Team Roles
Everyone on a team always has something to offer. It is up to the team members and leadership to identify what those qualities are that can be employed for the benefit of the team. Each person's role should, at a minimum, contribute to the larger picture, and ideally, be a collaborative inspiring addition. The issue is that not everyone knows how to become part of a team, or know how to inject themselves into a collaborative environment, physical, or virtual. Leadership has to decide the best course in employing their employees, so they are working a task, or set of tasks effectively as a single cohesive, team-building unit.
Whetten & Cameron (2016) state that task-facilitating roles include direction giving, information giving, information seeking, elaborating, urging, monitoring, process analyzing, reality testing, enforcing and summarizing. By, with, and through these role types, leaders must know what role to employ at the right time and with the right employees that will enable the team members to take positive action from the chosen facilitation type.
The great thing about knowing how to employ these facilitation types, is that when employed properly and effectively, they can lead to team-building phenomena. Brindley, Walti & Blaschke (2009) share [as cited in Juwah, 2006] Juwah has found that allowing learners to form their own groups and select their own topics facilitates socializing within groups and positive group dynamics. I feel providing each employee with the minimum amount of tools needed to initiate a task, forces them to look to each other, as well as outside of themselves for resources, and become their own task-facilitators.
In building relationships within the work environment, leaders must have a well-developed set of personal and interpersonal skills in order to identify personality types, and effectively approach their employees on a personal level. However, there are numerous tactics in which to conduct relationship building, as a large number of factors come into play that require consideration. In relationship building roles, Whetten and Cameron (2016) offer that leaders can facilitate this process amongst the team by maintaining unity and cohesion, facilitate participation and empowerment, show support to team members, and provide feedback to team and team member performance. During this period, team members must be willing to be cooperative, conform to standards and expectations, become more interpersonally attractive, and ignore disagreements (Whetten & Cameron, 2016). McNamara (n.d.) offers utilizing team-building activities to support trust and working relationships. I believe these concepts of relationship building between employee and leader, as well as between team members are intertwined.
As a Mobility Instructor in the military, I was responsible for developing a two week course that would introduce and train the incoming troop on vehicle and terrain familiarization. The troop size was so large, compared to how many instructors I had, it was forced to break up the group. It became a manageable ten to one ratio (student to instructor). Under these circumstances, I was able to assign different jobs to each person in order to facilitate the class schedule as a whole. Here, each team member had a responsibility, and everyone else depended on that person to be prepared, and execute their job effectively. For those team members that performed less than stellar, I quietly provided them with a task where they outshined others within their team, regaining confidence and improving reputation. I found that if I facilitated in task execution in a relationship-building way, I was able to enable the team to take action with each other to successfully accomplish their goals. The natural outcome was a self-propelling, team-building dynamic based on trust.
References:
Brindley, J. E., Walti, C., & Blaschke, L. M. (2009, June). Creating effective collaborative learning groups in an online environment. The International Review of Research In Open and Distributed Learning, 10. Retrieved from http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/675/1271
McNamara, C. (n.d.). All about team building: How to build highly effective teams. Retrieved from http://managementhelp.org/groups/team-building.htm
Whetten, D. A. & Cameron, K. S. (2016). Developing management skills (9th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson Education Ltd.
No comments:
Post a Comment