Group / Team Work

Problems

• Science and Engineering Education Focus on the Individual's Work
• No Experience
• Product Orientation

Necessities and Advantages

• Complexity Requires Many Experts
• Education Improved
• Social Advantages
• Product Improved

Team Building and Team work

• Goal Statement
• Social Contract
• Roles
• Interaction
  • Interpersonal Relations
  • Communication/Information Exchange

Guidelines for Effective Meetings

(Partially from Bush, MIT M.Sc. Thesis, 1998)

Meeting Organization

• Facilitator
  • Agenda
  • Keeps Rules
  • Avoids Domination
  • Keeps Time
• Record Keeper
  • Takes Notes
  • Distributes Notes
• Rotate Roles!
• Running a Meeting: See Separate Handout

Beginning

• Start meetings on time and hold them in a place where the group won't be distracted or interrupted.
• Come to meetings prepared.
• Assign someone in the group to prepare an agenda before each meeting to be finalized and agreed upon in the first few minutes of the meeting.

Speaking

• In speaking, the most important thing to aim for is balance. Try to balance the input of each member.
• To maximize the group's collective wisdom, seek to hear from everyone.
• As a group, appoint a leader during each meeting to notice who is speaking and who is not and to invite the comments of those who are silent.
• Encourage each other to speak for no more than 2 minutes at a time unless a group member has a report to give.
• Individually try to find a place where you are not monopolizing nor withdrawing from the conversation at hand.
• When you do speak, try to be honest, courteous, and to the point regarding your own work and the work and ideas of others.
• Avoid interrupting and side conversations; one conversation at a time is plenty, while three or four concurrent conversations make it impossible to go anywhere collectively.
• Stories whether about basketball games or political farce, should probably be saved for other forums.

Listening

• View listening as more important than speaking.
• Listen well enough to be able to paraphrase what is said.

Giving/Receiving Feedback

• Give feedback to each other in non-threatening supportive ways (a good way to do this is to focus on the group goals and how a particular issue assists group objectives without attacking any group member).
• Seek feedback from each other, because it is most often useful even if disconcerting.
  Expect to disagree with each other.
• Do not personalize disagreement; instead, try to learn from it.
• Acknowledge as a group that wisdom and information can come from many different sources: facts, feelings, hunches, opinions, ideas, mistakes, and even silence.
• Seek to maximize the information you obtain from each other in your meetings through asking questions.

Decision-making

• Be careful with the decision-making process. Once a decision has been made, it is very difficult and painful to backtrack.
• Be patient with the process of shaping consensus; make sure everyone agrees with a decision before moving on. One member's disagreement is a liability to group effectiveness.
• Make sure you hear and address all sides of an issue.
• If necessary, go through several iterations of analyzing alternatives, eliminating the most obvious, re-analyzing, eliminating, etc.
• If the decision-making process is not handled with care, a decision will probably have to be rethought at a later date after unneeded headache and work.

Assess Group Interaction

• Once a week discuss what goes well/not well re. group work.

Ending

• End meetings on time.
• Make significant progress towards the goal of a meeting before ending.
• Whenever these two objectives conflict, be sure to discuss why significant progress was not achieved and whether to continue or meet another time.
• Summarize what the meeting accomplished.
• Set the date and time of your next meeting, the possible agenda, and any necessary preparations or tasks.

Indicators of Successful Teamwork in Industry

Hensey, 1992

• Obtaining the opinions and involvement of other group members in issues that concern them before making final decisions.
• Being willing to help team members even when inconvenient or requires extra effort.
• Voluntarily offering relevant experiences, ideas, and findings to team members.
• Making timely contribution to someone else's action plan or project when requested.
• Acknowledging a colleague's contribution to a project when working with a client or senior manager, sharing the credit.
• Being non-defensive and receptive to the suggestions, ideas, opinions, and needs of colleagues; making effort to understand before criticizing.
• Considering impact your plans and actions will have on others.
• Being unwilling to criticize third party who is not present, not gossiping.
• Coming prepared to present or participate when you have a role to play in meetings.
• Expressing appreciation for teamwork extended to you and your people that was helpful.
• Identifying and helping to pick up loose ends even though they may not be in your area of responsibility.
• Keeping people advised of changes and developments and new information on a task or project.
• Being supportive of team's objectives once they are set, rather than sabotaging, fault-finding, or being negative behind the scenes.
• Pitching in when the whole team needs help in meeting a deadline or solving a problem, even if it's "not your job".
• Trusting the team to develop consensus on an issue, even if it takes a little more time.

Not all Groups are Teams: How to Tell the Difference

Katzenbach, Jon R., and Douglas K. Smith. "The Discipline of Teams." Harvard Business Review (1993).