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
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