DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.
DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.
DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

Chapter 6:  Sharpening the Team Mind

 

Christina --Communication and creating a team that focuses on group enrichment and fulfillment is a high and wonderful goal. This chapter reveals how to come together with all the tools to creative informative discussion and decisions that will serve the group and the project with the most accurate and sound decisions with the best data.

 

Katherine -- This chapter was very interesting to me and had a lot of good solutions for problems when working in teams. One of the biggest issues when working in teams is communication. The book gave many examples on errors in communication that occur such as message tuning, distortion, biased interpretation, perspective-taking failures, illusion of transparency, and saying is believing. I have seen a couple of these in our team enough that they were easily recognizable. Biased interpretation has been a small issue in our group. This occurs when people only hear what they want to hear and then only selectively deal with the information that favors their view sometimes ignoring important information that maybe doesn’t coincide with their views. Illusion of transparency has also been a small team issue. This is when people think that their thoughts and attitudes are clearly apparent to others in the group and is a communication failure to realize that we are not mindreaders. Uneven communication is a large problem in our team. This occurs when a handful of the people in the group do all of the talking when it should be everyone involved. There are ways to achieve good communication in a team environment. Redirect unfocused conversations and maintain focus, approach problems with solutions not judgements, and consider solutions one at a time are a few of my favorites.

 

Sarah- I wasn’t aware that the mobile device market was one of the most competitive markets on earth, but in retrospect, it makes sense for it to be. It also makes sense that team communication has changed (and improved) after technological advancements have taken place. Message tuning is also something I was familiar with, but wasn’t aware of the term for it. “Saying is Believing”, talking about how in the process of altering a message, the speaker’s impressions on the topic can change along with how the message is intended to influence the target audience. This also reminded me of psychology I’ve read up on, since the human mind is somewhat unreliable and can change depending on a person’s current state of mind and emotions. So it seems likely that a mind can be easily impressionable, even if a solid stance on a subject has been exclaimed by a person.

 

 

 

Chapter 7: Team Decision Making

 

Christina -- The individual versus the team cynergy in this unit really revealed a great concept that I have seen over the years. The effort of a wonderfully creative, decisive, and communicative team can produce more that the same number of individuals tasking on their own. Teamwork is the dream work.

 

Katherine -- This chapter offered some nice insight on group decision making. The text offers multiple ways to handle this successfully. One of the most common ways that jumped out to me is the majority rules decision making. This is when there is a vote taken and of course the side with the most votes wins the decision. Though this is the most common way I think that sometimes it can cause animosity. I honestly think that the best way to make a decision is to have a chairperson  to make the final decision. You can use the majority rules and then the chairperson makes the final decision. Groupthink is another topic that chapter seven discusses. This occurs when consensus is placed above all else in the team. It is a deteriorating occurrence in a team environment and can be devastating. Management can even be the cause of this sometimes through pressure. Conformity is not conducive to a team atmosphere.I think that as a team we have avoided groupthink. We are all pretty good at speaking our opinions and listening to others ideas. We are fairly good at coming to a decision that everyone is okay with and no one feels like they were pressured into it. Accountability was discussed in chapter seven as well. This is something that I think our team has struggled with a little bit. The team members all have responsibilities. Some members are very good at being accountable for their responsibilities and others are not as much concerned with being accountable. We, as a team however, have made it work successfully so far. This is another one of those differences that as a team you must work through and find a solution.

 

Bryant: Bias is easily the most cunning enemy of every person individually as well as it is a groups. Self-confirmation bias for instance, the problem of only looking and paying attention to what we already believe to be true can lead to many pitfalls. If we believe a person lazy and so we do not include them even though they are an equal member as any other we shoot ourselves in the foot by raising the workload on everyone else and create emotional turmoil within the team dynamic. Rather than voicing our feelings to the person and being able to solve the issue. There are an infinite number of biases but simply put, they are our inclinations to dismiss discomforting stimuli.

Sarah- A majority of what I read from the chapters reminded me of psychology books I’ve read in the past. I’ve already learned about some of the chapter material such as the “confirmation bias” from a book called, “You Are Not So Smart”. I answered the questions in the chapter talking about how an inflated ego can affect your judgement on how much you actually know about a subject. I didn’t know much about the questions, nor care, but the chapter explained the level at which you justify the correctness of your answers depends on how attached the content is to your ego. Overall, the material of the chapter such as the overconfidence bias seemed to be heavily psychology based and was compared to groups.

 

Xingfang (Jubilee)-The bias may have big influences in decision making for the whole team. Especially, It will be worse if it happens in top department managers (or in a central control system) for a big company or a country. For individual decision-making biases: there are Framing bias, overconfidence, confirmation bias and decision fatigue. For a group decision: It is hard to give the pervasiveness of group decision making, teams need a method by which to combine individuals’ decisions to yield a group decision. In order to avoid the drawbacks from bias, I think having an opening mind and listening to the different ideas from different perspectives could significantly reduce the impacts. We should accurately understand ourselves by knowing what are our strengths and what are our weakness, and do something according to our capacity. In addition, the flexible adjustment is also important by preparing for the second solution or alternative ways. We should reflect and summarize our shortages, and avoid for the next time. Being carefully to check each small step, because “Devil is in detail”. Sometimes the bad mood and attitude cause to non-optimal courses of action, which bring high-risk (p.182). Abilene paradox is also interesting, I may it’s the person in this situation. Sometimes if I want to say something, but I feel may cause conflict, I will choose to don’t say anything. I feel if use scientific method could help to solve this problem by providing more evidence to make the decision rather than just own beliefs.

