Summer School Teamwork

As a Completer Finisher, I took all your commas out. Sorry team.

The Completer Finisher role is definitely me. I’m a real fuss-pot with written work, polishing and re-polishing. I love to square everything away (folding washing, correcting your spelling, fixing lumpy grammar), but much as I like to take control of the editing, as a Team Worker (strength number two) I’ll always try not to be a cow about it.

No student is an island.     Photo credit: AIP

Actually, Completer Finisher is not even in my top three strengths in the Belbin range, and this illustrates the ‘needs must’ aspect of the theory: if a role or task needs filling in your group, different aspects of your talents and traits may emerge.

My top Belbin strength is Plant, so luckily we had a couple of Resource Investigators to have the sensible ideas. My magpie imagination is not always useful (although in my defence when I have ridiculous ideas I do complete and finish them. Actually this is not always useful either).  It became clear that Emma also had Plant in her strengths (#3), when she put forward alternative ideas for possum control that included installing high-frequency-emitting, possum-repelling deterrents around wilderness areas. I think her teamwork attitude extended to the possums themselves! (It’s a fair bet the possums are Implementers. And maybe Specialists.)

Meg, with Implementer and Monitor Evaluator as numbers five and six, provided practicality and planning strengths with both assignments, and a sensible, critical evaluation of our report structure.

An advantage for our team was that we all have both Team Worker and Coordinator in our top three. Combined with our other, complementary strengths, this made us a

  That's me at the back. Broke a nail.
Photo credit: National Geographic

very cooperative and helpful team, each willing to listen to ideas and help where we could. People volunteered for tasks rather than needing to have them allocated, and we all just got on with it. We were fortunate to have Catherine in the team leader role, steering us through this in a diplomatic, collaborative way with her Coordinator strength, and also Emma with her sneaky Shaper tendencies which came to the fore after Assignment 2 was finished and we all ran out of steam a little (or maybe that was just me). Organising skills and a dose of enthusiasm at just the right time.

Less than ideal in our team was having an editor who was also a Team Worker and Coordinator – a more autocratic approach would have been more efficient. Also, having more than one Completer Finisher on board is difficult at the revision and editing stages, as it can lead to re-work and double handling.  But as a whole our team was a good balance of Belbin strengths – nothing was missing apart from a strong Shaper, who would have been unhelpful in the mix as we were all capable and self-motivated; anyone trying to boss us would have caused a clash.

Especially lucky for me probably, that no one had Shaper as their Number 1 strength.  I might have had to back off and leave those commas alone.

Pale blue dot

I’m a product of the TV age, so when I think of public speakers I generally think of the ones in my own living room. Not everyone who narrates a TV show does so with the structured, literary elegance that qualifies them as a ‘public speaker’, but one who did was Carl Sagan, with his show 'Cosmos' in the 80s.

Not every great writer is a great speaker – and not every great speaker writes their own material. But Carl Sagan could do both. He had the ability to set the scene of a

Carl Sagan.      Photo credit: gizmodo.com

story with a beautiful economy of means, letting viewers join the dots as they listened. Then suddenly you would find that the story had leapt from a suburban backyard like your own, off into the endless night of space, taking you on a journey back billions of years and then forward again, through the history of human civilisations.

Photo credit: covertress.blogspot.com

What made him so good at this? He could paint a picture as he spoke, so that the listener’s imagination came along for the ride. He started an explanation in the right place, so the dots your mind had to join were dots of imagination or common sense, not unknown academic theory dots.  His delivery was calm and measured, but expressive; he might get all fired up about something but he never sounded whiney. He had a way of putting things into context that was easy to understand, and a knack for explaining how things were connected. Sagan himself once said that what made him so good at explaining was his experience at university, where understanding didn’t come easy to him – he had to work hard to understand what cleverer students grasped immediately. “I can remember what I had to do to figure it out. The very brilliant ones figure it out so fast they never see the mechanics of understanding.”

Above all I think what made Carl Sagan such a good speaker was that he cared. He

Photo credit: relativelyinteresting.com

had a strong social conscience, believing that scientific knowledge should be in the public arena, easily available and readily understandable. He was committed to education for everyone, not just the privileged, seeing ignorance as the driver of social injustice and misery throughout human history.

I especially love this clip from a talkback radio show, where in order to effectively answer the caller’s question, Sagan hangs up on his heckling, then continues calmly with his explanation. It’s a beautiful illustration of the difference between asking a question because you want to know, to find out, to discover something new – versus asking with no intention of listening to the answer, just because you think you can prove someone wrong. As a scientist, Carl Sagan’s approach was always the first, and it should always be ours, as we question the world with our eyes, our ears and our minds wide open to the possibility that anything we think we know might just be wrong.

