Skip to main content

My Role(s) in a Team

Teamwork is a common thread throughout life. Growing up with parents and a sibling, working at my first job at McDonald's, and my marriage and current household all provide me with an opportunity to practice teamwork. Most, if not all, of the engagements in my life involve interacting and cooperating with others, so this exploration into how teams form and are led is an interesting practice of reviewing literature and reflecting on how I engage in my day-to-date life. As a part of a team, I tend to take leadership roles quite naturally. Whetten & Cameron (2011) describe several roles of embers within a team: task-facilitating, relationship-building, and blocking roles. I believe that I have played each role at some point. I feel most at home when I play a task-facilitation role, but I also make time and space for relationship-building. Teamwork is all about getting individual contributors to work together toward a common goal, so ensuring that the relationships among team members are healthy is just as important as facilitating tasks. Without both teams cannot be effective (Whetten & Cameron, 2011). 

Task-Facilitating

Every team needs someone to keep them on task, and the task-facilitator is just the role for that. When team members perform task-facilitating roles, they ensure that the team is on task, on time, accountable, and has clear takeaways from meetings to ensure appropriate follow through once the meeting is over (Whetten & Cameron, 2011). 

Relationship-Building

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Perhaps this is a platitude, but also reality when it comes to working on teams. The most enjoyable part of teamwork is the relationship that it builds within members, at least it is for me. Building trust, cheerleading, and consensus building are important role that a team member who is engaged in relationship-building. Without positive energy, and comic relief relationships can become frayed over work related disagreements (Whetten & Cameron, 2011). 


Image From: https://www.potential.com/articles/teamwork/

By leveraging productivity tools, like Microsoft's Tasks & Planner management software, I help engage my team to accomplish our mission. Presently, I am on a long-standing team of three at my campus, but on occasion I work on a virtual team with my worldwide colleagues. When I had control over the agenda, I always ensure that we have an opportunity for relationship-building activities as well as takeaway tasks that are managed in MS Tasks & Planner. In my experience, the less formal the better when it comes to relationships. While structured activities like personality assessments are interesting and construction, having an opportunity to chat informally goes a long way to building rapport within teams. 


Reference

Whetten, D. A. & Cameron, K. S. (2011). Developing management skills, 8th ed. Pearson.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Moral Leadership and Unconscious Bias

Have you ever seen something wrong... but you stayed silent about it? Katie Shonk (2020) shares a personal story in a blog post about a good intentioned, but rather crass effort that they made to shut down a homophobic comment made at their wedding reception. Even though Shonk does not identify as gay, she took offense at this comment and made the decision to call out the comment as unacceptable. She wanted to be a good ally. When we hear people say things that are offensive or rude, it can be difficult to speak up, especially if we aren’t the ones that comment was about. When we do, it can be easy to come across as self-righteous and create more tension. So, what are we meant to do when we see biased or antisocial behavior?  As a university employee I am required to complete standard HR training on a yearly basis. One of these training sessions is related to harassment prevention. Last year our training was revamped to include bystander intervention and a section on the importance...
Post a Comment
Read more

Conflict Management

Before reading about conflict from the perspective in Whetten and Cameron's (2016) Management Skills for Leaders I held a rather negative view of conflict in general. Through the lens of the dual concern model of conflict management styles, I took an avoidance style which is uncooperative and unassertive. Basically I thought that conflict was bad and something to avoid at all costs, especially at work. Empowered with new knowledge about the nature of conflict and its benefits to decision-making and problem solving processes I now adopt a more conflict-positive attitude. What caused this shift for me in a big was was the study which described the powerful positive impact that a devil’s advocate can play on improving business outcomes, even though they can cause great stress to a team (Whetten & Cameron, 2016). Perhaps the reason that I’ve avoided conflict like the plague has something to do with the negative emotions that it can bring up. As a remedy to this Whetten and Cameron...
Post a Comment
Read more