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.
This post was good on the structure and the accountability part, but it really didn't talk about teamwork at all. It could have been written just as well where each of you did individual work and the tasks weren't tied together much. They just all needed to get done. If that was indeed the case then this is not a good example of teamwork. If, in fact, many of the tasks required you to work together with others at the lower rung, so it was a perfectly good example, then it would have been good for you to describe some of that and how you became effective doing it.
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