Frustrations and successes

I’ve had a lucky break with this paper’s ‘Team Roulette’. The random chances of ending up with a team of four like-minded mature students who don’t like to leave things to the last minute must have been pretty slim, but here we all are, nearly at the end of assignment two. I haven’t done a group study project before so this has been a first, and although we’re spread all around the country and have never met, I think we’re working in together very well.

I can not imagine how hard this would have been if I was a new student without the advantage of experience, from work and from the understanding I’ve gained over

Not. Slytherin. Photo credit: Warner Bros

the years through having a hundred flatmates.  Thank you, team-finding student forum! (Lest you think it was some kind of sorting-hat procedure, there was an aspect of like gravitating to like. But with hindsight I can see how easy it would have been to become part of a team much younger than myself, who had not yet lived in a hundred flats or had to meet a deadline.) Whew.

Skyping and emailing though is a poor substitute for face-to-face discussion. OneNote and Dropbox have made some aspects of collaboration easier, certainly OneNote helped a lot with the planning. Skype has its advantages; the chat function has been a revelation, great for nights when not everyone is available as it leaves a papertrail of the discussion. OneNote has advantages and disadvantages - I can’t even remember now why we didn’t use it for the final report document, though I recall my frustration. Something went wrong. (Obviously I'm that mature I’ve managed to move on successfully.) Dropbox is great for collaborating on documents, IF changes are tracked, and if everyone uses the in-document commenting function. But if tracking is off, version control becomes impossibly frustrating.

In terms of my role as editor, it’s been strange working with material I haven’t done the research for. In some ways it’s harder to revise and edit unfamiliar topics, but on the other hand it puts me in a good position for seeing, objectively, whether the text makes sense. I can see now, more than ever before, that an efficient editor is a decisive and bossy editor… I suspect my style is a little too collaborative to be truly efficient in this role.

Overall I’ve been impressed by how sensible our team has been about decision-

Credit: James Climer

making. Compromises made, expertise respected, and egos put aside. I think if we were ship-wrecked on a desert island we’d probably do pretty well, as a group.  By the time that rescue ship came by we’d have had ourselves organised well ahead of time and formatted seven different versions of ‘HELP’ in burning driftwood on the beach. (Calibri.)

Leadership in teams

People are strange creatures. Sometimes we cooperate and work well together, and sometimes we just don’t. What’s your default role when you’re part of a group that isn’t getting along?  Are you a leader, or do you wait for someone else to take control?

Sculpture by Max Frassi. Photo credit: unknown

There seem to be as many theories of leadership out there as there are self-help books in the library. I wish I’d read some of them years ago, when I worked for a manager who sidelined me as a girly ‘people-person’, excluding me from opportunities due to a mismatch of our leadership styles.  I was very aware that she was a process-focused, ‘old-school’ type, but I lacked the language to explain her style and why it was such a bad fit for me. Now I know: she was authoritarian and Theory X driven, versus my democratic, participative style, and my Theory Y perspective.

She certainly got the job done – well, she ensured the job got done in our area - but actually, her job was to lead people. And that was something she really never did. She gave orders, and set targets, but she didn’t set an example, or inspire trust and loyalty. And hidden away behind her office door, she never gave a sense that she actually understood the work we did.

In contrast I worked later alongside a laissez-faire manager, whose approach involved delegation of nearly every aspect of her own responsibilities, together with a marked absence from the factory floor and a complete lack of interest in the details of the job that her people did. Being in her team was an opportunity for some, who took on extra responsibilities and developed their skills. But most needed more support and attention, and they floundered. It was clear to me that this leadership style was not working – literally.  ‘Not sweating the small stuff’ was more about her not breaking a sweat at all, ever.

Me, I prefer to collaborate rather than command, and support rather than micro-manage: my aim is to be a transformational leader. I do take a more transactional

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons, on izquotes.com

approach though with team members who are not performing, because people without a strong work ethic need ‘what’s in it for me’ spelled out to them very clearly. 

Not to mention, Y-theory types can become very demoralised at X-theory behaviour in their midst if a leader doesn’t deal with it decisively. (In truth, not everyone responds to a participative leader, so a flexible approach is needed; this is the ‘making-it-up-as-you-go-along’ style of leadership that I favour most days.)

No team is perfect, but if you know the framework of leadership theory you can at least navigate your way through group dynamics and resolve conflicts in a constructive way. Because there will always be conflicts, and personality clashes. There’s always that one person who doesn’t listen, won’t take direction, or just doesn’t quite fit in with the rest of the team. And if there isn’t? Well, you know what that means. It’s you.