Team workingness

Teamwork its essential vital, from comic book superhero teams to super groups. It’s key in everyone’s life and most people have once had to placed in team work situation. It’s all well and good but the question is what you do when conflict and trouble appears?

The question to this seemingly rhetorical question is structure and organisation. Well this is what came across during our lecture today. Well more specifically organising the specific points:

• Contact- From the moment you say hi it’s key to create a strong contact system with your team from giving out contact details in case of emergency or organising meeting for guess what? contact or a better word communication.
• Assigning roles and a purpose- This is about ensuring that this most potential is dripped out the team by assigning roles their comfortable with and basically trying to sum the actual goal your team is trying to achieve. Like for example the production of a high quality magazine.
• Conflict and penalties- It’s natural that conflict will arise in some groups and some cases it could be just or create a better end result if that passion is re-directed re-productively. To help do this it could be key to set rules which could help direct conflict to more a productive conclusion. To do this it would be an idea to set up rules or a forum for people to express their thoughts with the group and let it be expressed in a more productive manner.
• The ‘passenger’ member – It’s a cruel term but I think it may be fair comment to say that in some teams you get one or two members which don’t particularly pull their weight in their time. To combat this the ideas we produced were to offer incentives for participation, i.e. a good reference after the exercise is completed or using contact details to try and find out why their not pulling their weight.

Ok now here’s a little back story about when I was in a tough team work situation and how I solved it and ideas on what I could have done better. Back in college our course group was assigned the task to re-brand the colleges hair and beauty saloon, were given the chance to put our names forward for our preferred positions and work in small groups on different areas of the task, I assigned to design which was pretty awesome, however what the rest of my class didn’t think was awesome was the fact that our project leader was not everyone’s first choice and most thought it was a terrible mistake.

Not before long the project leader was clearly not suited to the task due to her unorganised treatment of our tasks and everyone back to rebel and unproductively complain. Being the quiet kid of the group no one really listened to me so I went someone they would, the most intellectual and liked member of the group and persuaded him to create a structure where each part of the group had an organised plan which worked around each other, in conclusion turned out quite well and everyone got a pat on the back.

So now I’m going to quote Michael Preston-shoot’s ‘towards an anti value frame’ (Houdmill,2007) and how I could have applied to my situation.

1. Respect- If I had tried to promote respect for my team leader maybe people would have a better relationship with each other and things could have turned out even more amazing.
2. Self determination- If I had been more vocal and determined about trying to promote a stronger relationship with our team leader communication would have better and the future of everyone relationship with the project leader would have been stronger.
3. Individualisation- If I shown the group that since we were a team and everybody important in the college was watching that maybe if we put petty complaints aside and work for the greater good.
4. Maximising use of supports in the community- If I had looked outside our group and tried to someone who was used to deal with conflicts in the team somehow it would have salvaged the groups relationship with the project leader.