Team Dynamics

Is there such a thing as a perfect team? Is there any team that does not have any obstacles or conflict to overcome? Obstacles like communication or confusion due to a lack of materials. Conflicts such as a difference in opinion or different priorities each member has could be something plaguing the group. Time management could also be something holding the group's progress up. There are a lot of things that can affect the group's progress to achieving their ultimate goal or project completion. The important thing is that the project is completed and on time. In this paper we are going to discuss our adventures acting as a team as well as how all of these conflicts and obstacles arose and how we overcame each of them.

The formation and assignment of roles and responsibilities was our first step. It was rather easy for us to become a, "so called" team because we were in the same time zone, except for one member, and we had to find a team as per our instructor. Then it was time to create the chain of command and form where our direction comes from and how we were going to function as a team. The roles for us were simply a team leader and team members because we are made up of only 4 people that just seemed like the logical way to continue. We quickly nominated the most aggressive and outgoing person to be the leader and the role of members to the remaining three. We then come to a point of defining exactly what part these roles will play in our team. As team leader your responsibility is to be a mentor, motivator, monitor, judge, and boss. You delegate the work and see the project through to the end with or without your member's cooperation. As a team member you take your assignments and your input to the group so that the team is at its best at all times. The members are the body of a team. They are what makes the ideas of the team come to life and be realized. We found that communication is the key to having a successful team. It is important to keep in contact with your teammates. Since we are in geographically different places our communication was restricted to only written communication and no verbal communication. We then had some confusion about the reference manuals that should have been received in the beginning of class. These were important because we had assignments that had to be turned in but needed the books to complete them. The last portion of setting up our team was figuring out the times we would decide to meet and how we would use our time. Time management is very difficult when you factor in full time jobs, families, outside groups, and personal time.

The conflicts or what we call, "Challenges" arise within the first few days. Our leader is very motivated but not completely clear about what direction to take on our first assignment. There were no specifics and the team was left to make assumptions and use their own style rather then a uniform fashion to start the outline for this paper. Our leader also expected all of the team members to be equally motivated. It is the opinion of the masses that a leader is the person who sees the project through to the end. Just like a Captain going down with his ship the leader will pass or fail alone if necessary to fulfill their responsibilities. Sometimes there are things happening around us that lead us to be unmotivated or unable to devote ourselves to a project fully. Unfortunately, this led to an uneven workload and great frustration for the ones who were devoted to the team project. This is where our breakdown in communication also became a factor. We discovered that communication in only written form can not only be misleading but misconstrued to create hurt feelings among the members. It was not intentional but being careless with the way we use our words and not realizing that when we use verbal communication we have other non-verbal ques to tell us how the speaker is trying to convey his or her message. To top it all off, we had a group member that was fifteen hours ahead of the rest of us posing another challenge of being online at the same time. It has been difficult to come into a team setting with such challenges in your way and still come out on top. During our first week together we realized that not all of our members had their reference materials and were also having a hard time finding their way around the materials in our online class. That was a very hard time for all of us because there was frustration from the members who didn't have the information and frustration from the one's who did. The hardest challenge we have faced in being on a team with this type of distance between them was time management. We all have jobs, families, other responsibilities and we all prioritize these things differently. Some of us became very over extended and could not keep up with all the factors in our lives. Others of us found ourselves being exhausted trying to fill the gaps and make this work for us as a team. It has been a definite challenge to find time for our team responsibilities when we come from such different places with different family structures and after you factor all the differences we could understand how these conflicts arise. Things just happen and life is an obstacle that must be handled with great care and responsibility.

Now that we were faced with our obstacles we came together to find solutions. Our first line of business was to understand that everyone is different and everyone has different ways of dealing with conflict. The leader of our team is a pull yourself up by the bootstraps kind of person. We know that switching roles would have been a great resolution to the team leader's conflicts but it was not very practical considering the challenges that had arisen within our team. Some of our challenges on this project could have been avoided simply by communicating with each other. We did not give ourselves the ability to be prepared because we did not talk about our issues. Our leader should have taken more initiative to keep in continuing contact with the members. The feeling of being without direction was not necessary and could have easily been avoided if the leader had been leading. We did manage to get our thoughts together at the last minute. It seems that we just simply were not on the same page. Communication was once again the key factor in resolving things and was also the biggest conflict among us. We could have done a better job on this paper if we had talked more during our week and not leaving things to be dealt with at the last minute. We have assumed too many things in this team and not made clear cut rules which falls on everyone's shoulders. Had we simply made boundaries in the beginning we would have made sure that we lived up to those boundaries. Everyone has different time management skills. Some