How to work on complex tasks in a team

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Recommended: Reflections on team collaboration

Every day in our life we come across challenges. It becomes imperative that we find solutions to them. Some problems we need to face alone and some we need to encounter as a team. I worked in several teams all my professional life and I believe that any task can be easily completed when there is coordination between the members of the team. In this reflection paper I would like to present my views on the importance of defining roles, advantages of being with the same team, challenges in a diversified group and the significance of trusting team members.

Defining Roles

“Roles are positions in a group that have a set of expected behaviours attached to them“(John and Saks, 2011: Page 225 of quote). I feel that most of the problems in a team occur because roles are not clearly defined. Roles provide sense of direction to the team members and drive them towards the common goal. I would like to quote my experience when I joined as a trainee to depict the importance of roles in a team. Our team had two tasks, supporting the existing applications and developing new applications. Even though there were 6 members in our team, there used to be issues every day. There used to be slippages in deadlines and we used to miss support tickets too. This went on for about 3 months and our lead arranged a meeting to find out the reason behind our poor performance. The first and foremost thing that popped up was that none of the members of sure of their roles. Everyone concentrated on just one task and as a result we always defaulted. Drastic improvement in our team’s performance after each member was assigned a specific role proved the importance of team roles. My practical experience combined with the theoretical proof that “Role ambiguity causes...

... middle of paper ...

...hin few months she started working efficiently and the outcome was that we won best team award within our entire account.

To conclude, there might be several reasons behind exceptional or poor performance of a team but I regard the points mentioned above highly and I feel that if the above issues are taken care then the team would perform to their potential, providing exceptional results.

References

1. Organizational Behaviour, Sixth Edition by Gary Johns & Alan M. Saks

2. Why teams don’t work – Interview by Diane Coutu

3. Building the Emotional Intelligence of Groups by Vanessa Urch Druskat and Stephen B.Wolff

4. http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Managing_Groups_and_Teams/Diversity#How_Are_Diverse_Teams_Different_From_Homogenous_Ones.3F

5. http://jmo.e-contentmanagement.com/archives/vol/10/issue/1/article/382/trust-a-neglected-variable-in-team-effectiveness

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