Thursday, September 24, 2015
Peter Diamond Econ 490: Successful Team
When I think of successful teams that I've been a part of, a few come to mind. But the most successful I would have say would be a team I was a part of at my internship this past summer. I worked at a company in the sports industry, and my team was in charge of coming up with ways to maximize the potential of an omni-channel strategy for their merchandise. An omni-channel strategy is one where you connect the user experience from the brick and mortar store, the app store, and the online store, into one seamless experience. So that was our challenge, and we had a group of 6 to get that done.
We decided that since we were all kids, we didn't want to designate one boss, because we all agreed it's tough to take orders from people your own age, and honestly we all think our ideas are better than the other guy. So what we decided to do was divide the project into 6 parts. And each part was a unique thing that each team member excelled in. For example, one person was in charge of contacting outside companies because they were good with people. Another person was in charge of writing material because they were a journalist. And then another person was in charge of putting that material into a PowerPoint presentation because they were good with design and marketing. So each person had their own little project if you will, and that allowed us to go all in on very specific parts, and then combining them in to one great presentation. This relates to Katzenbach and Smith's point that all teams need the mission to be broken down into meaningful performance goals for each team member to pursue. It allows everyone to feel like they own something, and gives them more responsibility. It's like they own a stake in the company.
Another thing we did was use an outside person to be our project manager, because at the end of the day we all agreed we needed one person making the final decisions. So we consulted a VP of Merchandise, and they met with us once a week to go over how the project was coming along, and offer any suggestions on how to improve.
The key to our successful team though, was honesty. None of us were afraid to speak up and say if we disagreed with something. A lot of people don't say when they disagree with someone because they don't want to make them feel bad. But if the product you are putting out is bad, that's unacceptable. You have to be 100% honest for the best quality. We had our disagreements here and there but we knew it was in our best interests.
And finally, I think a key to us having a very successful team was that we had an agenda every meeting. We started with what was accomplished between the last meeting and the current one. We then moved on to what needed to get done for the next week, and then we talked about how we were going to get that done. We also had each person speak for a couple minutes about progress on their individual parts, which brought everybody up to speed.
Overall, the key to a successful team is communication. It doesn't matter how smart you are, how old or young you are, if you can communicate well and get the point and objective across, you can get the job done.
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You said all the team members "were kids" but not whether they were all interns. Was that the case? If so you might have commented on the following. Was there any competition among you regarding who might get a permanent job offer from the company in the future? If some of that was present, then in addition to team success people would want to demonstrate individual success in some way. There was none of that in your story. The question is why.
ReplyDeleteYou talked about a division of labor approach based on comparative advantage. Was the group constituted to have varying skills among the members or did it just work out that way? Was there ever an instance where two members of the group wanted to do the same job? You made it seem like the assignment problem was trivial. Maybe it was in this case, but it doesn't always happen that way so it would be good to know what made it so easy here.
There is also the issue of fitting the pieces together and who did that. You could have said more about coordination of the individual efforts.
The bit about being totally honest was interesting. My sense of this is that people do in Rome what the Romans do. There is already a culture of work at the place. If being frank and open is part of the culture already, it is easier for interns to embrace that. So you might have said a little more about how that came about, since you did recognize that sometimes people will not be forthcoming with their criticisms. What made the difference in this case?
So when I said "kids" I meant other interns who like me were all rising seniors in college. I would say there was some internal competition between us, but that was because we were all super competitive naturally, not because we were fighting for a permanent job from the company in the future. This particular company doesn't offer interns full time job offers after the summer.
DeleteRegarding the division of labor approach based on comparative advantage, the group was not constituted to have varying skills. Luckily my group was comprised of members who had different skills that helped us to not have too many arguments about what we wanted to do. The only instance where two members wanted to do the same job was when two people both wanted to do the conclusion, so the two both wrote what they wanted to say and we voted on it. The assignment was definitely not trivial, and the fact that it had so many difficult parts made it easier to split up. Each member had one thing to focus on and they focused all their effort on that one part to make it the best possible.
When it came to fitting the pieces together, we had the girl who was good with powerpoint and putting together presentations do that because she had an eye for design. There wasn't much of a conversation about that because we all knew she was the best. We would meet with the person who was going before and after us to make sure we weren't way off in terms of topics. The purpose of these side meetings was to make the transitions as smooth as possible.
Finally, regarding the honesty thing, I would say it was definitely encouraged in the culture at this company, but of course in every company you have people who aren't honest. I can't speak for the interns in terms of whether they were honest because their bosses taught them too, but I think they were honest because they know that's what it takes to get the best product out. I know my boss taught me to be honest and she showed that in everything she did and said, but even if she didn't I still would tell people exactly how I felt.
Some of the other interns weren't as polished and smart enough to be honest, but my group happened to be very impressive, and I would even say they were better than some of the full time employees I interacted with.