Managing teams : Evolution and progress

Extract

[...] Managing teams: Evolution and progress Entry Two After the simulation, share your experience (what happened in your team?) and reflect on your experience as a team member and a team as a collective. Look at the experience and identify what went well and what could be improved. It is here you explore your thoughts, feelings, and assumptions and ask yourself why. For example: How did you feel? Was your team effective? How would you describe your team functioning? [...]

[...] This solution could have helped us, I am sure, to refocus the debate and find a way out of this deadlock. If I were to try this again with the same team or another one, as an individual I try to always maintain team communication, to bring thoughts and discussions together as soon as progress is slowed down. Because as an individual I've also tried to overcome our difficulties on my own, and it was only afterwards that I realised that by doing so, the team couldn't think together and had less chance of finding a solution. [...]

[...] Dedicated meetings and information channels On an informal level, it seems logical that communication should be established on a daily basis, to avoid us all moving in different directions only to realise that we're going in the wrong direction at the end. What's more, organising weekly meetings seems essential, especially when we're dealing with complex subjects, because we need to keep the whole group informed of developments in the project, and talk together about any difficulties that any of us might encounter. In this respect we will have a dedicated communication channel, i.e. a discussion group; most often we use Whatsapp and it has proved to be effective for us, which is why I would choose this application. Furthermore, in order to have a good balance between teamwork and work, it is essential to observe, in my opinion, a small list of key points. [...]

[...] It was a total discovery in terms of what to do, the environment disturbing your senses and your thinking; but that wasn't counting the fact that I had to work with one person I didn't know at all, and three others who, although they were already familiar to me, didn't share my daily life as a team. The simplest thing I experienced in this experience was the search for clues, by which I mean the division of tasks. In fact, not once did we express the need to divide them up, appoint a leader, or question the actions of one of our members. On the contrary, everything was fluid, we occupied the space quite naturally, and in the same way we started looking for different things while avoiding encroaching on what the others were doing. [...]

[...] Because although our cooperation was good, we were confronted with this game designed to trap us, and it worked perfectly. We were blocked twice, and it was at this low point that our communication faltered, as no one had a solution, and we began to stop listening to each other. Not that this was ill-intentioned, but we were individually looking for an answer, whereas it would have been better to try and find one together. We all felt a great frustration, because despite all the good will in the world we could not find what we were missing. [...]