The current organization setting encourages teamwork for the accomplishment of the organizational goals. Teamwork is much productive due to the use of different aspects and skills that complement each member and ensure that team works towards the attainment of the corporation’s goals and objectives. However, the process of forming effective units can be hectic and troublesome to ensure that the team members are willing to separate their individualistic goals for the benefits of the team. Therefore, active groups are dependent on the ability to integrate people with different but complementing skills, enhance their communication and ensure that the members understand their roles. The following steps offer guidelines towards effective teams.
Five Steps to Team Development
Forming
This step involves the identification and introduction of the team members. The members meet for the first time to introduce and get to know each other for their skills. During the stage, the team leader must address the entire team to set the objectives of the group. The choosing of the team should ensure that the skills and abilities of the group members must have complementary skills that will provide that the team member improve the different weaknesses of the other team member (Wheelan, 2014). The stage also includes the formulation of the team norms.
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Storming
According to Maslow’s theory, everyone has individual goals and objectives. The personal need and egos of each are challenging to suppress (Wheelan, 2014). The suppression of ego is testing with some of the people for instance from the high-context culture individuals can be unwilling to suppress their individualism whereas the low-context culture individuals will view teaming up with the individualistic individuals due to the need to feel needed or gain a sense of belonging. This stage is the most challenging groups with everyone trying to prove their roles or status in the group. The group members will conflict all the time as members try to show to the others that they are the best and should be listened to rather than being ignored. Most groups fail at this stage since the step is unavoidable and difficult to change. The inability of some of the professionals to swallow their pride requires influential leaders for the group to boost its morale by making strict roles that those who fail to comply must be exiled from the group.
Norming
Once the individuals are willing to work together and use their diversity and embrace collectivity, they may encounter minor problems such as ineffective communication, but under this stage, they know their roles and do not conflict on small issues of pride. The group is settled, but the leader must offer support to ensure that they bond and solve conflicts that may arise.
Performing
Following the bonding created, the members can begin to show their skills. At this stage, the maturity of the group is depicted by the ability of the team to solve conflicts without requiring the supervision of the leader. All decisions are made by the members rather than depending on the leader as was the case in the previous stages. However, the cycles of teams can result in some members becoming individualistic, and the group will fall back to the second group, but such an issue does not happen the team continues to work towards the achievement of the stipulated or set goals.
Adjourning
Adjourning is the final step of a competent team. It involves the dissolving of the team once it has completed or achieved the set goals. In this stage, the team members have efficiently separated their objectives and are competent in all the team requirements and respect the efforts of each.
Benefits of Strong Team Skills
The ability to balance individualism and collectivism is one of the major components of strong teams. Communication is also integral thus learning these skills will be beneficial to my job since I will use them to broaden my integration in the organization, ensure that I can listen to my colleagues without being offended. The attraction towards people with similar likes or skills tends to overwhelm humans, but they limit our knowledge (Wheelan, 2014). Being in a strong team will help broaden interactions with diversified people that would have been challenging if I was not in a strong team.
Virtual-Meeting
Participating in a virtual meeting can either be enjoyable or challenging based on the motivation of the team. A strong team that has bonded can enjoy teleconferencing as the members listen to one person at a time whereas teams in the storming stage can collapse due to the conflicts between the members.
The virtual meeting is different from face-to-face meeting in the sense that members are in different locations and are using the web-based or teleconferencing to communicate. The other variation is the inability of leaders or members to know the feelings of each member because of constrained understanding of the non-verbal communication (Kappas, & Kramer, 2011). Lastly, it is difficult to convince or explain a complicated and tedious concept through the media whereas face-to-face meetings would enable the use of various examples and gestures. Face-to-face meetings encourage negotiation and better conflict solutions due to the avoidance of passiveness.
References
Kappas, A., & Kramer, N., (2011). Face-to-Face Communication over the Internet: Emotions in a Web of Culture, Language, and Technology. Cambridge University Press.
Wheelan, S. A. (2014). Creating Effective Teams: A Guide for Members and Leaders .
