Management I: People and Teams
Historical Team-Experience Assessment

My experience on teams is far from extensive. Most of my professional work has been independent in nature, and I have never been a “joiner;” I generally have not been drawn to join groups or teams, as I have an aversion to what often seems a contrived or asinine purpose. However, I can draw on a few poignant experiences I’ve had in various teams to identify what has been effective and ineffective in the pursuit of a common goal. My hope is that the combination of what I’ve learned from those experiences with the specific curriculum of this course will provide me with ample tools to be an effective, agreeable, and high-functioning team member in my Action Learning Project (ALP) team and the various other teams I will participate in at BGI. The best performing team I was a part of was actually an offshoot of a larger team. In 2001, I attended a semester-long wilderness course in Patagonia, Chile offered by the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS). This course consisted of three distinct sections: a month of sea kayaking, a month of mountaineering, and a ten-day section of Independent Student Travel (IST) to finish out the semester. For the first two sections I was part of the Avalanchas, a team of eighteen led by five instructors who made almost every decision and were completely responsible for the structure and direction of the group. This dynamic was understood and agreed to by all, as we were in unfamiliar, remote, and sometimes dangerous terrain. We were in a sense simply students following the directions of our instructors, as each of us had always done individually. No one was on the course by compulsion, and we were almost unanimously thrilled to be where we were and engaged in what we were doing. The IST was our opportunity to put into practice all the wilderness travel and survival skills we had learned over the previous two months. We would break into groups of five or six people, map out a route, obtain our provisions, and pack and plan accordingly to complete our route and arrive at the predetermined rendezvous point after ten days on our own. As the name implies, this excursion was indeed independent; no instructors would accompany any of the groups. To raise the stakes even more, we had no radios or other communication devices. We had topographical maps, compasses, and little else besides our personal gear. The first, and perhaps most difficult, task was to assemble the separate IST teams. Our instructors involved us in this task and allowed us to have a lot of say in how this team breakdown happened. There was a great deal of discussion as to the best way to accomplish this, but the instructors feared people forming cliques and excluding others, so they decided it would work like this: we would go around the circle and each person would describe what s/he hoped to accomplish on her/his IST. Some people wanted to stay in valleys. Others wanted to summit peaks. Still others wanted to fish and relax as much as possible, and a few others (myself included) hoped to include an element of personal and spiritual exploration in the form of a solo/fast (spending two or three days fasting in wild solitude). After everyone voiced his or her desires and goals, the instructors convened amongst themselves to set up the final teams. As it turned out, there were six of us who voiced a desire to do a solo/fast as part of the IST, so that was the unifying and determining element of our team. We shared a common vision, the value of which was intrinsic, not relative (Senge, 138). We came together and mapped out a loop that took us down into a river valley and then up near a couple of peaks that we could choose to summit depending on weather, time and desire. And we settled on a general location that seemed ideal for us to spread out and be out of sight and earshot of one another, but not overly exposed or distanced in case of emergency. We arrived at these decisions by consensus, but it was required that each team have a designated leader; I volunteered for this role and my teammates agreed. I presented our plan to the instructors and they approved. All that was left for us to do was go into town to buy our food and embark the following morning. Buying food was really our first team task. We had a set budget, and we decided what we wanted beforehand and went to the store together to make our purchases. However, we also stipulated that if anyone wanted to buy additional food with their own money, that was OK but he would be responsible for carrying the extra provisions he purchased (it was only males on the team). We set out the next day, equipped with the requisite skills and in excellent physical condition after over two months of strenuous wilderness travel. Our collective mood was outstanding; after all, we were doing exactly what we had hoped to do. This was the first element of our well-functioning team: voluntary participation. Each member of our team got his first choice of IST. We also shared a common purpose and had clear goals upon which we all agreed. As I alluded to earlier, our skill levels and physical abilities were very similar at that point in the course. Additionally, there were strong bonds between us and we trusted and generally liked each other. Finally, I was the clear leader but I was committed to consensus and definitely saw myself (and truly was) on the same level as my teammates—this was no autocracy. Overall, our group functioned extremely well and we were able to achieve our principle goals of covering our route, summiting a peak and completing a seventy-two-hour solo/fast. There were certainly some difficult moments, including a couple that were quite harrowing, but we made it to the rendezvous point unscathed, on time, and content with the experience and each other. Looking back, it’s easy to see why this team performed so well, given all the aforementioned positive elements. However, there were aspects of our team that were not necessarily ideal. For one, we were homogeneous: each of us was white, male, American, and between the ages of eighteen and twenty. While each of us learned a great deal, it’s likely a more diverse group would have better promoted both member and team learning (Hackman, 124). Also, we had colluded in order to form the team we wanted: we convened before the full-group circle to discuss IST aspirations and settled on some very specific goals. Whether this was unethical I am not certain; anyone else could have voiced a desire to do the same but no one did, yet I doubt the instructors would have been pleased to learn of our pre-circle powwow. Finally, it turned out one of the members of our team, Eric, was something of a wild card.
