A Successful Team

Working in a group is something we will experience throughout our entire lives. Whether it is group projects in elementary school, or working late to meet a deadline set by your boss, teamwork is a skill that is essential to most people in order to have a successful life. As you get older and teams become more complex, it is more important than ever to understand the structure of the team and what actions need to take place for the group to accomplish its goal.

This was made clear in my personal experience when I started working for the Parks & Recreation Department in my hometown. There was a list of tasks we had to do everyday by 6 PM, and if we were not finished by that time we were subject to consequences. So, it was vital we met this deadline. A key part to keeping our work efficient and at a top quality, was understanding the structure of our team. As stated by Bolman and Deal, there are various types of structures when working with a team. Our group utilized the Simple Hierarchy structure, which is where you have a bottom level of employees, a middle level for a manager type position and then the top level where an executive or owner would rank. In my case, I was a part of the bottom level workers, we had a project manager who would come out to work with us, and then there was a Head of Village Maintenance whom our manager reported to.

With this type of structure it was fairly easy to implement a system that would help our team be successful. The Head of Village Maintenance would provide the list of tasks that needed to be done that day. The project manager would then decide how, when and who would do each job in the way he thought was most productive, including if he thought it would be best for him to do some manual labor. Finally, us bottom level laborers would do the tasks as instructed to us by our project manager. At the end of the day, the project manager would submit a formal report to the Head of Village Maintenance describing the day's work and ensuring that we had met our deadline.

With this job, we could not go home until everyone was back at the village office and had completed their work for the day, and if anyone finished late or did not finish their work, we could all be subject to consequence. This brings up a rather important aspect of a high performance team as explained by Katzenbach and Smith. One of their characteristics of a successful team is mutual accountability. We could have guys working on various tasks at multiple locations in a day. It was crucial that we were all dedicated and hardworking because if anyone decided to slack off that day, we would all pay the price. I know our team had a high level of mutual accountability because we would never want a fellow employee to suffer a consequence due to our lack of effort. Everyday we would go out there with positive attitudes and we always completely our daily tasks. With a sensible, effective team structure and a strong level of mutual accountability we were able to perform as high functioning team everyday, and it was truly something I am proud of.

Experience With Organizations

Throughout my life experiences, particularly now in my collegiate years, I have been involved in many different clubs and societies. These groups run very much in the way are organization does. You have to manage budgets, meet deadlines, find new members and even sometimes make some tough decisions. If I had to choose an experience that was the most similar to an organization, and one of the most intense to operate, would be the time I spent on the executive board of my fraternity. We had to work together to keep the fraternity's operation running smoothly, meet the requirements set by our corporate board and ensure that the needs of our members would be met. 

While doing all these tasks was not easy, a serious change in our daily operations made things much more difficult. We ended our relationship with our house management company and gave the responsibilities to our house manager. This was a big change for us, but we decided as a board that it would be best for the house. However, it did not come without a price.

Like with any true organization, there are transaction costs that come with making a change. We had to pay a fee for terminating our contract with the old organization. Also, we lost some money of our deposit that we had placed. We knew this would be a loss, but decided it was not a large enough deficit to hold us back. Furthermore, we had to increase the salary of our house manager, so that is another cost we had to pay. This increase in salary required many negotiations between the house manager and us, so we could find a fair price that made both sides happy. This is another cost, even though it did not necessarily cost us money. This is entire process was a massive time cost. With having to end our old contract with the previous company and then, spend time having several meetings to negotiate the increase in salary our house manager was going to receive.

Theses transaction costs were definitely a loss and took away from a few of our other budgets in the end. But, like any good organization, we had to decide whether these costs were worth the change we wanted to make. In our case, we found that it was. There are of course other times where a group may find the transaction costs too overwhelming to make a change like this. It is always vital to consider these factors when making this type of decision in order to make sure you are making the right choice for your organization. 

Ronald Coase

Ronald Coase

Ronald Coase was born in a suburb of London in 1910. His parents worked together at the post office and he had a humble background. He had physical disabilities that required him to attend a special school as a young child, but none of this held him back. He ended up attending the University of London and the London School of Economics, all which led to his ultimate achievement - The Noble Prize.

I had never heard of Ronald Coase before I was assigned his name as an alias, but quickly into my researched I learned how important his work was. His two main works, "The Nature of the Firm" and "The Problem of Social Cost", made a lot of contributions to ideas of transaction costs among other economics concepts. He spent many decades of his life teaching economics and every year the University of Chicago honors him by hosting the Coase Lecture.

Ronald Coase's ideas affected how many people viewed ideas in economics and many people consider him one of the great economists. In 1991 he received The Noble Prize, the most prestigious award an economist could receive. He passed away in September of 2013, but he will not be forgotten anytime soon as he lives on in the books and ideas of economics.

Photo: www.newyorker.com

Sources: http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Coase.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2013/09/03/ronald-coase-is-dead-here-are-five-of-his-papers-you-need-to-read/

https://www.coase.org/aboutronaldcoase.htm