Week 9 - Team Analysis

I've said it in previous posts but I'll repeat it here; I think my team for this course was incredible. We did really well despite the difficulties we experienced and we worked really well together. In saying this, like every team, we had ups and downs and there were aspects of our team that made things more difficult.

Start-up Processes-
We formed a team early and starting having weekly meetings straight away so our 'start-up process' was pretty short. We created a Facebook group and started communicating on there as soon as we had five members and from there we began to have weekly meetings on Skype. As soon as we had a group we introduced ourselves and got an idea of who we all were in the first meeting and from there on we were all ready to do work.
Our start-up process for assignment two was just getting a feel for the assignment and getting an idea of what roles we'd all feel comfortable in. We had a little bit of reshuffling at the beginning of the assignment; originally Floyd was going to be editor, then I was going to be editor and then we settled on Michelle and I being co-editors so that everyone had a fair share of work. This was really the only reshuffle we had; we appointed Jess as leader and decided on everyone else's share of the work quickly and once we confirmed roles everyone was happy enough to do the associated work.

Team Roles-
I tried to work out what specific team roles everyone in the team fits but it's hard to know if my team members did fit all the descriptors given for each team role.
I think our leader was a coordinator although she didn't have the strong handedness that's implied in this role. She was very easy going and didn't try to direct us too much but she was also good at figuring out what we should all be doing.
We also had a monitor-evaluator. She wasn't in a leadership role but she definitely provided a lot of the critical thinking for our team.
I think we had a couple of implementers on our team but my co-editor could also have been a completer-finisher; she was both hardworking and had a strong attention to detail.
I was mainly a completer-finisher. Attention to detail and an inability to see the big picture are two attributes that I encounter often when I'm doing work and it was no different in this course. I also almost filled the team role of a specialist for assignment 2. I didn't end up with any writing so I came in at the end to do my share of the work. It's not a very strong specialist- I didn't just do one thing but there was some similarity there.
As you can see from these descriptions we had a lot of do-ers and a couple of leaders. This left us entirely without any ideas people. This worked out surprisingly well; although settling on our exact approach to things probably would have been easier if we had someone providing direct ideas.

Leadership-
Reading through the different Lewin leadership models I think the best fit for our team was Laissez-faire. All decisions were definitely made as a team. Luckily we all think similarly so making these decisions by team consensus was always very easy. On the Blake Mouton Managerial grid I think we were pretty far into the top right (high concern for production and people), although I think there was slightly more concern for if everyone was happy with how things were going than there was for getting the work done. Overall I think our team were all equally capable and committed so leading us didn't really need to be a hands-on thing. We were all doing the paper and the work in it for the same reasons and with similar goals so there was no one who needed to be guided strongly.

Strengths and Weaknesses-
Our strengths included our ability to get work done, our communication, our lack of tension and our consideration of each other. Any tasks each of us had were done efficiently and quickly; we were never waiting for someone, wondering when they'd get the work done. We also never had any trouble getting in touch with anyone or just having our ideas understood by the rest of the team. There was never anything that resulted in any long-term tension in our team. Everyone was very level-headed and reasonable throughout the entire assignment. Finally, everyone did a good job over understanding everyone else's circumstances and being compassionate towards other team members.
Our weaknesses were mostly related to the fact that we had such a range of schedules with a range of time-zones. Two members of our group live in Australia and we all had different schedules. Considering this we did a really good job keeping up with each other and communicating. However, we did struggle with small things like setting sure deadlines for each other and we all missed at least one meeting. Neither of these proved to be anything that set the team back though. I'm struggling to think of anything else that could be considered a weakness in our team; we just worked really well together.

This is my final blog post on this blog so thank you all for reading and thank you all for being such a great team! Good luck with all your future endeavours; I'm sure you will all do fantastically.