The “extra provisions” he chose to buy were a dozen green apples, which added so much weight to his backpack that he was lagging behind the entire first day and became very exhausted and agitated. But we waited for him, and encouraged him, and he made it to our first campsite just fine (and made an apple pie that evening to relieve himself of his load that is still among the most delicious things I have ever eaten). Later, when we were descending from the site of our solos, we came upon some very steep and unstable terrain. We had a couple of options and weren’t sure of the best way to proceed, so Eric offered to scout out one of these options. He jogged quickly out of sight, and then called out for us to follow. Eric had made a rash decision and committed us as a team to a very treacherous descent. We made it, but our unquestioning trust of his decision could have had terrible consequences. Overall though, the good in this team heavily outweighed the bad. I have not had the misfortune (or fortune, depending on how you look at it) of being an integral member of a poorly-functioning team, but there are two scenarios I recall that speak to many of the pitfalls of teams that we’ve been reading about and discussing. The first was my varsity football team in my senior year of high school. This team was plagued by the severe underutilization of human resources, i.e. talent. The coach had a certain type of offense in mind, in which he plugged those players he deemed best fit the system. This was a very conservative, run-based offense. But the two best athletes on the team, the two players who were undoubtedly the fastest and most elusive, played wide receiver in this offense, which had very limited ways of getting the ball to the wide receivers.
In the first game, there was a play where the quarterback simply threw the ball straight down the line of scrimmage to one of these wide receivers, who promptly faked out two defenders and sprinted about seventy yards for a touchdown. But this play was in fact an aberration from the coach’s standard game plan, and it took him four weeks to call the same play again, while the team floundered and its best players had next to no opportunity to get the ball in their hands. The coach simply refused to alter the structure of the team, which he had devised before even seeing the players practice. His unwavering commitment to a flawed system led to a very unsuccessful season, and not only did the best athletes barely contribute their talents, they lost untold opportunities to flourish and impress scouts who may very well have offered them athletic scholarships to universities. As a player (and a benchwarmer at that) on a military-style team organization, I had no chance to offer my input, but I clearly remember my frustration and sympathy for the players who, unlike me, might have had the talent to pursue a career in the sport if only given the opportunity to shine. I hesitate to even to discuss the other scenario I experienced of a poorly-functioning team, because this was truly a team in name only. In my job as a project manager at a small, private software firm, I was technically part of the “project management team,” but this “team” lacked virtually every element of a team, period, let alone one that performs well. There was no vision, no leadership, no end in sight, and only the vaguest definition of means. The delegation of responsibilities was a perpetual guessing game. Two members of this team worked remotely, which added to the difficulty, but even when they were in house the project management team never once sat down together to discuss, plan, or address anything. The worst aspect is that all of our jobs were made more difficult and redundant as a result of this utter lack of direction and organization. This team could not even be called a “co-acting group” because there was so much uncertainty about each individual’s duties (Hackman, 42). These past experiences of well-performing, poorly-performing, and in-name-only teams will inform my participation on my ALP team by providing me with a host of strategies that work well, that are mediocre, and that are wholly ineffective. I have clear ideas of what makes teams succeed or fail as a result of these experiences. My NOLS IST group provides me with an example of what good can come from shared vision and goals coupled with a collaborative leadership approach. And while my experience on the football team in high school was very different from my experience on the project management team at work, both exhibited some classic pitfalls of poorly-functioning teams: poor leadership, poor structure, and underutilization of talent. Through my past team experiences, I have learned that I enjoy and value collaboration as a means to a greater collective achievement. I also know that I do not like being compelled to participate in a team, and while the ALP teams are a required element of the curriculum, I am studying this curriculum by enthusiastic choice, and I chose the industry concentration (community development) I wished to research. My ALP team members chose this concentration as well, which I am confident will help us in building, in Senge’s words, “a shared vision that fosters a commitment to the long term” (12). I am also committed to fostering and maintaining a supportive environment, because the more each team member is supported and encouraged to succeed, the better the experience and performance of the overall team will be.
My greatest worry about my ALP team is something I would call the politeness pitfall, or according to Hackman, “when well-intended exchanges among well-meaning people serve mainly to bring to the surface and highlight the things about which they disagree” (69). But I believe our collective awareness of these and other pitfalls, as well as our commitment to performing well together and getting as much as possible out of this project, will allow us to be a high-functioning and effective team. I understand the actions I personally must take in order to be an effective team member, and I am fully committed to doing so.

Hackman, Richard J. (2002) Leading Teams: setting the stage for great performances. Harvard Business School Press.

Senge, Peter M. (2006) The Fifth Discipline: the art & practice of the learning organization. New York: Currency/Doubleday.

Works Cited

Hackman, Richard J. (2002) Leading Teams: setting the stage for great performances. Harvard Business School Press.

Senge, Peter M. (2006) The Fifth Discipline: the art & practice of the learning organization. New York: Currency/Doubleday.