out of. Looking back, this honestly wasn’t a very difficult portion of the team building. Charrier (1972) does express that this can be a trying time for the team as the bid for power might cause aggression, but it honestly wasn’t that difficult of a period for the team. I’m not
Team Creation We found that as a company, we were missing a team to support the applications we used as part of our infrastructure. My leader came to me and asked if I would be willing to create a team to take these support roles and turn them into a viable organization. The first thing I did was set out to hire ten people for the …show more content…
None of these individuals had ever worked together before nor had they worked for Cricket. They all were the same level and started out on an even playing field. Our first meeting was a team building exercise where we all spent the day outlining our team scope and function. I led this, of course, but I wanted the team to feel like they helped in the creation process. The important part was for the team to become familiar with themselves (Charrier, 1972). We started off with introductions and allowed the team to start working together towards creating a charter and scope for the team. While I gave a framework, I allowed people to build off the framework. It gave me a great opportunity to see how the team interacted and who was starting to step up into a leadership role. Right away, it became evident that three people were leading and taking charge of the exercise. One of the funny things was how they started to pair off based more on age than on experience or interests. There were three distinct groups formed and it seemed that age was a key focus. My concern was that groupthink would occur during the task of creating a scope during the polite phase. Groupthink is when the consensus is met for just the sake of agreeing (“Improving Group Dynamics”, 2016), and that’s not what I wanted. Now we started the long process of defining why we are …show more content…
In having them work together to define the scope, I basically had them create the part of “why were are here.” The major problem I had was my three different cliques needed to all flow in the same direction of the scope we had defined. “Why are we here” seemed to be more of an individual thought at this time instead of a group thought. One thing I did start to see, and Charrier (1972) defined it well, is the individual hidden agenda’s come into play. As they all were hired as contractors, they weren’t yet full time employees. A couple of them started actively seeking recognition to help them rise above the others and that can lead to more issues in the team dynamic (“Improving Group Dynamics”, 2016). It was evident that one of the leaders purely had his own agenda ahead of my own, so I was forced to adjust the team down to 9 members, and look for another to take his place. I found that after that action, the team was more focused on the team goals, and people started working together more. I still had two people who were looking to be leaders and that took us into the bid for power.
Bid for Power As a leader, this was actually a hard part to stay out of. Looking back, this honestly wasn’t a very difficult portion of the team building. Charrier (1972) does express that this can be a trying time for the team as the bid for power might cause aggression, but it honestly wasn’t that difficult of a period for the team. I’m not