WHAT MAKES A GREAT TEAM?

Introduction

Hi Guys, I'm Chester. I work for Yoobee Colleges in Wellington, New Zealand. I'm the Head of Faculty of Graphics, Web and ICT and manage a team of 13 tutor. I help tutors facilitate the the delivery of our programmes, scheduling learning hours, timetabling classes and building resources. I'm also responsible for monitoring the pastoral care needs of the students studying within the faculty. 

I work on programme, course and curriculum development projects. and more recently on guiding tutors to become comfortable in an online delivery environment.

Reflection

What are the helpful attitudes, behaviours and norms that make the team effective?

My Role involves being a member of few overlapping teams within our organisation. It’s difficult to seperate out one team as the responsibilities are often conflated.

Helpful behaviours that exist currently are a genuine desire to do good work and to participate in ongoing improvement.

Not so much an attitude issue, and more of a structural one. Roles within in the teams are described on paper in one way that rarely reflects the realities, and there are often member with very similar job descriptions and titles doing vastly different tasks. This often results in an unclear understanding of the goals that are trying to be achieved. Each team members is striving to achieve what they believe is the same goal without realising they way they describe it can be quite different to the rest of the team.

How do the projects of your team look through the lens of the content and process model? How effectively does your team balance the why, where to, what and how?

We have definitely fallen victim to prioritising content of progress, and it tends to result in lots of stuff being created but only a some of it being of value to the team or the end goal. We need to establish a much clearer vision and direction before we begin creating. There is a tendency to describe ambitious and aspirational goals only to repeat thing we’re already comfortable with as it can feel risky putting too much effort into innovation when you’re not sure if  your envy on the same page are the rest of the team.

When has your own behaviour hindered a team in some way. … basic needs? How so? When the behaviours of others hindered the team?

I’ve probably been the person throwing in controversial, conflicting or aspirational ideas into situation that could have benefited from a more measured approach.

In the past I’ve in teams where members in control have shifted and changed goals without notice, usually in effort to make them align with their existing understanding rather than becoming familiar with a new approach or concept.

In relation to the IMGD model. Which stage do you feel best represents your team at the moment? … move forward toward the next stage?

Within My direct team, I would say we are at stage 2, there are definitely elements of stage 3 happening and there are elects of stage 1 happening. The team is quite large, 14 members which makes it difficult to full engage with each member and understand individually their understanding our shared vision.

Leveraging some of the more social aspects of working within our organisation could help build trust and empower members to feel more comfortable being more open.

How can you apply insights from this week’s learning kit in your day-to-day work with your team?

I’m very interested in deceasing the content and process model with a team, and to see if collectively we can identify where in our past projects we have suffered because of an imbalance.

I discussed the content process model with a team member from a previous project. We quickly agreed that model provided a better balance and would enable a more focused and consistent delivery of content. We could see how our previous projects had suffered due to a lack of process.