A520.9.3 RB Course Reflections

This course could have been much more interactive and provided me with good tools with feedback.  The workbook encompassed so much and had so many good tools to add to my toolkit.  The courseware could have provided so much to my framework that I could have used, in my professional and personal life.  My leadership framework needs lots of work as I try to figure out how to make the transition from a tactical leader to a strategic thinker. 


This course produced many fruits that I have harvested for my time as a leader.  Being a leader is difficult, it does take a village but it also takes a thorough investigation into the scholarship of leading.  In this course I, garnered several key aspects that I can use in my personal and professional life managing stress source selection, building relationship and team building.  

Life is stressful and leadership can be really stressful at time.  It is important to identify the types of stressors that are impacting me or my personnel.  For examples is there an encounter stress with conflicting roles or is the stressor to be a situational dependent.  Working on the identification, I can use different techniques to help distress the member.  Usually just simply understanding the conflict helps me help to defuse what is going on and bring down the tension.  Another key take away from this course has been building relationships.  For years and years I was told that I could not connect to people and that my interpersonal skills needed help.  This course provides me with some key tools that I can use to improve this.  Often times in my profession it can be difficult to express accurate and trustworthy supportive communication.

Finally team building, I love working in a team and I especially love leading teams but this takes time and patience.  A team is only as strong as the sum of the parts (Jones, 2012).  There are several models on the stages of development however the most comprehensive is that model brought to masses in 1965 by Tuckman.  He described a team formation into four stages: storming, norming, storming and performing (Tuckman & Jensen, 2010).  During the forming stage roles are being put into place and members trying to be organized structure and members are attempting to understand the mission tasks, the rules and the boundaries (Tuckman, 2001).  New individual cycle into the organization and the roles and responsivities of the team are not clear in the dimensions of team empowerment and meaningfulness and meaning begins to breakdown.  The next stage is norming, this is the normal everyday grind of the tasks and the mission.  It is during this stage when the members start to normalize their strengths and weaknesses of the team and grow as impact and self-efficacy rise.  This will of course, be harmful as diversity and perspectives can be lost in the mix of groupthink and task-orientation (Wheeten & Cameron, 2016).  The next stage is the storming, it is during this stage that members have realized their inherent loss of identity and conflicts arise between in the dimensions of empowerment and role identification.  Individual goals and needs tend to trump the team goals and tempers flare (Miller, 2003).  Personal consequence and potency begin to erode away trust and autonomy.  It is critical that strong leadership and team empowerment stay the course through this stage of team development.  Finally, after weathering the “storm” a team could actually start performing as a cohesive unit while protecting the engaged leader/follower and the roles of the members.  Very few companies can sustain this for long periods of time and unfortunately, teams will go through struggles.  This can be short lived because of positive deviance, team members will avoid falling back into the previous stages (Wheeten & Cameron, 2016).  Strong leadership and positive members of the social groups can help forge a strong team that survives the waxing and waning of team development.    

References

Miller, D. L. (2003). The stages of group development: A retrospective study of dynamic team processes. Canadian Journal of Administrative Sciences, 20(2), 121

Team role. (2013). In G. T. Kurian, The AMA dictionary of business and management. New York, NY: AMACOM, Publishing Division of the American Management Association.

Tuckman, B. W., & Jensen, M. A. C. (2010). Stages of small-group development Revisited1. Group Facilitation, (10), 43-48 

Tuckman, B. W. (2001). Developmental sequence in small groups. Group Facilitation, (3), 66

Whetten, D. A., & Cameron, K. S. (2016). Developing Management Skills (Ninth Edition). Harlow, UK: Pearson Education  

A520.8.3 Team Roles

The roles of the team members are a crucial component to building a successful team. This includes the leader and the followers, each needs to understand their purpose.  In any professional team sport, there are positions on the field that must be filled each adding to the single goal.  It is not the individual that makes the outcomes of team but rather the whole team, therefore it is important during team developmental process and repair to correctly link the members up to appropriate engaged roles (Belbin, 2011).  Belbin (1976) identified nine roles of members of a team: plant, coordinator, sharper, team-worker, completer, implementer, investigator, specialist, evaluator.  Each of roles can be further broken into two distinct types those that support the teams mission and those that engage the relationship process internal to the team (Wheeten & Cameron, 2016).  Task orientation roles include the completer, the specialists, the plant, the evaluator.  Task oriented roles tend to focus more on the outcome of the team and production, many major corporations use this successful model to push production.  

In my professional career I tend to play key roles in leadership, I am normally the coordinator or the specialist.  I think that roles change depending on the makeup of the team and the objectives of the day.  While I serve as the coordinator role I am seen as the extrovert leader that is positive and has self-control throughout all stages of team development.  I actively try to clarify goals, rules and boundaries in the mission.  It is during this role where I reach out to the other members and delegate, delegate and delegate.  It is easier for me to delegate than to actually perform mission.  As a coordinator I work on collaboration throughout team roles.  Finding the right skills for the right task without over tasking.   

Throughout my career I have to turn to my other role as a specialist.  This is my introvert, narrowly focused self for the betterment of the mission.  It is during this role where I focus in on solving the problem for myself in the team, though benefiting the whole.  For example, I was stationed at a laboratory for several months to develop a new system.  During this time I was self-starting and dedicated to the task; I preformed this task with very little guidance or direction.  As a specialist, I deliver products to the leadership, while I might collaborate with other specialist my focus is contributing to the teams' mission.  

Neither of these roles is wrong.  They each serve the team in their own way.  Both of these roles are task-oriented and I recognize that this is a deficiency as neither is personality focused.  Throughout this course I hope that I can use the tools that I learn to fulfill different roles.  There is so much more that I have to adapt to be able to fulfill new roles in my teams.            

References

Belbin, R. M., Aston, B. R., & Mottram, R. D. (1976). Building effective management teams. Journal of General Management, 3(3), 23-29.

Belbin, R. M. (2011). Management teams: Why they succeed or fail. In J. Law, Business: the ultimate resource (3rd ed.). London, UK: A&C Black

Oke, A. E., Olatunji, S. O., Awodele, A. O., Akinola, J. A., & Kuma-Agbenyo, M. (2016). importance of team roles composition to success of construction projects. International Journal of Construction Project Management, 8(2), 141.

Whetten, D. A., & Cameron, K. S. (2016). Developing Management Skills (Ninth Edition). Harlow, UK: Pearson Education