The Team Work Experience
Managing Business Activities to Achieve Results (MBAAR) is one of the modules in the Edexcel Higher National Diploma Program where the whole batch has to works as a team in order to achieve a common goal to complete the module successfully. A team is a formal group established to achieve particular objectives. Teams succeed when members have commitment towards the common objectives, their defined roles and responsibilities and good personal relationships. The effectiveness of a team depends on the size of the team and when it has a clear goal which is to be achieved. According to Tuckman, there are four stages for a development of a team which starts from forming, storming, norming and finally performing.
The team GIVVE which works as an organization is currently marching towards their goal successfully. The reason behind the success is the team work. The whole team is divided in to sub groups in terms of departments, the departments are Marketing, Human Resources, Information Technology, Legal and Finance. Every department has its own members and the members were selected according to the skills, knowledge and the interest they have upon the departments mentioned above to make their task easy and effective. And duty of every department is to work as a team and achieve the objectives of the organization effectively and efficiently. Working as a team is much easier than doing a task alone as an individual. New blood and new ideas flows in when planning on events. For example, the team as a whole known as GIVVE had to plan three different events in order to collect funds and donate the funds which is to be raised for some charity purposes, at the beginning the CEO and the Chairman of the GIVVE Organization wanted everyone to come up with ideas and suggestions in order to raise funds, what different events can they have and where are they going to donate the funds. One by one turned up, in the sense, came up with different ideas, a few ideas and opinions were rejected on the spot as those events suggested were not supposed to raise enough funds. For example, a guy from the finance department came up with an idea to sell pens to the students of ICBT city campus. But it was not a good idea as pens cannot be sold for a higher price and therefore the funds that are to be raised will not be sufficient enough. The time went on and the ideas kept coming from all the departments. And finally after discussions, as a team and as a collective decision three events were finalized. The first event planned was a Movie Day, and the plan two was to have Holi-Day festival which an Indian Carnival and the third plan was to print a souvenirbook which could be also used as a business directory as the target customers were the business people. And then the team as a whole decided and finalized the place to donate the money which was to re-furbish an under-privileged schools library at Malwana. The reason as to which all these events were planned early instead dragging for days was because of the team work, which generated lot of ideas, plans and also knowledge. Afterwards all the departments had their own team work to be done in order to achieve the set objectives.
It sounds simple on planning and finalizing the events. But at the same time conflicts take place in every team. Conflict is pretty much inevitable when we work with others. People have different point of views, those differences escalate to conflict. According to Tuckman, this is the second stage in the development of a team where ideas are exchanged and then debated. The teamGIVVE as a whole planned on the three events, many arguments and disagreements took place. For example, a guy proposed on having a quiz competition, but the CEO was too rude to reject his idea before he completed on how the procedure will be and how much of an income can be earned through it. The arguments with the particular individual who proposed it and the CEO was firing up as the individual was blaming the CEO to accept all the ideas and think of it and not to reject it before knowing a bit deep about the ideas which is spat out. And then I interfered as the argument was heating up while all the other members were clueless on what to do. I simply advised the CEO to accept all the ideas instead rejecting them and once the ideas are collected to have brainstorming sessions to finalize the best three events after brief discussions.And the CEO was kind enough to abide by those words. One another example about a conflict which took place was when the team GIVVE got the opportunity to run a canteen as an additional event apart from the three finalized events. The story started when the team GIVEE ran the canteen successfully and achieved a good profit than what we expected but still when the CEO blamed the marketing department keeping behind the fact that the department as a whole didn’t contribute well to the project. The marketing manager was absent on the day of the meeting, and I as the assistant marketing manager of the GIVVE organization, had to make sure to fight back or to defend the department members as the contribution from the department was to the maximum as the department believe. The arguments again was heating up, the CEO kept saying that the members from the marketing didn’t contribute to prepare foods for the canteen to sell, but it’s the CEO who divided a special team to prepare foods for the canteen which included at least one member from every department. So I fired some questions to the CEO, the first question was “Then why did you have a different group to prepare foods and what has the marketing department got to do with that?” the second question was “Didn’t the marketing department promote the canteen as a whole along with the cause for what we collect money on the day of the event?” and the final question was, “Do you have any other reasons to blame the department and why don’t you blame the other members in the other departments for not coming to prepare the foods?’. As a result, the CEO had no more arguments as he understood it was his fault forgetting the fact that a separate group was created with volunteers to prepare the foods.In fact, the CEO had some personal issues with both the manager and the assistant manager of the marketing department, but his plans to let the department down just because of his silly reasons was an utter failure. The department was not demotivated because of this incident, the CEO and the marketing department along with the other departments peacefully kept going working on the objective successfully. Conflict can be constructive as long as it is managed and dealt directly and quickly. By respecting differences between people, being able to resolve conflict when it does happen, and also working to prevent it, you will be able to maintain a healthy and creative team atmosphere. The key is to remain open to other people's ideas, beliefs, and assumptions. When team members learn to see issues from the other side, it opens up new ways of thinking, which can lead to new and innovative solutions, and healthy team performance.
The first event was the Movie Day, the objective was to sell two hundred tickets to the students of ICBT City Campus, and it was not an easy task as there were only a few days left for the event to take place. The marketing manager went on leave and I as the assistant marketing manager, had to take the initiative and plan on how the sale of tickets will be taking place. The marketing department which had ten members had the sole responsibility to sell all the tickets. The department was merged into two different teams, team one was supposed to sell the tickets to the morning batches and the team two was supposed to sell the tickets to the evening batches. Each team was given hundred tickets and both the teams had one common member that is the assistant marketing manager heading the team. Both the teams together managed to sell total of one hundred and sixty tickets and the reason behind this achievement was because of the team spirit that he had behind as a back up to visit all the morning and the evening batches and explain each and every class the reason behind to screen the movie and other relevant information which was clearly communicated. The members in the team then went to every student and sold the tickets to themas the leader’s message was clear to everyone and there were no questions to be asked in the minds of the students. It took less than eight minutes to sell tickets in a class as the team members were quick enough to sell instead wasting the lecturer’s precious time. The thing which is to be understood here is that even a leader cannot complete his task well if there is no team spirit; it was indeed a great achievement to sell hundred and sixty tickets in a day, it shows how effective it is to work as a team and complete a given task.
Team work will be the key to success to do the final two events successfully. So far it’s the team work which has leaded us to success. The benefits gained in working in a team are of increased creativity in an individual’s point of view, which drive through increased ideas and to achieve better results. Working as a team also increases the satisfaction of the members which leads them to do their task effectively while it also helps to generate a broader diversity of ideas and innovations than a person is working as an individual. Teamwork promotes unity, rapport, and bonding.
Team GIVVE has achieved the first objective successfully, that is screening the movie, two more to go and then the funds raised will be donated to an under privileged school in Malwana to renovate their Library.

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