Reflection 4: life is all about teams

Teams are everywhere, and teamwork is experienced many times in one’s life. This experience then permits to differentiate between actual teams and working groups.

I have been part of several teams, but I think I have really discovered teamwork at school during my exchange in Vancouver. Indeed, after almost one term spent at UBC, I can say that my home university doesn’t allocate great importance to teamwork. In France, team projects generally don’t last more than a couple of weeks. The project goals are usually not very big or can be easily reached. Plus, it doesn’t represent a big part of the students final grades. All those aspects made most of my teamwork experience uninteresting and personally unrewarding. Due to all those constraints, the team members would tend to focus on getting the work done by the deadline, and there would usually be no much room for creativity. In some cases, each student would get marked separately, which means that each member of the group would concentrate their efforts on their part of the work.

In The Discipline of Teams, Katzenbach and Smith’s definition of team is “a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable”. In essence, teams are cohesive groups of people mobilized around a common goal. Thereby, every group of individuals does not necessarily constitute a team. When I came to Sauder and was led to work in different team projects, I realized that what I had been doing for several years already in fact distinguished from teamwork, and was more what I would call group work. In one word, simply meeting often will not be enough to make a work group an effective team. This illustrates Katzenbach and Smith’s relevant sentence: “a team is more than the sum of its parts”.

What’s more, I find the seven characteristics of effective teams (that distinguish them from simple work groups) identified by the two researchers particularly pertinent:

– Shared leadership, rather than having one, dominant leader;
– Team accountability, rather than holding individuals accountable;
– Distinctive purpose, rather than assuming the corporate mission is the team’s;
– Shared work, rather than simply trying to string together individual efforts at the end of a project;
– Open-ended meetings, rather than efficient carefully managed meetings that stifle exploration and creativity;
– Direct, collective measures, rather than rewarding individuals on individual effort;
– Real work, rather than make work or busy work projects.

I have had various experiences in working in teams in my life (at work, in community involvement, while playing sports, volunteering, etc.). However, each framework has its own characteristics and involves different kind of teamwork, and I think I still have a lot to learn in school teamwork. I have realized how important some aspects such as commitment, trust, shared leadership or finding which role best fits best one’s personal skills are; and I will definitely try to apply all what I have learnt, as soon as I come back, in team projects in my home university.