A morning daily recently featured the Prime Minister declaring “there is no place for prima donnas” in his party. The report then went to quote the Prime Minister as saying, “teams with strong teamwork would reap more success compared to those with prima donnas”… etc.
With a strong feeling that these were not the Prime Minister’s words, a check in the Bernama report revealed, “…. A leader cannot project himself without considering the interest of the party”.
It, thus, became clear that the Prime Minister was telling his party members, and members of Barisan Nasional component parties, not to lose sight of the environment in which teamwork would be executed.
Teams are merely groups of people with supposedly common purpose and objectives. Teamwork is the total performance by members of the team put together for achieving a definite purpose. For arriving at this end the team needs to demonstrate certain characteristics.
5 P’s of Team Design
Forming teams randomly could be an expensive experience. The 5P’s in team-design so often referred to in college text would provide useful guidance.
Purpose: All members of the team should clearly understand why it exists, and what do they stand for. The team must agree to a mission statement. All members must be aware they are working together in a common direction for meeting their overall purpose
Participation: Evaluate the skill and attitudes of individuals before putting them into respective teams for which they are to produce to meet your strategy.
Placement: Teams must first agree to some ground rules and recognize the constraints related to decision-making, and how to overcome such situations when faced with them. Silence of the decision-maker is never a valid decision. This should be equated to disagreement or disapproval if permission is needed. Smart executives shun bosses who demonstrate such weakness in decision-making as the amount of trailing unfinished business could only spell failure to the project.
Process: Processes and procedures are not necessarily red-tape. For start-up projects, these P&P are the ultimate learning tools of teams. Such activities could be as simple as records-keeping and drawing up agenda for meetings.
Plan: I consider this the most important of the 5P’s. In a coalition, there must be an agreed strategy among the coalition partners to avoid open conflicts or displays of internal weaknesses. In a business enterprise, the marketing, sales, credit control and even the back-end administration and customer service teams must know when to sing the same song , figuratively speaking.
Unusual angles
Schein, the organizational psychologist, defined an organization as:
“The rational co-ordination of the activities of a number of people towards a common purpose or goal, through a division of labour and functions, and an hierarchy of authority and responsibility.”
In a political coalition, “common purpose and goals” are statements of fact. Problems do occur due to misalignment of activities between teams, i.e. the component parties.
It was often said that the leaning tower of Teluk Intan, was an engineering feat of micro miscalculations that gave rise to one major misalignment. If only this can be always on the minds of our people’s representatives, the number of grouses and complaints from the rakyat could, perhaps, be largely reduced.
Coordination of activities
Coordination is the second most important characteristics in running effective teams, after communications. Whereas communications called for the sharing of current and accurate content, coordination would be the testimony of the political culture in the environment of a shared paradigm.
Deviationist attitudes of individual team members could frustrate coordination. A team member who resorted to dishonesty in an attempt to cover up a personal mistake could bring down the entire team’s scaffolding for building integrity.
A temporary side-step in coordination might not frustrate the entire team’s purpose of the day. However, the repercussions could be far reaching as the team members affected by this deviation would not stop at doubting the defaulting member only. Mistrust might drench team strategy. The situation might further deteriorate if the dreadful question, “What is the boss up to?” were to surface.
Allowing such a breakdown in cohesion to permeate in a team net environment is equivalent to planting explosives for a major blow-up.
Design Flaws
Seamless coordination of activities can only happen when there is minimum or no flaws in the design of teams. In a large e-commerce project, a multimedia graduate was asked to lead the production of the front interface. The result was a heap of latest multimedia features jumping out of an online store front minus the functionalities for the online shoppers.
For reasons best known to themselves, bosses they often insist that their staff conduct cross checks in their work. This feature signals the existence of design flaws in the structure of the team. The parsing from storefront to delivery should be a seamless experience for the customer.
Structural design
Structural designs carry three important purposes, viz.
a) allocation of tasks and responsibilities,
b) official channels of coordination, and ,
c) formal reporting relationships
An e-commerce website built with unfriendly features for lodging complaints will initially cut down the number of complaints received. However, customers would quickly flood their grouses on online blogs and websites. The customer care department would now need to spend more time checking out the worldwide web to screen for complaints on the company.
A person who manipulates with time had best realize we now live in the precision of an electronic clock.
Collaboration
Collaboration is a recursive process of actions among members of a team for achieving the same goal(s). Most collaborations require strong leadership. Openness is compulsory for maintaining a collaborative environment for team members. Knowledge-sharing and on-project learning would help in developing consensus among team members.
At this stage, the team structure becomes flat to allow member’s opinions and suggestions to rise to the top. Team leaders might deploy project management tools for mapping and keeping activities in check; at the same time to keep a watchful eye on decision flip-flops.
* The views expressed here are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysian Mirror and/or its associates.blog comments powered by Disqus
