Document Type

Closed Project

Publication Date

Spring 2019

Instructor

Charles Weber

Course Title

Communications and Team Building

Course Number

ETM 522

Subjects

Technology -- Management, Information technology -- Strategic aspects, Orgnizational behavior

Abstract

The team building and communication class focused on the dynamics of the team and taught us how to perform better in a team in order to deliver the best results and interact effectively with our team members. We were a team of 4 – Ali, Anju, Jose, and Priyanka.

Our diverse backgrounds in terms of nationalities, gender, experiences, and personalities made our team equation complex. Also, at the start of the class, we were nothing more than acquaintances and had never worked before. To add to the complexity, one of our team members dropped out in the first week (not listed) and one of the members were in a different country and time zone. We were prompted to get creative to overcome this initial difficulty and form a high-performing team.

When we had our first meeting, it was clear that our working styles were different. Understanding this was very important and we believed that getting to know each other better by spending a lot of time together, especially face-to-face interactions, and taking a genuine interest in each other’s working style and interactions were made a priority.

We did a personality analysis (DISC) to know more about each other and the best working styles that need to be employed. This effort paid off later as we started taking up complex activities that required continuous collaboration. We used to discuss our learning from the classes – especially listening to the experiences of professor and classmates, and from the activities. We used to openly discuss what is good and what could be better in our interactions and day-to-day task management.

Finalizing the research topic and working on it was the pivotal moment in our team building process. We had conflicts during the process and we had to think of ways for solving the conflict – of all the methodologies for conflict resolution that we learned from the class, we used a problem-solving method by doing in-depth analysis on the topics and convincing each other of the other’s point of view. We also deeply analyzed the behavior of the members at each point and tried to find a common goal – the task at hand and in turn our end goal of doing well in the class. Our topic for research – servant leadership was motivational on many fronts. We imbibed the essence of servant leadership and worked towards our common goal of excelling in the course and beyond.

We tried to analyze our behavior and team performance using Tuckman’s stages of group development and it aligned well for the most part. It was a slow but steady journey from a working group to a high-performance team at the end of the course. We kept tangible goals for ourselves by giving feedback to each other’s performances and learning from the feedback from the professor and teaching assistant. We could see that we were getting better with the quality of deliverables as well as with respect to our interactions and understanding of each other.

We believe we are a high-performance team because, towards the end, we loved working together and the quality of the deliverables were getting better and if we had done it alone. The cohesiveness of this team is something that all of us would like to emulate in our future teams as well.

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Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/28109

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