I like in the end, the textbook wrote, “ all these decisions involve a certain level of risk, but that risk can be minimized” Avoiding Mistakes is important, but reducing the risk for your each decision.




Chapter 8:  Conflict

Christina  --  Conflict in Chapter 8 with Chapter 9’s Creativity is the measure of fluidity, flexibility, and originality has really excited me in this project. I have used creativity for many years as a graphic designer. I rarely see all three and therefore I have seen a lot of design that had not reached high enough to have creative design. In my conflict inside myself to create great design and the conflict in a creative team can bring about a wonderful product if we deal with this constraint.

As a team that is collaborating and pushing the envelope to design a portfolio for our project I am engaged and challenged at the same time. I hope our product is something that excells and all the conflict we encounter will make us greater team members and better at resolving conflict and not avoiding it.

 

Katherine -- Conflict is the theme of chapter eight and so interesting. I have always thought of conflict as a whole and not necessarily ever thought that there are three distinct types of conflict. The three types of conflict are relationship, task, and process. As a team we have not really dealt with the relationship side of conflict since there is not really any type of socialization amongst us outside of our project. Task conflict, however, has been an issue for us. Task conflict occurs when there are disagreements about the work being performed within the group. We have many different styles of work ethics and many different levels of efficiency and quality importance amongst all of us. Process conflict we have been pretty good with as a group. We are good at delegating responsibilities and finding resources as a team. The struggle lies in our task conflicts. In order to achieve fairness in the team there are three things that we must make sure exist in our team. These three keys to fairness are equity, equality, and need. Benefits should be equal to what team members contribute in order to have equity. Equality occurs when team members equally treated with rewards or punishment no matter how much they have inputted toward the common goal. To achieve the need in a group the rewards must equal the work.

 

Bryant: illusion of transparency definitely negatively affected our groups mindset toward end of last week. There was four or five of us all worrying about what needed to be finished and everyone was going over each other’s work. There haven’t really been any effective conflicts that I have been involved in or made aware of but I think that if we can continue building rapport as a team we will be able to communicate more effectively and discuss what conflicting feelings any teammates may have so we can continue growing.


Christina: In my conflicts this week I have seen planning fallacy and illusion of transparency causes to our conflicts. It is easy to use a bias that I have enough time and then to not inform the project that you are falling behind and feel overwhelmed until the eleventh hour. Trust needs to be reassured with the project investors or team. I do believe we are all growing and handling our conflict. I believe we are all matchers in our efforts and a few are givers. I would like to reassure the matchers to keep participating in a group. The right people are in the right sets on our bus as Jim Collins illustrates in his book Good To Great.

Xingfang (Jubilee)- I agree with Katherine that we may need to build more strong relationship with each other in order to better understand and reduce the bad influence of conflict during the team-work, even we can bring benefits from differences. Yes, we all know that conflict within team and between teams is one of the top concerns of team management. In addition, I feel we are lack of the proportion of task conflict, which means we did not good enough in team member commitment, cohesiveness, individual performance, group performance, and member satisfaction. However, all of us are willing to become better and would like to together solve the problems, I believe we can do it. For culturally diverse, I think even I come from China, I may have some different ideas and opinions, but I know we are in the one team. It is more important to put the common benefits in the first place rather than just say my own opinions. It is better to understand and look to the different situations and occasions, and then giving the appropriate suggestions. Personally, I feel the justice and equity are very important. We should have our own responsibility and be honest. In the end of this chapter, I think these three conflict resolutions are very useful in team-work:  “(1) Focus on the content of their interactions rather than the delivery style; (2) explicitly discuss reasons behind work assignment decisions; and (3) assign work to members who have the task expertise rather than by other means, such as volunteerism or convenience.”



  • Watching and talking

  1. View Are you a Giver or a Taker?

    1. Jubilee: Adam Grant talked about 3 types of people in a team or a company: Giver, taker, and matcher. For a good/positive team here are 3 things we can do: Firstly, protecting givers from burnout by reducing their pressure and letting them enjoy the process (showing their contributions). Secondly, encouraging helps means to let help becoming easy. Thirdly, getting the right people on the bus, which also could say keeping the wrong people off the bus. For a team, we need more givers and matchers, and avoid fakers/takers. I really appreciate that he said in the end: I believe that the most meaningful way to succeed is to help other people succeed.

  2. Essentialism

    1. Jubilee: It really enlightens me. Greg McKeown shared that he learned from his experience that the Essentialism - The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, which also could say doing Less but better. He was seeking which can drive people from breaking through to the next level, and he got the answer is the success. However, our time and energy are limited, the better way is to focus on few things and avoid undisciplined pursuit of more. We need space to take time to think. Learning how to say no, and doing better in what you doing, managing your time and making a more valuable contribution. “Focusing on essentials frees up space to explore and discover.”

  3. Thailand Football Team

    1. Jubilee: Dream it and do it! Nothing is impossible. It really encouraged me that when we have good ideas, even if the conditions are difficult, we should try our best to create conditions. Teamwork makes it easy to achieve!  


Reading, Watching and Discussion:

Watching and talking

View Are you a Giver or a Taker?  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uJAJ7-LYb0

Essentialism

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9x6D09AKBU

Thailand Football Team (5.25 min)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jU4oA3kkAWU

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.